Straight by Hanne Blank Page B

sexual response would not happen until after 1910.
    Early psychiatry was part of the material-science field of biomedicine by convention and because its practitioners had studied medicine, not because the actual practice of early psychiatry had much to do with biomedical physical science. “Heterosexual,” coined by a layman who was just trying to articulate a protest against an unjust law, became “scientific” and “medical” because it was adopted and used by men who had scientific educations, not because it had been revealed or proven by experimentation and research.
    As a psychiatric inheritance, “heterosexual” was promptly enshrined in medical practice as a standard of normalcy and proper function. There it has remained. The overwhelming assumption, among natural scientists who work on sexual orientation, appears to be that heterosexuality simply must exist as a physical-science reality. Were it not, the myriad attempts to explain homosexuality on biomedical grounds would not make much sense. But the truth is, no one has yet established—or, to my knowledge, attempted to establish—that a quality called heterosexuality exists not as a social phenomenon among humans, but as a spontaneously appearing material entity in nature. They only behave as if they had.
    THE DEGENERATE IN THE MIRROR
    The early days of “heterosexual” were also the early days of sexual science. As nineteenth-century race, gender, and class insecurity founda point of focus in sexual deviance, it came to seem imperative that “degenerates” be managed, lest they place the upright and respectable at risk of falling pell-mell down the crumbling rungs of the evolutionary ladder. A vast body of what can be described as medico-legal and medico-moral literature began to appear, including
Psychopathia Sexualis.
Such texts were intended to help doctors, lawyers, and other specialists understand and deal with these dangerous deviants.
    Out of these writings emerged two major subtexts that reflected not only on the deviant few, but also on the “normal-sexual” many: conformity with gender role, and conformity with the principle of procreativity. Two additional concepts, the notion of a sexual orientation and the more subjective notion of a sexual identity, both grew out of the obsession with determining the parameters of deviance.
    Procreativity was a fairly straightforward standard. For early sexology, as it was for the Catholic Church, the only defensible sexual act was a potentially procreative sexual act. The further that sexual activity took one from the potential for procreation, the less defensible and more “perverse” it was. Acts between same-sex partners fell clearly and decisively into the nonprocreative category. But so too did the use of contraception, which was widely viewed as morally wrong despite its growing popularity behind closed doors.
    Newly named dynamics like masochism, sadism, and fetishism, however suspect they might have been, were not automatically beyond the pale. A certain masochistic tendency was considered psychologically normal in women and a corresponding sadistic tendency normal in men. Early British sexologist Havelock Ellis claimed this was a legacy of a fundamental, less complicated pre-civilization sexuality in which males seized women for sex, and women accepted such aggression. In modern people, he thought, such aggression and submission were quite normal as long as they were not excessive. Freud held a similar view, taking the fairly liberal tack that an act had to turn completely away from procreation before it became a perversion. But most people, and most writers, seem not to have been so tolerant as Freud or Ellis. Virtually all of what we would today term “foreplay”—another concept for which we must thank Freud—could be and often was considered too nonprocreative to be widely accepted. As late as 1920, sex advisors like