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In 1967, the US Supreme Court declared the entire antimiscegenation legal regime unconstitutional after Richard and Mildred Loving challenged the state of Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage. Richard, a white man, and Mildred, a woman of African and indigenous ancestry, had been childhood sweethearts in Caroline County, Virginia.60 But after they married in 1958, they were charged with violating Virginia law and forced to leave the state to avoid a jail sentence. Seeking to return home, they eventually began a court challenge that would result in the invalidation of all the remaining miscegenation laws nationwide. Marriage, the Supreme Court ruled in the Loving case, was a fundamental right that states could not abridge or deny on the basis of race.61

Since that ruling, the number of heterosexual interracial couples in the United States has increased dramatically, especially those involving Asians and Latinos. In 1967, only 3 percent of all newlyweds married across race lines. Today, 17 percent of different-sex new marriages are interracial or interethnic (meaning Latino/non-Latino). The number of black-white married couples has increased from 51,000 in 1960 to 422,250 in 2010. Public opposition to interracial relationships has also declined dramatically since the Loving decision. In 1958, 94 percent of Americans disapproved of black-white marriages; today, only 11 percent do. Americans of all racial groups are more open to intermarriages involving members of their own families. In 2000, 31 percent of Americans indicated that they would disapprove of a family member marrying someone of another race; in 2015, that number stood at only 10 percent. And 39 percent of Americans in a 2017 Pew Research Study said that more people marrying across race lines would be good for society; only 9 percent claimed that more intermarriages would harm society.62

But if cross-race different-sex relationships have been as challenging to heterosexuality as same-sex relationships have and both interraciality and homosexuality have served as the “other” against which heterosexuality was defined, what does the lessening of the taboo against interraciality suggest about the stability and future of the sexual regime of heterosexuality?

To be fair, not everyone agrees that there really has been any meaningful decrease in opposition to interracial relationships since Loving. Pointing to the still small number of interracial couples and to other indicators, many scholars and social commentators argue that interracial pairings remain rare and socially deviant. Fifty years after Loving, whites remain four times more likely than random to marry another white person, and a recent study attributes most of the increase in the number of interracial marriages to demographic change, especially the growth in the US population of Asians and Hispanics and the decline in the white population, rather than to more tolerant attitudes toward interracial relationships among whites.63 Ethnographic studies of heterosexual interracial couples find that they still report feeling hypervisible in public, while studies that seek to probe people’s private racial feelings find that many whites still find interracial relationships off-putting and even something that inspires disgust.64 A recent edited collection of essays by law professors about the 1967 Loving decision almost uniformly takes the glass-half-empty approach, emphasizing all the ways that heterosexual privilege remains outside the reach of different-sex interracial couples. As one writer explains, “mixed race remains a threat to political stability and social respectability,” while another stresses that black-white relationships remain “sexualized spectacles” that observers see as deviant and perverse. Interracial couples, a third essay points out, rarely see relationships like theirs represented in the media or affirmed as normal for their children.65

But given the changes in the past thirty years and the fact that today one in six newlyweds is married to a partner of a different race or ethnicity and that the rate of interracial pairings is even higher among cohabiting but unmarried couples, it seems useful to conclude with at least some questions about what a greater openness to interraciality might suggest about the future of heterosexuality.

Siobhan Somerville lays out one possible answer in her 2005 essay “Queer Loving,” in which she argues that heterosexual interracial relationships became normative—at least in the legal arena—through the increased demonization and stigmatization of same-sex relationships. Normative citizenship, Somerville argues, had been articulated through both discourses of race and discourses of sexuality, as reflected in laws that prohibited interracial marriage and criminalized homosexuality. But just weeks before the Supreme Court handed down the Loving decision, it upheld a 1952 law that made homosexuals and adulterers ineligible to naturalize. For Somerville, this timing is evidence that “the interracial couple was imagined as having a legitimate claim on the state at the same time that the nation was defensively constituted as heterosexual, incapable of incorporating the sexually suspect body.” Loving thus expanded marriage rights by consolidating heterosexuality as a prerequisite for recognition by the state, Somerville insists. Interracial marriage became legitimized in law “in relation to its thorough heterosexualization.”66 In this reading, different-sex interracial relationships became normative—at least in the eyes of the law—because they could be defined against same-sex relationships. Thus, one possibility is that interraciality and homosexuality no longer operate in tandem as others against which heterosexuality defines itself.

While Somerville argues that interraciality became normative by the intensified exclusion of the homosexual, developments since she made that argument in 2005 raise the very different possibility that different-race and same-sex relationships have both become less oppositional to heterosexuality in the past forty years as long as they adhere to certain heteronormative (or homonormative) conventions. It is telling that the past fifty years have witnessed not only the legalization of interracial marriage and an increased acceptance for interracial relationships but also the legalization of same-sex marriage and a lessening of the taboo against homosexuality. Indeed, the popularity of the Loving analogy—or the argument by proponents of gay marriage that since the court upheld individuals’ freedom to marry across racial lines in 1967, it should uphold the right of individuals to marry someone of the same sex—indicates that the increased acceptance of interraciality has helped spur the acceptance of homosexuality too. It seems that both kinds of relationships that heterosexuality defined itself against have become more socially acceptable as long as they do not challenge gender conventions, they link sex to love and marriage, they uphold family values, and they limit their public displays of affection. The history of interraciality may tell us, in short, that heteronormative heterosexuality is today “constituted as much by the ‘other’ being incorporated in a subordinate position within the dominant category as by the ‘other’ being excluded.”67 Even though the division may no longer be solely between same-race/interracial or hetero/homo, heteronormativity in this reading still creates a hierarchy between “good sexual citizens” and those “bad” sexual citizens who engage in erotic behaviors unmoored from intimacy and monogamy.68

Or—and this final possibility seems as likely to me as the others—the legalization of interracial marriage and at least a lessening of the taboo against interracial relationships may signal that we are near the end of the sexual regime known as heterosexuality. Jonathan Ned Katz ends his book about the invention of heterosexuality with evidence that the sexual regime was already becoming less stable beginning in the 1970s and 1980s. Katz points to increasing divorce rates, falling marriage rates, less distinction between “gay” and “straight” sex acts, and a general convergence of gay and straight lifestyles.69 While Katz does not include anything about race on his list, the growing number of interracial couples might be yet another indicator that the era of heterosexual supremacy is coming to an end.

Whatever the future holds for heterosexuality, it is clear that its past is inextricably linked to interraciality. Yet these links remain woefully unexplored. Scholars of sexuality rarely identify monoraciality as a key prerequisite to heterosexual privilege, while scholars of interracial relationships have failed to recognize heterosexuality and heteronormativity as important influences on heterosexual interracial intimacy. In other words, heterosexuality remains an area where monoraciality is assumed, while interraciality is an area of intellectual inquiry where heterosexuality is assumed.70 But as this chapter has attempted to demonstrate, neither interraciality nor heterosexuality can be fully understood without reference to the other.