Читать книгу Still Straight - Tony Silva - Страница 9

While attractions are shaped in part by biology,48 sexual identities are not. Rather, they are shaped by history, culture, and social context. Economic and political changes helped form the framework for sexual identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.49 Some of these changes helped make gay/lesbian identities possible, whereas others helped spread the concept of heterosexuality. Interrelated historical developments from the mid- to late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth effectively created the identities of gay, lesbian, and bisexual that are now common in the West. Before then, individuals engaged in same-sex sexual practices, but these acts were not usually associated with a sexual identity.

Many people in the West regarded particular sexual acts between men, like anal sex, as something problematic that any man could feel temptation to experience.50 As wage labor,51 especially wage labor tied to corporations,52 allowed for individual economic self-sufficiency, individuals were less reliant on the family unit to survive. This meant they could live on their own and have lives organized around work, friendships, and same-sex partners rather than biological families. This helped provide part of the framework for gay/lesbian identities. Additionally, urbanization allowed individuals with a common sense of sexual difference to form communities, facilitating the emergence of gay/lesbian identities.53 All these developments were especially important for women, who historically had far fewer opportunities for economic self-sufficiency and consequently little opportunity to form a collective sense of sexual difference.54 For both groups, the increase in personal privacy due to these historical changes also helped facilitate this shift.

While urbanization helped create gay and lesbian identities, sexual and gender nonconformity is not simply a product of urban culture. In the mostly rural American West, many people engaged in same-sex behaviors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.55 There were also many people who today would be considered transgender. Community and individual responses to these people varied greatly. Many were met with relative tolerance or even acceptance.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the American West was increasingly portrayed by the media and others as lacking sexual and gender diversity, effectively burying evidence that showed such diversity was commonplace.56 The belief that rural areas were historically without sexual and gender diversity is one reason for today’s widespread and incorrect assumption that LGBTQ people live only in urban areas. Understandings of purportedly healthy gender and sexuality changed in rural areas—and urban ones as well—as the national discourse about gender and sexuality spread across America by the mid-twentieth century.57 Indeed, only during the 1960s, when the gay rights movement was linked to the civil rights struggle seeking racial equality, did Christian churches and conservative political movements in the American South cast it as a threat to social stability.58

Modern medical, governmental, and religious institutions played key roles in the creation and perpetuation of “heterosexuality” as both a concept and an identity. In the nineteenth century, emerging medical disciplines began to explain sexual practices as characteristics of particular types of people.59 They helped create “heterosexuality” as a social category and constructed “homosexuality” as its undesirable opposite. Prior to the nineteenth century, most people did not perceive sex with men and/or women as proof of an internal disposition like “heterosexuality,” “homosexuality,” or “bisexuality.” Twentieth-century bureaucratic practices in federal immigration, welfare, and military institutions helped legally define homosexuality and heterosexuality.60 Government institutions also more often associated sexual “deviancy” with people of color and punished them accordingly.61

The US federal government helped spread a national discourse about what it termed “normal” gender and sexuality using idealized images of rural white people.62 This was in opposition to what government workers and others perceived as immoral behaviors more common in cities. These ideas also penetrated rural areas through community organizations that reinforced the importance of heterosexuality, as well as the importance of men being masculine and women being feminine.63 Today, government-funded efforts to encourage marriage similarly teach that marriages between men and women are key to social stability and in fact are the only truly legitimate unions.64 The state thus helped to create the concept of sexual identities and continues to reward heterosexuality. Similarly, religious institutions traditionally placed considerable value on marriage and reproduction. This attitude became linked to the concept of “heterosexuality” once the phrase was more commonly used, particularly beginning in the 1960s.65

A variety of other historical changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also helped to spread the concept of heterosexuality, especially those that threatened how middle-class white men perceived their masculinity.66 Middle-class men lost some economic independence as they began to work for large businesses that were starting to dominate the American economy. This state of affairs challenged their previous understanding of business ownership and self-sufficiency as a basis for masculinity.67 Men also became concerned that women were feminizing society.68 Women increasingly entered the formal paid workforce and fought for political reforms, such as the right to vote. They also began teaching children and adolescents, which had previously been a male-dominated occupation. Additionally, many social settings became more integrated by gender and threatened men’s sense of themselves as “opposites” of women.69

Already worried about these changes, middle-class men became concerned that working-class men and immigrants had stronger claims to masculinity due to their jobs, which often involved physical labor.70 Middle-class men, in contrast, primarily held white-collar jobs that involved little if any physical labor. In response to all these threats to their masculinity, middle-class men began trying to underscore their masculinity through ties to fraternal organizations, interest in the outdoors, and competition through sports.71 Yet middle-class men were also concerned about others interpreting their social interest in other men as having a sexual component.72

In part to prevent people from thinking this about them, middle-class men claimed “heterosexuality” as an identity. This identity showed others that they had “normal” sexual desire for women and were thus masculine, even when their masculinity was otherwise being challenged.73 This identity also helped them distinguish themselves, at least in their minds, from working-class men and men of color.74 The concept of heterosexual identification took longer to take root in working-class communities.75 In short, the concept and identity of heterosexuality emerged in part to help relieve concerns about masculinity among middle-class white men, and this thinking eventually spread to most segments of society.76

Before this shift took place, social relations between men and between women were much different. Indeed, throughout history many societies defined “sex” as something that involved a penis, giving women the opportunity to engage in physically intimate encounters with other women without suspicion as long as they continued to be wives and mothers.77 Furthermore, in the early nineteenth century, Victorians considered sexual passion and love to be mostly unrelated. This attitude facilitated socially accepted, romantic friendships between women78 and between men.79 These types of friends often sent passionate love letters to one another. Romantic friendships also contained various types and degrees of physical contact, like sleeping in the same bed or cuddling—and sometimes genital contact.80 These friendships mostly disappeared as the modern system of sexual classification became widespread and pathologized them.

From the mid- to late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, sexual identities as an organizing principle of social life slowly disseminated across the West. Today, mainstream understandings of sexual orientation link emotional and physical attractions, even though they are actually distinct.81 For instance, it is possible for a man to fall in love with another man but not want to have sex with him or indeed with any other man. Yet current understandings of sexual orientation define all strong same-sex feelings, whether sexual or romantic, as gay or bisexual. This is why passionate emotional bonds are rare today between straight men.

In short, the current understanding of sexuality between men and women as “heterosexual” did not always exist. During the colonial era, sexuality was organized on a reproductive/nonreproductive basis; there was no social validation of sexual pleasure and most nonreproductive acts were viewed as offenses.82 Much later, in the late 1800s, the emergence of heterosexual identification helped to normalize sexual pleasure between middle-class men and women.83 Freud’s insistence that humans were predisposed toward seeking sexual pleasure, especially different-sex (woman-man) genital pleasure, both reflected and helped solidify this shift.84 Over time, most Americans came to understand themselves in terms of a sexual identity. Overall, historical research shows that sexual identities, including heterosexuality, are social creations rather than innate aspects of a person’s identity.