It’s been a big weekend for the GLBTQ movement; on Saturday night, President Obama promised an end (though the timetable was missing) for “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and for the Defense of Marriage Act. On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of marchers took to the streets of Washington DC to call for equality. And Governor Schwarzenegger signed two key gay rights bills, one requiring California to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states and the other making Harvey Milk’s birthday (the same as mine, May 22) a state holiday. Good news.
Yesterday was National Coming Out Day, and many folks on Facebook (where I spend what may be an inordinate amount of time) took the opportunity to do just that. In a couple of different threads, discussions arose about the use of the word “straight”, a term I abhor for a variety of reasons.
The word “straight” has many meanings in the demotic. When I was a child, “straight” was less often used as the opposite of gay and more often to refer to someone who didn’t use drugs and alcohol. In seventh grade, Jenny Nix asked me if I was straight, and when I gave her a blank look, explained that she was asking if I wanted to “smoke out” after class. (My middle school was, at least in the late 1970s, notorious for its drug use.) To be “straight” meant to be sober, a meaning that survives in the popular teen subculture of “Straight Edge”.
In college, long after I knew of the sexual meaning of straight, I began to hear another, urban use of the term, one recently brought into the national discourse when the president employed it. My African-American roommate sophomore year, Terry, once said to me after we had had a particularly convivial discussion, “Hugo, we straight.” Rather than an affirmation of mutual heterosexuality, Terry explained to my quizzical self that he was affirming we had an understanding; “we straight” meant that we were on the same page, as it were.
And of course, it was also in college where, as I studied Christian history, I reflected on the term “orthodox”, which is the Greek for “straight path.” I noted the moderate curiosity that the opposite of orthodox is heterodox, which sets “straight” and “hetero” in opposition — whereas in sexual nomenclature, they are synonyms. Language is funny.
I dislike the word straight as a synonym for heterosexuality for a multitude of reasons. First of all, it sets the alternative up as a pejorative. When Christians or Jews call themselves orthodox with a small “o”, they are almost always implying that those who are not on their particular understanding of the “straight path” are in serious error. To not be straight, in other words, implies deviance; to deviate means to turn off the one true path. And I react with visceral anger at those who suggest that those whose sexuality draws them to their own sex are in any way deviant. The road to fulfillment, and for we believers, the road to God, is a challenging one. Heterosexual inclination or behavior is no guarantor that one walks a straight path towards the divine; same-sex desire or action is, in the same way, in and of itself no obstacle to either earthly or divine joy. To me, it is thus spiritually offensive to use the word “straight” to describe sexual identity.
I also object to the notion that “straight” somehow implies normal or healthy. Most of us struggle with some aspect of our sexuality; many of us are, as theologian Richard Mouw has said “bruised and confused” as a consequence of abuse and other painful sexual experiences. Many of us are “battered” by a culture that both shames and commodifies sexuality. Many of us even think of ourselves as broken, or crooked, because of our particular fantasies or fears or experiences. Being heterosexual is no prophylaxis against toxic shame. In a world where most crimes of sexual violence are committed by “straight” men, the moral and psychological superiority implicit in the term is revealed as an absurdity and a lie.
I’ve written about my own sexual identity here. I call myself “Eira-sexual” with real seriousness for reasons I explain in that post. But were I ever — God forbid — to be single again, I wouldn’t use the term “straight”, even if my intentions were only to pursue relationships with women. In the deepest sense of the word, no one I’ve known is straight. It is a term redolent with overweening pride, with smug certainty, and with hypocritical disdain. Let’s drop it as a term for our intimate longings, once and for all.
=) I love reading these posts. They teach me so much and make me feel good about myself.
Very insightful. Part of renouncing privilege is to question the language. But what should we call ourselves? I don’t care for “hetero” because its opposite, “homo”, is nearly always a slur against gay men and doesn’t include lesbians, as colloquially used. I would like to call myself “queer” because I celebrate sexual diversity, but as a woman who is attracted to men, I worry that I would be co-opting a GLBT term that doesn’t apply to me. I could follow your lead and be an “Adam-sexual”, but my thoughts are not so pure…all it takes is one “2xist” ad on a bus kiosk and…drool :)
Anyhow, good job questioning our loaded language. More ideas please.
