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From “Normal” to Heterosexual

The Historical Making of Heterosexualities

Images of heterosexual identity invoke well-worn associations of a nuclear family, or a married straight couple, or, to use the current lingo, the casual sex “hookups” of college students and other nonmo- nogamous straight men and women. These images, though, are not natural results emanating from biological male and female differences, nor are they socially random. Rather, they are socially constructed. That they are not natural phenomena is demonstrated not only by their variance across time and place but also by their ever-changing social status, identity conception, and historical arrangement. Fur- ther, these variations are largely explained by the shifts and changes in sociohistorical constructions of heterosexualities and their boundary relations with homosexualities since the late nineteenth century. These shifts and changes were both systematic and shaped by the culture and principles of social organization of the society to which they belonged. And these changes helped to construct part of the realm of sexual life as we know it today.

It is useful to think of another society or a different historical period than our own to get a concrete sense of how varied sexualities can be and to relativize our own culture’s organization of homo/heterosexuali- ties. The anthropologist Gilbert Herdt’s (1981) famous study Guardians of the Flutes examines the Sambia of Papua New Guinea, who combine rituals of homosexual and heterosexual behaviors in transitioning boys into manhood. In their movement toward adult relations with women

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and with the aim of reproducing their tribe’s existence through having children of their own, all Sambian boys engage in ritualized homosex- ual behavior, where they suck and ingest the semen of an older adult tribesman. This cultural ritual is based on the belief that boys do not produce masculine fluid (semen) on their own. And in order to become big, strong, and virile men, they must practice this ritual of same-sex fellatio in order to store up and obtain the masculine fluid that will allow them to later impregnate women. This is an example of a different culture’s organization of acts of homosexual and heterosexual behavior that is distinct from our own.

Closer to home, we need only turn to nineteenth-century Victorian America to find a historical time period with a qualitatively different organization of the meanings of sex and love among women and men. Victorian Americans did not view sex as an expression of love, nor did they conceive of love as expressed through acts of sex. This changed only in the twentieth century, when a cultural shift that sexualized love and eroticized sex took place. At this time, the rise of the new norm of romantic love was accompanied by notions of companionate dating and marriage (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012; Seidman 1991). In contrast to our notion of romantic love, during the nineteenth century, Victo- rian Americans defined love as a spiritual feeling, and sex was aimed at primarily procreative purposes within the institution of marriage, although there were degrees of eroticism and intimacy between cou- ples, and the institution of prostitution flourished beside the institution of marriage (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012; Lystra 1989). In part, Victo- rian women’s statuses were attached to their association with the higher purpose of love as spirituality, whereas men’s sexualities were viewed as animalistic and thus lowly and instinctual, needing to be tamed by women’s higher nature and spiritual love. The fact that we no longer view women and men nor sex and love as polar opposites is an example of our own historical present’s different organization of heterosexual sex and love.

Heterosexual/homosexual desires, behaviors, and identities have a complex relation to one another, the society in which they are config- ured, and the historical period in which they gain meaning and help constitute how one experiences social life. In this chapter, I sketch the changing historical character of heterosexual masculinities1 and

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heterosexual femininities in America since the late nineteenth century. Analytically, I focus on historiographical studies that explicitly analyze heterosexualities and their shaping of black and white men’s and wom- en’s experiences.2 Much of the historical research in gender and race scholarship does not account for the development of heterosexual iden- tities. Rather, lesbian, gay, and feminist scholars have been pioneers in studying the sociohistorical construction of heterosexualities in their efforts to study and document lesbian and gay life, although new his- torical research shows an attentiveness to analyzing sexualities that was absent in prior research.

In her virtuosic statement Epistemology of the Closet, the late literary theorist Eve Sedgwick (1990) captures the defining move of sexualities scholars and queer theorists to study sexualities as a general principle of social organization in American society. Sedgwick argues that “many nodes of the thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western cul- ture as a whole are structured—indeed, fractured—by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition” (1). This analytical move by queer theorists shifted sexualities scholarship from explaining the modern homosexual to analyzing the power relations of the homo/ heterosexual definition. Queer theorists changed the discussion from being exclusively focused on homosexualities to more broadly focusing on sexualities, thus including heterosexualities, as a general principle of social knowledge, social difference, and identity formations. This move is central to my project of turning the lens back on heterosexuals and making their identities and privileges subject to social and historical analysis (Butler 1992; Fuss 1991; Katz 1996; Seidman 1996; Somerville 2000; Warner 1993).

Moreover, the extant historical scholarship on heterosexualities demonstrates that its formation is inextricably tied to the construction of homosexualities over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The development of heterosexual identities over time consolidated a sexual hierarchy, distinct from but often reinforcing of gender, racial, and class hierarchies, that constructed heterosexualities as natural, the internalization of psychological health, and the normative ideal of one’s personal and public self (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012). Central to this sexual hierarchy and its enforcement of normative heterosexual- ity is the establishment of homosexualities as a polluting social force

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that stigmatizes nonheterosexual behaviors, styles, and relations. While the development of the homo/heterosexual definition sought to distin- guish sexuality from gender, the rise of sexuality as a distinct domain of humanity paradoxically reinforced the importance of gender identity politics by connecting heterosexual normativity to the embodiment of gender normativity. These normative relations are the hallmark of the false dichotomies that designate masculine men and feminine women as performing ostensibly heterosexual identities and feminine men and masculine women as performing supposedly homosexual ones.

Since the construction of heterosexual men’s and women’s identities occurred partly as a result of the rise of homosexual identities, hetero- sexual men’s privilege and identity are based on the pollution of homo- sexual masculinities as womanlike, sexually licentious, and an inversion of the traditional social roles ascribed to men, such as father, husband, and protector. Similarly, heterosexual women’s privilege and identity use polluting images of lesbians, who are portrayed as pathologically manlike, sexually aggressive, and inverting the traditional social roles of women as mothers, wives, and those who need to be protected.

Gender has always been a fundamental organizing principle in the social and historical constructions of heterosexual and homosexual identity formations in America. Heterosexuals define themselves as heterosexual by disidentifying with homosexuals of their same gen- der. For instance, heterosexual men are not like homosexual men, who desire men, but rather are men who desire women exclusively, and it is their heterosexuality that ostensibly and fundamentally alters the meaning of their masculinities. This point is historically evidenced by the emergence of homosexual male subcultures before lesbian ones, and consequently the prior development of conscious heterosexual identi- ties among men before women (Chauncey 1994; Faderman 1991). The later development of lesbian and heterosexual femininities is related to women’s subordination under patriarchal institutions, where women were economically and socially dependent upon fathers, husbands, and men more broadly for their welfare. And, as I document in this chapter, a gendered social organization has been central to the organization of sexual behaviors and identities among and between heterosexual and homosexual men and women. Further, a gendered ordering of sexual identities continues to this day, where a gendered set of codes circulates

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among straight and gay Americans as an informal system of symbols that are viewed as proxies for heterosexual and homosexual identities. These gender codes, though, are problematic proxies for sexual identi- ties in a society where a diversity of gender displays is common among gay and straight individuals alike.

The hierarchical boundaries between heterosexualities and homo- sexualities were also central to reinforcing a racial hierarchy that marked black sexualities as pathological and abnormal in comparison to white sexualities, which went unmarked but served as the embodi- ment of health, normality, and beauty (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012). The concept of respectability is key to understanding how black women in particular aimed to counteract the pathologizing of their sexualities, wanting to project themselves as decent and good, sexually and other- wise, to white society as well as to one another (Higginbotham 1993; Hine 1989; Mitchell 2004; Summers 2004; Wolcott 2001).

