Look at this ruler. You might describe it
as something with no curves and swerves, or
long and straight. But then again you might
also use the same word "straight" to describe
someone’s sexuality when they’re attracted
to someone of the opposite sex. Wait…what?
This doesn’t quite add up. So today let’s
get to the bottom of the long and winding
road of how “straight” came to be synonymous
with sexuality.
Okay, so before we can get into how a word
like “straight” came to mean “heterosexual,”
we have to quickly talk about how and why
people started categorizing sexuality in the
first place. The idea that someone could be
hetero, homo, or bisexual (or any configuration
of LGBTQIA identities) really isn’t that
old at all.
While most historians agree that there is
evidence of same-sex romantic relationships
in nearly every documented culture, the realities
of the people who engaged in them weren’t
really categorized as “gay.” The same
goes for heterosexuality, which only showed
up about a century ago under a definition
that might be confusing to people today.
That definition for “heterosexuality”
came to us in the late 1860s, when Austrian-Hungarian
journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny coined it in
a letter to German lawyer and author Karl
Heinrich Ulrichs, whom Kertbeny met on his
travels and considered a contemporary. Today,
Ulrichs is known as an early pioneer in the
gay rights movement. In the letter, the term
appeared with three other terms as well: “homosexuality,
“monosexual,” and “heterogenit.” Those
last two meant “masturbation” and “bestiality,”
respectively.
If that makes “heterosexual” sound more
like a diagnosis than an identity, well, that’s
because it kind of was.
In the 1880 book “The Discovery of the Soul”
the word “heterosexual” in German debuted
to a wide audience. A few years later in 1892
the word appeared in English in Psychopathia
Sexualis. And in 1901, Dorland’s Medical
Dictionary defined heterosexuality as an “abnormal
or perverted appetite toward the opposite
sex.” When the term appeared in Merriam
Webster’s dictionary for the first time
in 1923, it touted the definition, “a morbid
sexual passion for one of the opposite sex.”
Wait, hold on. Does that mean heterosexuality
used to be seen as deviant behavior? Were
straight people being oppressed for being
straight? Well, no. It’s just that what
we now know as “heterosexuality” was so
accepted as the norm back then that nobody
felt the need to go out of their way to define
it, and when they did, it was to pathologize
all manner of sexual behavior that would have
been seen as taboo.
In 1934, heterosexuality adopted a meaning
that might look more familiar to us today,
although it might elicit a few justified “yikes.”
Its updated definition in Merriam Webster
called it a “manifestation of sexual passion
for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality.”
Keep that last part, “normal sexuality,”
in mind, because it’s going to come up again
with “straight,” which we’ll finally
get to now. Sorry, I guess the path to the
word “straight” is pretty loopy.
The first documented appearance of the word
“straight” as a descriptor for heterosexuality
is in American psychiatrist G.W. Henry’s
1941 book titled Sex Variants, which sought
to follow the experiences of 80 lesbians and
gay men in New York City in the 1930s. In
it, there’s the definition, “To go ‘straight’
is to cease homosexual practices and to indulge--usually
to re-indulge--in heterosexuality.” Because
heterosexuality is oh so indulgent.
In case you missed the subtext here, the book
is saying that the word “straight” actually
started out as gay slang, as an in-community
way to describe someone who was, if I may
use a term that wasn’t in popular vocabulary
back then, “re-closeting” themselves.
Someone was “going straight” if they dropped
out of the scene or entered a heterosexual
relationship. As is often the case with slang,
it was laced with irony and sarcasm.
The gay community was likely playing off the
common colloquial phrase “straight and narrow,”
which is defined in the Cambridge Dictionary
as behaving in a way that is “honest and
moral.” This old saying has its roots in
the Bible, specifically the Gospel of Matthew
7:13-14, which in the King James Version says
“Enter you in at the strait gate: for wide
is the gate, and broad is the way that leads
to destruction… Because strait is the gate,
and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life
. . .” A “strait,” s-t-r-a-i-t, like
the Bering Strait, is a narrow passageway.