What word do you suggest we use instead? I appreciate and agree with everything you say here, but I think “straight” is useful because we need a casual word to refer to heterosexual people. It’s far better to have an imperfect word like “straight” than to have no word at all, which takes as right back to square one in which heterosexuality is so normal, so much the default, that it needn’t be named. I just want heterosexuals to own the fact that they are heterosexual (none of this “I hate labels” nonsense; as far as I’m concerned it basically amounts to “I don’t need labels because of my privilege”). The widespread use of “straight” does this better than anything else has so far, so if you want to strike it from the books, I think you need to provide a useful alternative.
Whoops, forgot to edit my info — just for the record I’m going by just Bond now.
I use “het” a lot, as a short and sweet contraction. Other ideas?
Het’s not bad — I don’t think it implies homo quite as much as hetero does, and it’s a good companion for bi.
I don’t have any other ideas, but I’ll try to sue het more, and I’ll keep my eyes and ears open for others.
That’s use* het more, of course. I’m not planning any legal action against heterosexuals.
But doesn’t “gay” imply that heterosexuals are, you know, mopey?
;)
Bond? Just … Bond?
*sigh* I won’t be able to read your handle without this running through my head. (Given your new approach to life, perhaps that’s what you intend.)
:)
“I appreciate and agree with everything you say here, but I think “straight” is useful because we need a casual word to refer to heterosexual people.”
Why do we need a casual word to apply to heterosexual folks? Why not just call them heterosexual?
I guess I’m just not seeing the issue here. I understand the issue with the word “straight”, but why we can’t just use heterosexual is not registering. Is it just because people don’t want to take the time to use big words? I’m not intending to sound offensive or snarky, I’m just honestly not understanding the problem with the word heterosexual.
Ballgame — hahaha. There’s only so much I can do here; I wanted a less feminine moniker and didn’t want to rename myself whole cloth, and Bond is my honest to goodness surname. I figure there are worse associations. :)
Faith — oh, I don’t have a problem with the word heterosexual (not that it would be my place to have a problem with it, not being het), and I often use it. I just think it’s very handy to have a word with the same friendly, snappy, non-clinical tone as “gay.” Heterosexual is six syllables long, straight is just one, and to my ear, phrases like “straight guy” and “straight couple” are just smoother than “heterosexual guy,” etc. Also the word “homosexual” has sort of been monopolized by the anti-gay (phrases like “homosexual marriage” aren’t generally used favorably), and I like symmetry in language.
But anyone who wants to use heterosexual exclusively won’t get any trouble from me.
I’d consider myself heterosexual, but don’t call myself “straight”. No need to get into it, but straight I generally consider heterosexual and… I suppose what one might call mainstream, maybe hegemonic, sexual norms. I do consider “het” to be slightly pejorative.
In general, though, I don’t bother often with labels on people’s sexuality in general. Not my business and I don’t care what anyone else’s sexuality is. Then again, I live in the Bay Area, so it’s pretty much come as you are.
I wonder to what extent late-19th and early-20th century medical, legal, and academic trends and imperatives to label, and pathologize, non-standard sexual behavior led to this conception of ironclad and immutable sexual identity, Michel Foucault’s thesis. It didn’t exist in our culture until then, and it doesn’t exist in most cultures in the world today either. I think it’s probably artificial and describes human sexual behavior and desire inaccurately. Of course, that paradigm was turned on its head over the last 40 years or so in the form of the LGBT rights movement and it’s collateral descendants, when people took those labels and made them a source of personal identification, pride, and a basis for organizing and activism. That liberalized norms of sexuality and relationships for everyone, so I suppose the labels did prove to have some value, though obviously not what their inventors intended.
Just thought that I should qualify that last remark to state that I don’t intend nor should what I wrote be taken as an attempt at erasure of anyone’s identity.