This chapter introduces and integrates the historical scholarship on the rise of heterosexual masculinities and heterosexual femininities in the United States from the 1890s to the 1990s. First, I examine when the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual” were invented and started to be diffused into American culture. Before the creation of a sexual system of identity, individuals were defined by a gendered social order, where marriage, reproduction, and laws against nonprocreative sexual behaviors governed the relations between men and women, men and men, and men and animals. Using the concepts of the changing defini- tion of heterosexualities and the rise and fall of the closet to organize my analysis, and to advance my argument of the importance of under- standing post-closeted dynamics in America today, I synthesize the historiographical work on the rise of the homo/heterosexual definition among men and women.

In the first historical period, from 1890 to the 1930s, which I refer to as “the birth of heterosexuality and the pre-closet period,” I show that a gendered organization still predominated but that a visible homosexual male subculture existed in major American cities, where homosexual men socialized and had sex with “normal” men, the historical predeces- sors of “heterosexual” men. Since the colonial era, female sexuality had been defined by women’s reproductive capacity in the family; this had changed by the 1880s, when “romantic friendships” between women,

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previously viewed as a common part of women’s affectionate attach- ments, were now regarded with suspicion as possibly “perverted” and lesbian.

In addition, historians document the elaboration of a new culture of sexual liberalism, also referred to as the first sexual revolution, in the 1920s across America. Sexual liberalism promoted a new awareness of sexual agency, independence, and self-discovery among women. Fol- lowing this, from the 1930s to the 1960s, was the period I refer to as “heterosexual hegemony and the rise of the closet.” In my discussion of this period, I delineate the formation and hardening of boundaries between heterosexuals and homosexuals, with the state’s repression of everyday homosexual life and its implementation of laws and poli- cies that singled out homosexuals for discrimination. By this time, and in contrast to the previous period, heterosexual identities are defined through the exclusion of all same-sex contact. Furthermore, I describe how the increasing development of nonprocreative heterosexual mas- culinities and femininities led to the end of this limited sexual free- dom referred to as sexual liberalism, as sexual liberalism emphasized marriage as the predominant arrangement for heterosexual relations throughout most of the twentieth century. In the chapter’s final sec- tion, “Challenges to Heterosexual Hegemony and the Decline of the Closet, 1960s–1990s,” I show how the Stonewall generation changed what it meant to be gay and lesbian by refashioning identity politics. Before Stonewall, homosexuals generally came out only to other homo- sexuals. After Stonewall, the social and political act of coming out was revolutionized and redefined by LGBT persons, so that now it meant coming out to heterosexuals and challenging the closet’s repression of sexual and gender difference. These changes brought about newfound freedoms for LGBT persons while challenging heterosexual Americans’ homophobia, heterosexism, and gender normativity in profound and unprecedented ways.

This sociohistorical chapter demonstrates that sexual desires, behav- iors, and identities are deeply constructed by a society’s social catego- ries, norms, and discourses. I show that the formation of sexuality as an independent principle of social organization is interlocked with Ameri- can society’s gendered, racial, and social class formations. To imagine a different, more democratic sexual order, we need to look to the past

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for answers to why and how society is the way it is presently. A post- closeted culture of LGBT individuals is a clear pattern and trend in the contemporary United States, and this cultural force is reshaping and changing straight Americans’ identities and their interactional practices with nonheterosexuals. In the following empirical chapters I analyze straight Americans’ identity conceptions and their social interactions with LGBT individuals, and sociologically account for how the rise of a post-closeted culture is transforming straight sexualities today. In this chapter, I utilize the invention of heterosexualities and the rise and fall of the closet as the analytical frames for understanding the shifts in the definition of homo/heterosexual identities during this hundred-year period from 1890 to 1990.

Before Heterosexuality

Historians argue that from the colonial era to the late nineteenth cen- tury in America, same-sex sexuality was viewed as only a behavior, not yet an identity of a subcultural group. From 1600 to the late 1800s, homosexuality was prohibited through sodomy laws, which were aimed not at homosexual individuals but at nonprocreative, nonmarital sex- ual behaviors more broadly. It was only during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that prohibitions against sodomy were regu- larly enforced, and now against a subcultural group of people thought to embody homosexual identities. Thus, the distinction between homo- sexual (and heterosexual) behavior and identity is crucial for under- standing the development of the homosexual/heterosexual categories and later social relations.

In his book The Invention of Heterosexuality, the historian Jonathan Ned Katz (1996) argues that in the early part of the Victorian era, from about 1820 to 1860, neither the notion of heterosexual behavior nor the notion of identity existed in America. Rather, the social organization of sexual behaviors and intercourse was based on notions of a true man- hood, a true womanhood, and a spiritual love. A major concern for Americans was whether sexual relations took place within or outside marriage (Seidman 1991). Socially sanctioned sexual relations were to occur between married persons and to be aimed at procreation. Mar- riage was the sacrosanct cornerstone of Victorian life, and a proper

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womanhood, manhood, and progeny—not an erotic heterosexual love based on pleasure or carnal desire—were organized through this institution. While nonprocreative sex, as well as sex outside marriage, was culturally maligned, prostitution was a growing phenomenon in American cities due to the double standards that allowed men to seek sexual release with sex workers, who unburdened wives from husbands’ stronger sexual appetites (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012, 140). Overall, though, sex was generally conceived of as an instinct aimed at repro- duction, not the basis of an identity, and marriage was the container of socially appropriate sexual reproductive behavior and central in estab- lishing Victorian men’s and women’s gender roles, social honor, and respectability.

In fact, the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” were invented in 1868, according to the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement (Katz 1996, 10). The “terms heterosexual and homosexual apparently came into common use only in the first quarter of this [twentieth] century and before that time, if words are clues to concepts, people did not con- ceive of a social universe polarized into heteros and homos,” Katz notes (1996, 10). One of the great ironies of these modern terms is that Karl- Maria Kertbeny, a German law reformer, coined the term “homosex- ual” in his effort to amend sodomy laws in Germany at the time, but not to stigmatize homosexuals. This progressive reformer used the word “heterosexual” in 1880 in his public defense of homosexuality, naming a heterosexual individual’s sexual sense of himself as a way to promote tolerance of homosexuals (Ghaziani 2010; Katz 1996).

However, the formation of the idea of homosexuality came before heterosexuality, as European sexologists, physicians, and other scien- tists provided the first medical interpretations of homosexuality as a form of pathology in the 1860s. Over time, they sought to distinguish homosexuality and homosexuals from a changing group that was called “normal,” “unafflicted,” and “heterosexual” (Terry 1999).

Heterosexual identity, then, is a modern invention of the late nine- teenth century, and it is not reducible to the reproduction of the human species; nor is heterosexual identity simply an extension of one’s sexed body, whether understood as based in genitalia, chromosomes, or hor- monal differences between males and females. Heterosexual identity is also not one’s gender identity. That is, embodying gender-conventional

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behaviors or being viewed as a “masculine” man or a “feminine” woman does not make one heterosexual. Rather, this is a culturally dominant ideology that falsely equates the embodiment of gender-traditional displays with heterosexuality. And, finally, heterosexual identity is not reducible to sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, as sexual behaviors do not necessarily include the adoption of an identity.

The notion of a sexual identity was new to American culture in the nineteenth century, when people understood themselves through a gender principle of social organization, primarily arranged through the institutions of marriage and family. A sexual identity was a new form of selfhood, where erotic life became a defining part of one’s self and a new form of difference distinguishing one from others (Duggan 2000). Heterosexual identity names an individual’s sense of self and the collec- tive grouping he or she identifies with on its basis. The sociological con- struction of heterosexual identities developed through their relation- ship to homosexual identities. Paradoxically, heterosexuality was and is defined against homosexuality. But by being defined against homosexu- ality, heterosexuality is at the same time dependent upon the existence of homosexuality for its meaning (Fuss 1991). The birth of the hetero- sexual/homosexual binary in Western culture, then, became imbricated with other key categories of modern Western culture, such as disclo- sure/secrecy, public/private, masculine/feminine, majority/minority, and natural/artificial (Sedgwick 1990).