Thus, to live righteously is to “walk the
strait and narrow,” which later got changed
to the homophone “straight and narrow.”
This all relates back to what some scholars
would call lavender linguistics, which looks
into how LGBTQIA people use language as a
vehicle to communicate nuances in identity
and their lived experiences. It’s based
on the idea that certain communities, especially
marginalized ones, will utilize the dominant
language in unique ways to make a home for
themselves in it. Looking at it that way,
it’s no wonder so much slang comes from
groups of people who are often “othered”
in mainstream culture.
For more examples of lavender linguistics,
we can look at other slang terms that have
come up out of gay community. “Tea,” a
word that means the truth, be it sipped or
spilled or what have you, originated in black
drag culture. Merriam-Webster gives an example
of this use of “tea” from 1994, in which
The Lady Chablis, a black drag performer and
female impersonator, defines it as, “My
thing, my business, what's going on in my
life."
But the term “straight” wasn’t limited
to gay community slang. Its strong relationship
to morality meant it was often dispatched
as a catch-all for someone who was defined
by their abstinence from debauchery. And by
the 1970s, the term was concretely established
as a synonym for “virtuous.”
Just take a look at some 20th century pop
culture, like the Modern Lovers’ song from
the 70’s titled “I’m Straight,” in
which singer Jonathan Richman compares himself
to a woman’s stoner boyfriends. When he
calls himself “straight” in the song,
he’s not calling himself heterosexual. He’s
saying that he’s not a drug user.
That’s not just a one-off example either.
Look at “straight edge” culture that formed
in the early 80s in response to the punk culture
of the 1970s, the latter of which was big
on drug use. The term was coined by the band
Minor Threat in their song “Straight Edge,”
the lyrics of which bragged about having better
things to do than drugs.
People who used “straight edge” to define
themselves used to, and still do, define it
as abstinence from drugs, alcohol, and sometimes
promiscuous sex. Though it has been applied
in many ways, one thing is for sure: “straight”
as a slang word has a strong relationship
to ideas of morality.
The use of “straight” to mean “not gay”
has a lot to say about how people viewed homosexuality
back then: as an act of deviancy, alongside
other socially taboo activities like gambling
and drug use. It’s a view that sadly persists
to this day, but back when the words we used
to describe sexual orientation were still
crystallizing, the word “straight” was
broad enough to cast a person as distinct
from all kinds of marginalized groups and
misfits.
It’s these moral implications that have
caused some LGBTQ advocates to push for abolishing
the term altogether.
You know, one thing that might surprise a
lot of people when they dig into the history
of words like “gay” or “straight”
or “heterosexuality” is that, relatively
speaking, they’re really not very old. What
this could tell us is that the book isn’t
closed on any of these terms. That’s true
for language in general. It’s a living,
evolving thing, as we’ve seen in this journey
through medical terms, lavender linguistics,
and community slang.
I mean, just look at the roaring debate over
whether it’s OK to describe people as “cisgender,”
a word that means “not transgender” or
“a person whose sense of personal identity
and gender corresponds with their birth sex.”
We have words like “non-binary” for people
who don’t identify as a man or a woman,
and “Latinx” for people of Latin American
descent who want to eschew the gendered nature
of Spanish. Some critics have accused LGBTQ
activists of destroying language and making
up words, but isn’t that kind of how words
work? They have to come from somewhere, and
the context they’re created in matters a
lot. Plus all of them were made up by someone
at some point. It’s why the dictionary gets
updated every year.
So it could very well be the case that “straight”
won’t be around forever as a way to describe
heterosexuality. Its past as a way to contrast
heterosexuality against homosexuality in a
moral context speaks to a painful history
of discrimination and bigotry. But it also
speaks to a colorful tradition of marginalized
groups creating their own language and their
own slang, to creatively communicate with
each other under difficult conditions.
