The Invention of Straightness: A History by Hanne Blank

A detail from the cover of "Straight"

Even today, there is often the assumption that straight is the default, and queer is something you "find" or "discover" or "become."  But such attitudes are limiting, in my opinion, and can prevent us from opening up to new experiences.  I believe many of us are more fluid than the terms "gay" or "straight" can ever capture.  "Queer" is certainly a handy term.

That said, how did the linguistic divide between "gayness" and "straightness" actually arise? 

Interviewed by Thomas Rogers at Salon, Hanne Blank (who is author of a new history of heterosexuality, entitled Straight) speaks of the Austro-Hungarian journalist named Károly Mária Kertbeny who coined the terms "heterosexual" and "homosexual":

"He created these words," says Blank, "as part of his response to a piece of Prussian legislation that made same-sex erotic behavior illegal, even in cases where the identical act performed by a man and a woman would be considered legal. And he was one of a couple of people who did a lot of writing and campaigning and pamphleteering to try to change legal opinion on that matter. He coined the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” in a really very clever bid to try to equalize same-sex and different-sex. His intent was to suggest that there are these two categories in which human beings could be sexual, that they were not part of a hierarchy, that they were just two different flavors of the same thing."

Revealing, right?  Yes, I want to read this book!