The rise of heterosexual identities among women did not occur until the twentieth century. Before that, late nineteenth-century Victorian white women understood their sense of self through the construction of a “true womanhood.” Marriage was the foundation of white middle- class women’s lives and was based on the notion of a “true love” between man and woman. For example, Katz explains, “special purity claimed for this era’s true women referred not to asexuality but to middle-class women’s better control than men over their carnal impulses.  .  .  .  True love was a hierarchical system, topped by an intense spiritual feeling powerful enough to justify marriage, reproduction, and an other- wise unhallowed sensuality” (1996, 44). The historical construction of white Victorian women often presents an image of them as angelic creatures whose identities are based on a spiritual love, and Victorian men as aggressive and sexually voracious “beasts” who had to exercise

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gentlemanly restraint at home in their roles as husbands. However, recent historical accounts have modified this image of Victorian men and women as totally unromantic in their marriages and relations. The historian Karen Lystra (1989) finds that Victorian men and women embraced romantic notions in their letters to one another, especially during courtship. Still, neither married Victorians nor their unmarried counterparts considered themselves heterosexual or homosexual at this time.

Between 1860 and 1890, however, a shift occurred. During this period the concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality emerged as part of the knowledge domains of sexology, psychoanalysis, and medi- cal science (e.g., psychiatry), as well as legal, media, and other cultural domains. These new knowledge domains delegitimized and aimed to replace religious views, which had been culturally dominant and had defined sexual behaviors as sinful or not (Weeks 1977). Heterosexual sexual behaviors, however, that were not aimed at procreation were still seen as deviant, but now alongside a deviant, nonprocreative homosex- uality. Heterosexual sexual behaviors’ legitimacy still rested on a procre- ative justification, and so heterosexual sexual behaviors that were lustful and nonprocreative in aim were seen as pathological just like homo- sexual sodomy (Katz 1996). For example, the first usage of the word “heterosexuality” in an American medical article occurred in 1892. In this article, Dr. James G. Kiernan defined pathological heterosexuality as sexual desire not oriented toward reproduction, viewing a focus on sexual pleasure as deviant. This definition of heterosexuality lasted until the 1920s in American middle-class culture.

A key figure at this point is Sigmund Freud ([1922] 1949, 1962), the father of psychoanalysis. Freud’s theory of sexuality establishes sexual object choice (the person one desires) as an integral development of the human self, and his theory informs the foundational approaches taken by medical psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis in conceptualiz- ing sexualities. By the early part of the twentieth century, Freud, as well as other sex researchers, who are referred to as sexologists, such as the British researcher Havelock Ellis and the Austro-German researcher Richard von Krafft-Ebing, made opposite-sex object choice the orga- nizing principle of a healthy social-psychological sexual identity, and same-sex object choice a psychic disease.3 At this time heterosexuality

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lost its negative connotations, and began to be seen as the embodiment of psychological health, while homosexuality became its unhealthy complement.

The importance of Freud and the shift he represents in medical science, the social sciences, and American culture more broadly is in defining heterosexuality as an acquired social-psychological identity, not simply as a desire or behavior oriented toward procreation. In con- trast to earlier definitions that defined the heterosexual sexual instinct’s aim as solely toward procreation, Freud argues that procreation is a sec- ondary development in the pursuit of happiness. He states that plea- sure is the main purpose of a human being’s mental apparatus. Thus a person’s sexual “instinct” can be directed toward pleasure, self-expres- sion, love, or procreation. The Foucauldian (1978) argument is instruc- tive here: Freud makes the heterosexual sexual instinct into a feeling (or a psychology of selfhood) and therefore a central part of one’s self- understanding, not reducible to acts of procreation. Heterosexual and homosexual categories are no longer descriptions of only sexual behav- iors; rather, they are now social identities imbued with psychological notions of healthiness or unhealthiness and social statuses of normalcy or deviancy.

The Birth of Heterosexuality and the Pre-Closet Period, 1890–1930s

A major misconception of the history of sexuality in America is that heterosexual domination is assumed to have created a closeted exis- tence for homosexuals since the colonial era or before. This was not the case. As we have seen, first the terms “heterosexual” and “homo- sexual” had to be invented by medical-scientific experts whose dis- courses were disseminated into American culture, and then put into practice by men and women in everyday social life. Before the devel- opment of the heterosexual/homosexual system of sexual identity that we know, a gender system of social organization overlaid same- sex and other-sex behaviors. From roughly 1890 to 1930, “normal” men and fairies, who were womanlike men who had sex with men, were defined by a gendered sense of self. That is, “normal” men were allowed to have sex with other men, as long as they maintained both

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a traditional masculine display and the dominant penetrator role in anal sex. Likewise, men who made same-sex sexualities central to their lives were expected to display feminine manners and assumed to take on the role of the penetrated. For women, same-sex intimacies were permitted under the respected institution of women’s “romantic friendships” with one another. Whether genital sexual relations took place between “romantic friends” remains a matter of historical dis- pute, yet these female same-sex love relationships were fundamental to the proto-lesbian identities and subcultures that would emerge in the twentieth century. The sexualization of women as lesbian or hetero- sexual in the 1920s and 1930s set the frame for the homo/heterosexual definition among women later in the century. In sum, at this historical juncture, sexuality—heterosexuality and homosexuality—as a distinct axis of identity was still submerged within the gender roles, arrange- ments, and institutions of the period.

Historically, heterosexual men’s identities must be understood in relation to homosexual men’s; likewise, women’s heterosexual and homosexual identities must be understood in relation to one another. This claim is supported by the historical scholarship that documents clear and salient gender differences in the emergence of homosexuali- ties; and this difference is related to the later development of lesbian identities and subcultures in the United States in comparison to nine- teenth-century gay male subcultures present earlier in cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Women throughout the nineteenth century lacked access to both wage-earning jobs and public spaces where they could form same-sex subcultures parallel to those among men (Boyd 2003; Chauncey 1994; Faderman 1991; Heap 2009; Stryker and Van Buskirk 1996). Furthermore, the prominence of “romantic friendships” among women has made distinguishing women’s affec- tionate companionship from sexual, specifically genital, relations a historically complicated issue, as “romantic friendships” ran the gamut from friendship and companionship to erotic sexual relationships (Rupp 2001).

The later development of women’s lesbian and heterosexual subjec- tivities is also demonstrated by the role sexology played in construct- ing women’s sexualities. Throughout the nineteenth century, sexologists claimed that only men were able to be actively sexual and that women’s

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sexualities were a response to, and dependent on, men’s initiation. In a parallel to this logic, homosexual women were “female inverts,” as “inversion” of the female character into that of a male is what it took in sexology’s discourse for a woman to pursue another woman, as suppos- edly only a man would (Chauncey 1982; Smith-Rosenberg 1989). The shift in the twentieth-century discourses of sexology as well as psycho- analysis, psychiatry, and medicine to conceptualizing women’s sexuali- ties as active, self-initiating, and agentic is central to the development of both heterosexual femininities and lesbian women’s identities.

While the historical studies presented so far document the rise of heterosexuality among the social sciences, medicine, and psychiatry, culminating in the Freudian distinction and its discursive diffusion into other scientific and popular cultural discourses, other significant historiographical work has documented the everyday relationships between homosexual men and working-class “normal” men, who will become “heterosexual” over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. These shifts in masculinities are partly the result of develop- ments in medical-scientific discourses that pathologized homosexu- ality and consolidated heterosexuality as a middle-class phenome- non that would later pass on to working-class men’s cultures as well. Although expert medical discourses and professionals were cultur- ally esteemed, the behaviors and subcultures of men and women with same-sex desires remained to varying degrees independent from their influences.

In Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940, the historian George Chauncey (1994) provides a careful periodization on the rise of heterosexuality as an identity cat- egory among working-class and middle-class men. From the 1890s to the 1930s, working-class cultures of New York socially permitted “nor- mal” men to publicly socialize and have sex with other men who were categorized as “fairies” without this stigmatizing these “normal” men as homosexual or morally deviant. According to Chauncey,

So long as they [normal men] maintained a masculine demeanor and played (or claimed to play) only the ‘masculine,’ or insertive, role in the sexual encounter—so long, that is, as they eschewed the style of the fairy and did not allow their bodies to be sexually penetrated—neither they,

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the fairies, nor the working-class public considered them to be queer. (1994, 66; italics in original)

The key distinction is that fairies were the ones marked as socially stigmatized but publicly tolerated womanlike men. From their plucked eyebrows and colored hair to their powdered faces and overall effemi- nate bodily comportment, fairy men projected public self-presentations that embraced these markers of femininity. Further, “normal” men, who are also called “trade” by their fairy and homosexual sexual partners, of this period are not to be thought of as “heterosexual,” at least not yet, as these “normal” men could engage in sexual activity with other men without the cultural opprobrium of the heterosexual/homosexual sys- tem. The sexual boundaries between “normal” men (sailors, common laborers, hoboes, and various other transient workers) and fairies were not based on a conceptualization of sexuality as a distinct indicator of personhood; rather, the sexual boundaries between “normal” men and fairies were organized through this period’s gender system and the sexual roles assumed in these relations. “Normal” men, according to Chauncey, “were, rather, men who were attracted to womanlike men or interested in sexual activity defined not by the gender of their partner but by the kind of bodily pleasures that partner could provide” (1994, 96).

Regarding middle-class men’s culture, the development of a homo- sexual or queer identity among gender-conventional middle-class men in the 1910s and 1920s led to the establishment of heterosexuality among their nonhomosexual male middle-class counterparts. On one hand, middle-class gender-conventional queer men distanced them- selves from fairies’ effeminate self-presentations and stigmatized status, but queer men privately acknowledged to themselves and other queer men that they sexually desired men. “Queer” at this time means a con- ventional masculine gender presentation among homosexually identi- fied men, and it is largely a reaction against the stigmatized status of effeminate homosexual men.

On the other hand, nonhomosexual middle-class men reacted and formed their heterosexual masculinity against both fairies and queer men alike. By claiming that their masculinity was indicated by their het- erosexuality—that is, the absence of homosexual desire—“heterosexual”

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middle-class men emerged in this period of changing gender and sex- ual formations. According to Chauncey,

Whereas fairies’ desire for men was thought to follow inevitably from their gender persona, queers maintained that their desire for men revealed only their “sexuality” (their “homosexuality”), a distinct domain of personality independent of gender. Their homosexuality, they argued, revealed nothing abnormal in their gender persona. The effort to forge a new kind of homosexual identity was predominantly a middle- class phenomenon, and the emergence of “homosexuals” in middle-class culture was inextricably linked to the emergence of “heterosexuals” in that culture as well. (1994, 100)

Queer men constituted a sizable number of homosexually identified men from 1910 until the 1940s, but since queer men led publicly hetero- sexual lives, fairies were the ones who took the brunt of antihomosexual prejudice and discrimination. The straight world’s lack of knowledge of the middle-class world of gender-traditional queer men meant that they faced less police harassment and hostility than their fairy counter- parts (Chauncey 1994, 103).

At this same time, the black community in Harlem was home to working-class and middle-class subcultures of black gays and lesbians. Celebrated blues singers, such as “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Gladys Bentley (who married her white lesbian lover in a talked-about cere- mony), all sang about “sissies” and “bulldaggers” to their knowing audi- ences. While black New Yorkers were ambivalent about public displays of homosexuality, they embraced it in performers and at the annual drag balls held in Harlem. “Nothing reveals the complexity—and ambivalence—of the attitudes of the black press and Harlem as a whole toward gay men and lesbians more than the Hamilton Lodge ball, the largest annual gathering of lesbians and gay men in Harlem—and the city,” notes Chauncey (1994, 257). The drag balls were the most publicly talked-about events of homosexual life at this time and received favor- able, if not sensational, coverage in the black press.

From 1900 to 1930, black middle-class men of the period navigated the shift from a Victorian industrial entrepreneur notion of masculinity to one based in the rising consumer capitalist economy. The historian

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Martin Summers (2004), in Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930, dis- cusses the heterosexual/homosexual divisions and their effects on the masculinities of aspiring middle-class black men. Summers compares the “normal” black male members of the Prince Hall Freemasonry, a black fraternal order that created a social network among black men based on their shared sense of class standing and masculinity, to the middle-class black homosexual male artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Both the Prince Hall Freemasons and Harlem Renaissance artists were experiencing a changing definition of masculinity, moving from one based in industry to one “more defined by the consumer goods one owned, the leisure practices one engaged in, and one’s physical and sex- ual virility” (8).

Summers implicitly describes the Prince Hall Freemasons as “nor- mal” or nonhomosexual men who defined their masculinity by being married and providing for their wives and children: “When black Masons invoked their positions as protectors of, and providers for, women and children, and spearheads of commercial development within the black community, they were engaging in the formation of a gender identity that was rooted in notions of production” (42). Gender identity is central to the inchoate formation of a heterosexual identity among the Freemasons.

In contrast, Summers views the African American and Afro-Carib- bean men of the Harlem Renaissance as contesting the black middle- class “normal” masculinity of the Prince Hall Freemasons. This contes- tation is based on the Harlem Renaissance men’s homosexuality. Some of the most celebrated black male artists of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Countee Cullen, belonged to the vibrant black homosexual subcul- ture in Harlem (Garber 1989; Summers 2004). However, while this vis- ible black gay subcultural presence contested black middle-class norms of respectability and heterosexual conformity, they also provoked out- bursts from Harlem pastors like Adam Clayton Powell.

Homosexuality, they [the black middle-class] argued, was only one of the ills of rapid urbanization but it was the most dangerous obstacle to the reconstitution and stabilization of the black family. One of the tireless

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crusaders against gay and lesbian subculture was Adam Clayton Pow- ell, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Powell attempted to root out homosexuality not only from urban leisure spaces but also from more respectable institutions such as the church. (Summers 2004, 194)

Here, then, pastors like Powell created an antihomosexual discourse among the black middle classes and aimed to enforce a respectable black masculinity as strictly heterosexual. As a result, black masculinity, heterosexuality, and middle-class status aligned in the stigmatization of black homosexualities.

Alongside these shifts in Victorian masculinity that allowed men to develop sexual selves and erotic desires in different ways, whether as “normal” or conventionally gendered, on one hand, or queer and mas- culine versus fairy and feminine, on the other, women were just begin- ning to create sexual subjectivities and a sense of consciousness around their new erotic desires. By rejecting the Victorian model of feminin- ity and its emphasis on reproduction and sexual restraint, American women fomented a sexual revolution from 1890 to 1930. Historians observe the appearance of three groups of women who exhibited the newfound freedoms in “manners and morals” of the period: working- class wage earners, young middle-class “flappers,” and the second gen- eration of independent feminist “new women” (Allen 1931; Meyerowitz 1988, 1990; Ryan 1983, 2006; Peiss 1983, 1986). These groups of women were central to the historical rise and formation of heterosexuality as connected to, but separate from, gender identities. All three groups of women were orientated to intimate relationships with men, but among the second generation of “new women” were famous lesbian writers of the time, and some working-class women participated in homosexual subcultures as well.

As the sexualization of women produced nascent conceptions of het- erosexual and homosexual feminine selves, the older nineteenth-cen- tury “female world of love and ritual” between female friends, compan- ions, and clandestine lovers—that is, “romantic friendships” between women—became suspected of “female inversion” and stigmatized as a form of female homosexuality (Faderman 1981; Smith-Rosenberg 1975; Rupp 2001). No longer could “romantic friendships” be seen as sexually innocent, simply platonic, or unassociated with lesbianism;

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the romantic friends themselves as well as the expert discourses of sexologists, psychoanalysts, and medical psychiatrists started to view same-sex friendships and intimacies as possible or actual forms of les- bian identities and relations. However, the homosexual suspicion and stigmatization that surrounded “romantic friendships” were uneven in their application among women who displayed “normal” gender presentations as well as those from different social classes and races, as “romantic friendships” continued to include a variety of relation- ships—from friendships to sexual relationships—between women into the twentieth century (Rupp 2001).

