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Scholars of normative heterosexuality tell us that there are many ways to be a “bad” heterosexual. While the invention and institutionalization of heterosexuality served most powerfully to regulate and stigmatize same-sex acts, it also created hierarchies that privileged heterosexuals who were involved in monogamous, gender-conventional, long-term (preferably married) relationships based on love over those who engaged in casual sex or commercial sex, who had multiple partners, or who in some ways challenged gender norms. As Steven Seidman argues, “normative heterosexuality not only establishes hierarchy with homosexuals, but creates hierarchy among heterosexualities” as well.48 Interracial couples might be considered the poster children for deviant heterosexuality; adhering to heteronormative conventions has done little to normalize them historically.

The exclusions of different-sex interracial couples from the most basic aspects of heterosexual privilege raise the question of whether they are really lesser heterosexuals, ranked lower on a hierarchy than normative heterosexuals, or are perhaps instead defined as outside the norm entirely. One of the most powerful aspects of heterosexual privilege, Hanne Blank writes, is the right to go through the world without your relationship attracting much notice. “Having your sexuality and your relationships be perceived as ‘normal’ provides unearned privilege,” Blank argues. “It accrues automatically and invisibly to everyone who is perceived as being heterosexual for as long as they continue to be perceived that way.”49

Are different-sex interracial couples “perceived as being heterosexual” under this definition? If being heterosexual means one has the right to go through the world without your relationship attracting much attention, they certainly have not had that right. Different-sex interracial couples in the United States have historically encountered disapproval and even violent opposition. Historically and currently, different-sex couples complain about the stares, comments, and scrutiny they experience when they are in public. Whether those comments are hostile or affirming, they make clear that interracial relationships are not normative.50

As a sexual regime, heterosexuality stigmatizes same-sex relationships as the ultimate boundary against which normative practices are judged, making homosexuality suspect and highly visible while making heterosexuality the invisible norm. But the color line has been sexualized in a way that makes different-sex interracial pairings far more visible than same-sex interracial relationships. It is heterosexual interracial pairings that raise the specter of the loss of white racial purity and the threat to the project of constructing a racial nation. Cross-racial interactions between a man and woman—particularly the most taboo of those crossings between blacks and whites but also sometimes those between white men and Asian women—serve as visible triggers of a history of sexual racism and illicit desire, and that history is so powerful that even men and women of different races who are only acquaintances are often construed as sexually involved. The sociologist Amy Steinbugler argues that “racial difference may actually heighten presumptions of heterosexual intimacy.” Some pairings are so associated with racial and sexual deviance that “others may read this historic symbol onto two individuals who are simply occupying the same physical space.”51

While heterosexual interracial couples experience a heightened sense of public visibility, queer interracial couples often feel profoundly invisible. In interviews with contemporary queer interracial couples, Steinbugler found that most felt that their interraciality lacked any public identity and indeed made them culturally illegible. All of the cultural scripts about interraciality relate to different-sex pairings, a category that carries with it long-standing “historical, social, and political meanings.”52 In fact, crossing the color line has been so deeply linked to deviant heterosexual desire that at times even same-sex interracial pairings have been understood as fundamentally heterosexual. In 1913, the psychologist Margaret Otis explained the relationships between young black and white women at a reform school as an example of white women’s heterosexual attraction to men, with race difference standing in for gender difference. “The difference in color, in this case,” Otis argued, “takes the place of difference in sex.”53 Other twentieth-century reformers also attributed interracial lesbian relationships in prison to black women taking on masculine roles and temporarily substituting for male partners for their supposedly straight white female lovers.54 This understanding of interracial lesbian relationships demonstrates the power of the “heterosexualization” of the color line.

This relative invisibility of same-sex interracial relationships is particularly noteworthy because demographic evidence suggests that today—and perhaps historically—queer couples are in fact more likely to be interracial than straight ones are. In 2010, the US Census found that same-sex couples were more likely to be interracial or interethnic than any other kind of couples; 20.6 percent of all same-sex couples were interracial or interethnic, as compared to 18.3 percent of different-sex unmarried couples and 9.5 percent of different-sex married couples.55 Nevertheless, queer interraciality often remains invisible in public. The black law professor I. Bennett Capers explains the different treatment that he encounters when he is out with his white husband than when his black brother visits with his white wife. His brother and sister-in-law “are still suspect, subject to the look, an ‘interracial tax,’” while he feels he is actually made safer and less threatening by having a white male partner.56

Rather than different-sex interraciality being a form of “bad” heterosexuality, it might perhaps be more aptly considered as akin to same-sex relationships: one of the “others” that heterosexuality as a new sexual regime defined itself against. The reorganization of the systems of gender and sexuality that took place in the late nineteenth century and resulted in the “invention” of the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality drew on and developed from ideas already in circulation about race and racialized bodies. In Queering the Color Line, Siobhan Somerville argues that scientific discourses about race shaped the ways in which sexologists articulated emerging models of homosexuality. Sexologists scrutinized bodies of so-called inverts for biological markers of difference just as scientists had scrutinized black bodies for markers of racial inferiority. They described gender ambiguity—or what seemed to be a mixed-gendered body—as akin to a mixed-race body. And they developed a new focus on sexual-object choice that linked homosexual and interracial desire as both unnatural and deviant.57 The emerging system of heterosexuality defined homosexuality as deviant, in other words, by associating it with interracial sex, which was already understood as illicit and overly sexualized.

Heterosexuality as a new sexual regime associated with different practices and behaviors became socially acceptable in part through contrasting it both to interracial heterosexuality and to homosexuality, which in fact were often geographically linked. What Kevin Mumford calls “interzones,” or sites that allowed interracial mixing that developed in northern cities in the early twentieth century, also became sites associated with same-sex relationships. Interracial sex became the marker of vice; these deviant spaces, Mumford suggests, provided space for the emergence of new gay subcultures. Both different-sex cross-racial mixing and same-sex relationships became the stigmatized other that a new, more sexually permissive heterosexual center could redefine itself against. A dance hall could be respectable as long as it did not allow racial mixing, Mumford argues in his study of New York and Chicago. In California, fears of mixing between white women and Filipino men led to city bans on mixed-race dancing, not to mention bans on all dance halls in the 1920s.58

The historian Chad Heap similarly demonstrates that the new heterosexual system based on the acceptance of female sexual desire and of the erotic as central to one’s identity legitimated itself and became respectable through the practice of middle-class whites defining themselves against an “other” that included both same-sex and different-sex interracial relations. Heap focuses on the practice known as “slumming,” in which middle-class whites (and new immigrants seeking whiteness) visited neighborhoods and clubs associated with primitivism, illicit desire, and commercial sex and in so doing shifted the boundaries of what was considered respectable sexual behavior (dating and oral sex, Heap argues, were two practices that slumming helped validate). Whites could maintain their own respectability, even while embracing new sexual practices, by positioning themselves against a degraded, exotic other. “Slumming provided the mechanism through which its participants could use both race and sexual encounters to mediate their transition from one system of sexual classification to another,” Heap writes.59 Both black and tan slumming and the subsequent “pansy” craze, in which middle-class whites visited first spaces in black neighborhoods and then spaces associated with same-sex coupling, helped reshape middle-class sexual boundaries and legitimate the idea of sexual pleasure and desire linked to the emergence of heterosexuality. Interraciality, in short, helped establish the boundaries of what constituted proper and normative heterosexuality and became one of the markers that served to stigmatize same-sex relationships as deviant.