As a result of the influences of the first sexual revolution on Ameri- can women, according to the historian Joanne Meyerowitz (1990),

women began to adopt more sexual, or at least less modest, styles; shorter skirts, cosmetics, bobbed hair, and cigarettes, once the styles of prostitutes, all seemed evidence of a larger change in mores when adopted by “respectable” working- and middle-class women. Men and women mingled freely in new commercialized recreation industries and in workplaces. And surveys of the middle class revealed increases in pre- marital intercourse. (274)

This sexual revolution and the rise of young working-class women wage earners, who adopted these new sexually permissive attitudes and styles of dress and sought fun in cheap amusements, were connected to the second industrial revolution, which occurred from 1880 to 1920 in urban centers. Disfavoring the previously predominant kind of work available to women as domestics, urban wage-earning women sought positions in the new workplaces of the office, department and retail store, and factory (Peiss 1986; Meyerowitz 1988).

As the economy shifted to an increasingly consumer-based organi- zation, women’s and men’s leisure pursuits did as well. The new social entertainments and leisure activities included popular theater, dance halls, and nickelodeon cinemas. These leisure activities were accom- panied by the mass production of automobiles, which procured a new kind of privacy for women and men. Urban entertainments, along with automobiles, created new spaces for women’s and men’s heterosocial interactions and their heterosexual self-developments, as these new

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spaces provided separation from the family and workplace and pro- moted heterosocial interactions in these urban geographies (Peiss 1983, 1986; Zaretsky 2004).

From middle-class flappers who went slumming in working-class districts to middle- and upper-class “new women” who lived in these neighborhoods and observed their working-class counterparts’ behav- iors, more affluent women’s heterosexual practices and subculture were influenced and shaped by those of working-class wage-earning women. This group of working-class women wage earners included black and white women lodgers who lived in the furnished room districts of urban centers apart from their families (Meyerowitz 1988, 1990; Peiss 1986), native white and immigrant wage earners who lived at home with kin (Peiss 1986), and their more sexually permissive “charity girl” peers (Peiss 1983, 1986).

Living outside traditional communities and family supervision, working-class women lodgers, who constituted one out of five urban wage-earning women, negotiated sexual conventions and boundaries in the context of economic necessity, as they worked in low-paying jobs that barely met their basic expenses (Meyerowitz 1988, 1990). Meyerow- itz (1990) describes the patterns of their sexual practices:

Heterosexual relationships in the furnished room districts included “dat- ing,” “pick ups,” “occasional prostitution,” and “temporary alliances.” Like professional prostitution and marriage, these were economic as well as sexual and social relationships.  .  .  .  By entering sexual relationships, however, they could supplement their wages with free evenings on the town, free meals in restaurants, and sometimes gifts and money. (280)

The woman lodger became a symbol for urban reformers. On the one hand, she represented a type of endangered womanhood in need of protection, but on the other hand, some Hollywood movies roman- ticized her as a chaste but sexually exciting independent woman who sometimes caught the eye of rich male suitors (Meyerowitz 1990).

While women lodgers, also known as “women adrift,” later became popular characters in novels, movies, and magazines, showing the struggles but also the excitement of living as independent working- class heterosexual women, they were at the same time a model of

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nonmarital and nonprocreative heterosexuality, one that went against the dominant model of wifely and motherly duties in the domestic home of the heterosexual family (Meyerowitz 1988). If women lodg- ers struggled harder to make ends meet than their female peers who lived at home, then it was paradoxical that women wage earners who lived at home also depended on men “treating” them to the city’s amusements. This is due to the fact that many of these women’s par- ents claimed their daughters’ incomes as part of the family’s earnings (Peiss 1986).

Although applying the term “charity girls” to all working-class wage- earning women would be a mistake, the term was underworld slang used to describe working-class women who traded sexual favors for a night out on the town with a male companion. The importance of the term is that it highlights the fluidity of heterosexual respectabil- ity among working-class women who sought a good time by visiting a city’s restaurants, dance halls, theaters, and amusement parks. In other words, “charity girls” represented a form of working-class female morality that fell between the degraded “fallen women” and the utmost sexually chaste ladies.

Alongside their working-class peers, female flappers emerged out of middle- and upper-class white families, and these young white women took advantage of these new urban spaces and media as well, rebelling against their parents’ repressive propriety (McGovern 1968; Meyerowitz 1990; Ryan 1983). With their adventurous heterosexuality, female flap- pers also signaled a notable departure from the ideal of a restrained sexual self. According to one historian’s classic description, a flapper

smoked, drank, worked, and played side by side with men. She became preoccupied with sex—shocking and simultaneously unshockable. She danced close, became freer with her favors, kept her own latchkey, wore scantier attire which emphasized her boyish, athletic form, just as she used makeup and bobbed and dyed her hair. (McGovern 1968, 317)

To say the least, the flapper daughter was not her Victorian mother. With the rise of flappers, there was a resexualization of American

middle-class women, allowed for the first time to be erotically het- erosexual. For example, nineteenth-century sexologists and medical

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doctors discussed female deviancy as “inversion,” a broad category of deviant gender behavior that included homosexual desire as only one aspect. Now they focused on female deviancy as “homosexuality,” which was now coupled with heterosexuality (Chauncey 1982). Before the sexual revolution of the early twentieth century, Victorian women were generally viewed as passionless, asexual, or passive sexual beings. Only men (and female prostitutes), not respectable, sexually chaste women, displayed aggressive sexual desires. During Victorian times, sexologists and medical doctors, then, thought that only an “inverted” woman would pursue another woman, as it took a masculine character to be sexually active and aggressive in Victorian culture.

However, once inversion gave way to homosexuality in the early twentieth century, both lesbians’ and heterosexual women’s sexual characters were capable of being active and more like men’s ostensi- bly aggressive sexual character. Chauncey analyzes this shift through changes in sexology and the broader culture:

For if it no longer was considered a deviation from the norm for a woman to initiate sexual relations, then it no longer needed to be con- sidered an inversion of her sexual or social role to do so. But once all women were considered able to experience and act on sexual desire, medical concern shifted logically from the fact of women’s sexual activity to their choice of sexual and social partners. . . . Indeed, the resexualiza- tion of women—in one sense a progressive development—was used to tie them to men, as the culture increasingly postulated the importance of women’s sexual desire as a basis for their involvement in heterosexual institutions such as marriage, which their employment supposedly ren- dered less of an economic necessity than before. The new complexity— and restrictiveness—of sex/gender roles was epitomized by the flapper, who was at once both sexually precocious and profoundly heterosexual. (1982, 143–44; italics in original)

With the increasing recognition of lesbianism in American society, heterosexual women’s prior same-sex relations, particularly romantic friendships, and same-sex social institutions, such as women’s colleges and settlement houses, were no longer viewed as solely indicative of asexual relations and spaces of female bonding; rather, these relations

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and organizations were now regarded with suspicion as potentially les- bian (Chauncey 1982; Rupp 1989a; Smith-Rosenberg 1989).

Alongside the white female flapper, who had left behind her Vic- torian female predecessors, was the white male flapper, who similarly rejected many aspects of the Victorian model of manhood as embodied by the white Christian gentleman. The white male flapper introduced a lustful heterosexuality into male masculinity. Whereas the white Chris- tian gentleman valued character, married a woman of virtue, but visited prostitutes for sexual release, the male flapper maintained his predeces- sors’ focus on character, but looked for sexual and intellectual compan- ionship with women, emphasizing fun and a promiscuous sexual ethic (White 1993). In contrast, the tramp bohemian completely disavowed the Christian gentleman ideal. The tramp bohemian embraced an ethos of underworld primitivism, where a wild sexuality and violent mascu- linity promoted fraternizing with other men while avoiding commit- ments, sexual and otherwise, to women (White 1993, 180–81).

In addition to the sexual liberalism of the white female and male flappers, the second generation of feminist “new women” contributed to the sexual revolution among women by rejecting the asexuality of the first generation of feminist “new women” (Ryan 2006; Smith- Rosenberg 1989). This second generation included both heterosexual and consciously lesbian-identified women. Born in the 1870s and 1880s, they came of age in the first decades of the early twentieth century. Among the most famous are Margaret Sanger, Isadora Duncan, Ger- trude Stein, and Radclyffe Hall. Hall, although British, wrote arguably the most famous and influential lesbian novel of the period, The Well of Loneliness, which was published in 1924 but became a touchstone for generations of lesbians throughout the first half of the twentieth cen- tury in America (Newton 1993; Smith-Rosenberg 1989; Rupp 2009).

Whereas the first generation of “new women’s” asexual character and image as “repressed old maids” protected them from the stigma of homosexuality, the “new women” of the 1920s opened themselves up to the rhetoric of male sexologists, doctors, and politicians who sought to discredit them as social troublemakers seeking male privileges and as perverted “mannish lesbians” to be reviled and shunned (Faderman 1991; Newton 1993; Smith-Rosenberg 1989). These characterizations and their cultural purchase led the historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg

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(1989) to argue that the 1920s “new women” were eventually marginal- ized and came to be viewed as social failures and outcasts:

Investing male images with feminist meanings, they [the 1920s “new women”] sought to use male myths to repudiate male power—to turn the male world upside down. They failed. By the 1930s, women and men alike had disowned the New Woman’s brave vision. The New Woman herself, shorn of her connection to older feminists, of her political power, rhetoric, and influence, became a subject of misunderstanding and ridicule. (265)

The label “lesbian” became a powerful way to discredit any woman professional, reformer, educator, or feminist ideologue by the 1920s, making an anti-lesbian discourse a way to enforce heterosexuality and traditional gender roles among women in general (Faderman 1991; Smith-Rosenberg 1989).

However, the anthropologist Esther Newton (1993) argues that while the rising visibility of the mannish lesbian and the charge of lesbianism led partially to the undermining of the early twentieth-century women’s movement, it also helped to create spaces, discourses, and identities for consciously lesbian women, helping to form lesbian subcultures in American culture at this time:

To become avowedly sexual, the New Woman had to enter the male world, either as a heterosexual on male terms (like Emma Goldman and eventually the flapper) or as a lesbian in male body drag (the mannish lesbian/congenital invert). Feminine women like Alice B. Toklas and [Radclyffe] Hall’s lover Una Troubridge could become recognizable lesbi- ans by association with their masculine partners. (291; italics in original)

Nonetheless, among these working-class women workers and their female flapper and feminist new women peers, the early twentieth cen- tury witnessed the power of compulsory heterosexuality in its high rates of marriage and the occurrence of marriage earlier and earlier in the lives of American women. “The proportion of never-married women fell precipitously after 1900, from as high as 20 percent for women who came of age in the late nineteenth century to well less than 10 percent

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for women born after 1900.  .  .  .  the mean age of marriage fell steadily after 1890 until in the 1950s it reached an all-time low of 20.2 years” (Ryan 1983, 242).

Although a culture of sexual liberalism was expanding sexual expression among white working-class and middle-class heterosexual Americans by the 1920s, allowing them some sexual exploration before marriage, this dynamic remained uneven in its development across the lives of black Americans (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012; Cahn 2007). Rather, mainstream American society and the culture of sexual liber- alism constructed blacks’ sexualities as hypersexual. In the context of the legacy of slavery, blacks were ideologically constructed as less civi- lized than whites and demeaned with descriptions of their sexualities as animal-like.

Historians of black women’s experiences of migration to the north argue that rape, the threat of rape, domestic violence, and a desire to take control and care of their children, along with economic consid- erations, fueled black women’s migration before and during the Great Migration (Carby 1986; Hine 1989). Needing to protect themselves from sexual violence and refuting notions of a promiscuous nature, black women developed a politics of respectability (Higginbotham 1993; Mitchell 1999; Wolcott 2001). Aimed at garnering respect from white society and within their own black communities, black female respect- ability imposed social constraints on working-class blacks’ behaviors, bringing them into line with middle-class values of heterosexual pro- priety as well as industriousness, thrift, good manners, and proper deportment (Wolcott 2001).

Sexual pathology continued to be the recurrent historical frame through which black women’s heterosexualities would be positioned in relation to white America (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012, 277–99). For example, due to their lack of economic opportunities in northern cities like Chicago and New York, black women became associated with pros- titution. By the 1930s, in New York, black females accounted for over half of the arrests for prostitution (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012, 296–97). Given the association of black women with prostitution and the popu- larity of “slumming” by whites in black neighborhoods and clubs, black women’s heterosexualities were stigmatized as wild, exotically different, and primitive (Collins 2004; D’Emilio and Freedman 2012; Heap 2009).

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In counterpoint to this pathologizing of black heterosexual women, Hazel Carby (1986) documents black women blues performers who rejected hypersexual codings of black womanhood. Through their songs, blues performers narrated black women’s experiences of north- ern migration from the South. Drawing on black communal expres- sions of call and response, singers like Bessie Smith, “Ma” Rainey, and Ethel Waters sang about women being left behind as their men migrated. Their songs were filled with stories of separation, migration, and the difficulties of dealing with men’s infidelities in heterosexual relationships. Some blues singers like “Ma” Rainey also sung about their lesbian relationships in boastful songs like “Prove It on Me Blues,” naming the streets frequented by lesbians in Chicago as evidence of the subculture’s vitality (Carby 1986; Meyerowitz 1990). Black women blues singers, though, could be subversive figures, playing against the poli- tics of respectability that most black women felt compelled to exhibit in order to counter stereotypes of themselves as promiscuous (Carby 1992; Garber 1989; Mitchell 1999, 2004).

During this time, black reformers and activists focused on racial uplift and destiny by promoting the heterosexual reproduction of healthy or “better babies” by black heterosexual families. In response to the threats of lynching and ritualized rape, black reformers promoted heterosexual marriages and families with healthy offspring as key to racial advancement. The historian Michele Mitchell (2004) explains this development among black reformers and activists:

[P]referred behavior was associated with middle-class and aspiring-class values in that it firmly placed sexuality within the realm of marriage and family; and, as more and more black women decided to limit their preg- nancies, they were encouraged to bear a healthy number of “well-born” babies by a particular and vocal cohort of racial uplift activists. (106)

To bring this discussion to a close, if the Jazz Age strikes us as a sur- prising period of sexual tolerance, where “normal” men and women mixed with homosexuals in bars and restaurants, at annual drag ball events, and in a variety of other louche public locations, then the back- lash against this “deviancy” and the sexual and racial “slumming” that went with it probably proves unsurprising. As the Great Depression set

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in, antigay attitudes, state policies, and local policing began to clamp down on the previous public places where homosexuals had social- ized and congregated. A conservative gender and racial order reacted against the gender nonconformity of fairy men and butch women and built the closet of homosexual oppression in the next period in order to protect heterosexuals from homosexuals’ deviancy and to establish the supremacy of heterosexual identities, relationships, and institutions (Canaday 2009; Chauncey 1994, 2004; Heap 2009).

Heterosexual Hegemony and the Rise of the Closet, 1930s–1960s

The rise of the closet as a state formation across the country occurred through a variety of laws and policies that were put in place from the late 1920s through the 1950s. After the end of Prohibition in 1932, many states made it illegal for bars and restaurants to serve lesbians and gay men (Chauncey 2004, 7). In 1934, the Production Code of the Hol- lywood film industry banned depictions of homosexuality; the ban remained in place until 1966. Similarly, in 1927, New York State passed a “padlock” law that prohibited gay male and lesbian characters from being portrayed in Broadway plays. Since Broadway was the staging ground for new plays in America, this exclusionary policy meant that a generation of theater production would be shaped by this censorious antigay law (Chauncey 2004, 6).

What the closet’s laws and policies meant for everyday Americans is that a system of sexual identities—homosexual and heterosexual— was being constructed in place of and in relation to the previous era’s gender system of organization. With the rise of heterosexuality as a new discourse of men’s and women’s self-identities, the exclusion of all same-sex contact became the key element of the definition of het- erosexual identities. However, the gender system did not disappear but continued to serve as an informal set of classification codes in popular culture and common stereotypes of heterosexual and homosexual iden- tity practices.

For men, over the course of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the terms “fairy,” “queer,” and “trade” started to be replaced by the predominance of “gay,” which, like “queer” before it, emphasized a masculine gender

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self-presentational style among homosexual men. The disappearance of “trade” or working-class “normal” men—that is, men who were not homosexually identified but who would accept homosexual men’s sexual advances—along with the new establishment of gay as the pre- ferred homosexual identity category over fairy and queer, represented the development of sexual object choice and its accompanying hetero/ homo binary as distinct from the previous gender system, where homo- sexuality was conceptualized as gender inversion and emblematized by the figure of the fairy (Chauncey 1994, 20–21). Now, “normal” working- class men, who had previously had sex with homosexuals without being viewed as homosexual themselves, were viewed as “latent” homosexu- als. This system of sexual identities confined homosexuality to a “devi- ant” minority and heterosexuality to the “normal” majority. As it was for their middle-class counterparts, being “normal” or “heterosexual” for working-class men now meant the total absence of both homosex- ual interest and behavior (Chauncey 1994).

Furthermore, heterosexuality became a key part of gender boundar- ies for the middle classes in the twentieth century. Heterosexual identi- ties helped to reinforce dichotomous gender roles for men and women. Likewise, the norms and conventions of gender identities were central to the construction of heterosexual identities, as gender displays took on a new significance in indicating normative heterosexual identities. Gender codes and identities became and continue to be codes of het- erosexual/homosexual behaviors, interests, and styles.

Whereas the society of the nineteenth century exhibited a clear delin- eation in the worlds of white men and women, where white men domi- nated the public worlds of work and politics and white women were largely confined to the home as wives and mothers, the first half of the twentieth century witnessed women struggling for civil and political rights, specifically suffrage, as well as joining the workforce and attend- ing college in sizable numbers. Men were moving from farm and blue- collar occupations to white-collar ones, where the salient qualities were seen as “feminine” traits, such as the ability to project a good presenta- tion of self, to adeptly manage interactions with clients, and to work well with others in teams (Goffman 1959). The gender division was in flux; while men were becoming “feminized” through white-collar occu- pations, women were increasingly entering into predominantly male

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bastions, such as college, the workforce, and government (Chauncey 1994; D’Emilio and Freedman 2012, White 1993).

Heterosexuality, then, played an essential role in the legitimation of a traditional gender order. For example, the most famous sociologi- cal theorist of the time, Talcott Parsons (1954), argued that men were “instrumental” in their role as family providers, and women were “expressive” in their roles as mothers and wives. Parsons warned that if these functional roles were deviated from, there would be role “strain” or “competition.” Thus, heterosexuality made dichotomous gender dif- ferences between men and women seem natural and part of a func- tional social order. Heterosexual families in this discourse were needed to produce the country’s future citizens; ideologically, this reduced gen- der divisions to a heterosexual procreative imperative (Chauncey 1994; D’Emilio and Freedman 2012; White 1993). Men and women were, then, necessarily and justifiably different in order to reproduce the family, the nation, and even humanity in general.

The association of heterosexuality with traditional gender conven- tions and identities also helped to form a culture of homophobia. A whole symbolic system of homosexual codes circulated through hege- monic notions of gays and lesbians as gender deviants. Homophobic practices separated heterosexuals from homosexuals, denying the lat- ter public spaces, social recognition, and legal rights (Chauncey 1994; D’Emilio and Freedman 2012; White 1993).

As a heterosexual social order developed, a procreative heterosexual- ity continued to tie men and women together in marriages and families. Heterosexual men, however, started to contest the expectations of being a breadwinner for a wife and family. The new discourses of bachelor- hood and sexual promiscuity legitimated a nonprocreative model of heterosexual masculinity for men. Similarly, heterosexual women grew increasingly dissatisfied with being confined to the roles of wife and mother. Women became more sexualized, started to be increasingly capable of economic independence, and aimed to become active part- ners in “companionate marriages.”

As these shifts were occurring among men and women and these new models of nonprocreative heterosexuality became increasingly predominant, sexual images of women in popular magazines started to proliferate as well. In fact, the growth of sexual images of women

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in popular magazines throughout the twentieth century “was one com- ponent of a broader transformation toward a modern sexuality that assigned a heightened value to nonprocreative heterosexuality,” argues Meyerowitz (1996, 9). The term “cheesecake” started to circulate in 1915 to indicate acceptable mass-produced representations of variably naked women, while “borderline material” indicated images that pushed the line between “respectable cheesecake and illicit pornography” (Mey- erowitz 1996, 10).

In an important US Post Office legal hearing on whether Esquire magazine could legally deliver its cheesecake pictures through the fed- eral mail system, American society witnessed the increasing cultural support for nonprocreative heterosexual identities. In 1946, the US Supreme Court ruled that the postmaster general, Frank C. Walker, could not censor magazines like Esquire for their scantily clad images of women. In winning its case, Esquire called on a female social worker and a female child welfare activist for supportive testimony. These two professional women supported the sexualized pictures of women as ordinary, flattering, and indicative of a healthy heterosexual femininity.

They described the images as commonly accepted, modern, healthy and lovely imagery, admired by girls and women as well as boys and men. They avoided the obvious gender asymmetry that we notice immediately today: that only women were portrayed with their clothes off and that the pictures were created by men for heterosexual male pleasure. (Mey- erowitz 1996, 18)

Cheesecake and borderline material proliferated across mass media publications after this court decision, setting in circulation a highly sexualized white heterosexual femininity for women to embody and for men to consume without shame.

The debate over cheesecake images was recapitulated in the letters African Americans sent to Ebony and Negro Digest. From 1945 to 1957, African American letter writers debated issues of the racial stereotyp- ing of black sexuality as animalistic, protested the devaluing of black women’s beauty, and raised concerns over their respectability. In the debate among African Americans over the representation of black het- erosexual women’s sexualities, Meyerowitz observes that

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African-American women also argued the pros and cons of sexual images within the context of American racism. Since the early years of the slave trade, white men had used racist stereotypes of African “ani- mal” sexuality to justify the sexual exploitation of black women. And some of the most hard-core pornography presented nonwhite women as exotic objects of titillation for white men. From the end of the nine- teenth century, middle-class African-American women activists had worked strenuously to counter these racist stereotypes and to publicize a contrasting image of black women as morally pure. (1996, 19)

Although most African American women objected to these cheesecake images, other African American women and most of the men defended the images as a sign that black women’s beauty was finally receiving the recognition it deserved and had long been denied. In the context of the exclusively white cheesecake media images that predominated in popu- lar American culture of the time, some even viewed black cheesecake images as part of racial advancement (Meyerowitz 1996, 18–20).

Similarly, from the start of Playboy magazine in the 1950s, women wrote letters supporting the image of the topless “Playmate of the Month” as a model of sexual allure and expressing their enjoyment of the magazine and its ethic of sexual fun (Meyerowitz 1996). Moreover, the development of Playboy in the establishment of heterosexuality for American men was a watershed event in the construction of straight masculinity.

Before the arrival of Playboy and its dissemination of the image of the lascivious heterosexual male bachelor, men in the 1950s found them- selves uniformly expected to marry and to support a wife and children, by ideally earning a “breadwinner” wage (Ehrenreich 1983). White men, though, were chafing against the “trappings” of marriage and their role as the family “breadwinner.” “If adult masculinity was indistinguishable from the breadwinner role,” the feminist scholar Barbara Ehrenreich notes, “then it followed that the man who failed to achieve this role was either not fully adult or not fully masculine” (20).

The conformist culture of 1950s America drew on the specter of homosexuality to keep heterosexual men in line (D’Emilio and Freed- man 2012; Seidman 2002). This conformity was partly enforced through the stigma attached to men who did not follow the breadwinner route

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as homosexuals. “Fear of homosexuality kept heterosexual men in line as husbands and breadwinners; and, at the same time, the association with failure and immaturity made it almost impossible for homosexual men to assert a positive image of themselves” (Ehrenreich 1983, 26).

However, with the rising popularity of Playboy magazine, a cultural alternative was offered in place of the family man role and its breadwin- ner work ethic. Although heterosexual men should still work hard at their careers and make money, playboys need not get married and give control over their wages to wives. Instead, Playboy encouraged hetero- sexual men to lead the life of a lascivious bachelor. Ehrenreich provides this insightful quote from Hugh Hefner on the alluring image of bach- elorhood that the magazine proffered and publicly legitimated for its readership:

We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex. (1983, 26)

Heterosexual men, in the eyes of Playboy, should be consumers who dated and had sex with women without the confining commitment of marriage. One might call heterosexual men who emulated Playboy’s bachelor model immature, but one could no longer label these men possibly homosexual. In other words, Playboy magazine served as a cul- tural model of heterosexual masculinity orientated to nonmarital sex- ual relations. Playboy encouraged heterosexual men to stay bachelors and have casual sex. More importantly, it provided proof of a lustful heterosexual masculinity through subscription to its magazine and the new cultural model of heterosexual masculinity it represented.

Historical revisionist accounts of Playboy, though, find a more com- plicated message in the magazine’s portrayal of heterosexual women. The historian Carrie Pitzulo (2011) argues that in its efforts to carve out a model of heterosexual masculinity beyond the roles of husband and father, the magazine supported hedonistic pleasure and a nonprocre- ative version of heterosexuality for both men and women. While the magazine objectified women’s bodies, it also encouraged heterosexual women to take up the sexual privileges of men in its image of the sexu- ally entitled “girl next door” who enjoyed sex.

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Alongside the new icon of the lascivious heterosexual bachelor, sci- ence emerged as a surprisingly provocative purveyor of sexual infor- mation and its dissemination in American society with the unexpected best-seller success of Alfred Kinsey’s dryly written, but substantively exciting, studies of American men’s and women’s sexual practices. Regarding men’s sexual practices of the time, Kinsey’s report, pub- lished in 1948, showed “that masturbation and heterosexual petting were nearly universal, that almost ninety percent had engaged in pre- marital intercourse and half in extramarital sex, and that over a third of adult males had had homosexual experience” (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012, 286). In contrast to the dominant image of mainstream America as sexually conservative and reserving sex for marriage, Kinsey’s study documented a surprising variety of sexual practices among heterosex- ual men.

While Kinsey’s report on the frequency of men’s nonmarital sex prac- tices eased many white men’s sense of sexual “deviance,” black men’s migration to northern cities did nothing to mitigate the pernicious ste- reotypes of their heterosexual masculinities as dangerous, violent, and hypersexual (McGruder 2010). Escaping the Jim Crow segregation and threat of lynching in the South, black men wound up facing dispropor- tionate arrests and harsher punishments for rape in the criminal jus- tice system of northern states. “Between 1930 and 1964, ninety percent of the men executed in the United States for rape were black,” observe D’Emilio and Freedman (2012, 297).

Black men were also often blamed for the dissolution of the black family due to their lack of sexual morals and their irresponsible ways. Given the perceptions of black rates of unemployment, black fathers’ absence from the home, and black families’ dependence on welfare for survival, black people’s sexualities, particularly black heterosexual men’s, were viewed as exemplars of disorder, pathology, and immorality (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012, 295–300).

Meanwhile, with the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s report in 1953 on American women’s shocking practices of masturbation and significant rates of premarital and extramarital sex, the 1960s picked up on and mainstreamed this trend of casual sex among nonmarried heterosex- ual women. The author Helen Gurley Brown and her book Sex and the Single Girl, published in 1962, exemplified this new sexually permissive

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attitude among heterosexual women of the 1960s. Brown promoted an ethic of sexual fun, answering Hugh Hefner’s call for heterosexual male lasciviousness and nonmarital sex with a message that sex is power and that a woman should exercise this power by being just as uncom- mitted to marriage as any man, at least until her youthful looks faded (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012, 303–4). Brown went on to be the edi- tor of Cosmopolitan magazine, which unsurprisingly became a kind of female version of Playboy for straight women. In addition, the pill arrived on the cultural sex scene, and it dramatically lessened fears of pregnancy and anxieties of becoming an unplanned parent, proving unsurprisingly popular among women (and men) in a new era of sex- ual permissiveness.

Historical shifts in heterosexual femininities need to be understood through the rising visibility of lesbian identities in the 1950s. Lesbian identities have historically served as a source of stigma in enforcing narrow definitions of heterosexual femininity (duCille 1989; Duggan 2000; Faderman 1991; Rupp 2009). And with the rise of a lesbian sub- culture, particularly the butch/femme working-class bar scene and the first lesbian organization, Daughters of Bilitis, in 1955, American soci- ety witnessed a growing consciousness of homosexual and heterosexual feminine identities. By the 1950s, American culture overwhelmingly enforced normative heterosexuality through the use of polluting images of lesbians as psychologically sick, socially deviant, and representative of the outer bounds of human abnormality (D’Emilio 1989; Faderman 1991). The Cold War in particular enforced an image of homosexual women and men as possible communist traitors due to their potential to be blackmailed by Soviet spies for their stigmatized sexual identities. Consequently, heterosexual Americans, particularly the heterosexual nuclear family, became the emblematic representation of patriotic, loyal citizenship, while gays and lesbians were potential enemies of the state (Lewis 2010).

In their study of lesbian bar culture in Buffalo, New York, Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis (1993) document a working-class subcul- ture of butch and femme lesbians who felt oppressed by the enforced secrecy and discrimination against them and thus desired to break out of the “closet” of oppression they experienced in the 1940s and 1950s. Butch lesbians experienced a deep sense of themselves as “queer,”

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marginal, and the targets of homophobic harassment and oppression, while femmes “did not experience themselves as basically different from heterosexual women except to the extent that they were part of gay life” (Kennedy and Davis, quoted in Stein 1997, 17–18). Thus, gen- der-traditional presentations of self were a way for women to pass as heterosexual if lesbian, and they remained a central force in maintain- ing compulsory heterosexuality among women, particularly by stigma- tizing masculine lesbian gender displays.

Illustrating the defensive status of feminism’s association with les- bianism in the 1960s is the liberal heterosexual feminist Betty Friedan and her breakthrough best seller, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. Friedan sought to bring attention to a postwar ideology of gender subordination that kept heterosexual women repressed as housewives and denied them permission to pursue careers and lives outside the home. Historians, though, question the accuracy of Friedan’s charac- terization of postwar gender ideology as uniformly opposing women’s participation in paid work and politics (see Meyerowitz 1994b; Ryan 2006). Historical revisionist accounts argue that the gender ideology of postwar women’s magazines, as well as Friedan’s defense of early feminists and their “emphasis on femininity and domesticity (and the two were often conflated), seems to have cloaked a submerged fear of lesbian, mannish, or man-hating women.  .  .  .  She [Friedan] attempted to legitimate the early feminists by repeated insistence that most of them were feminine, married, and not man-hating” as well as by excluding many lesbians from her book’s narrative and later the National Organization for Women, which she founded for women’s rights, but to the exclusion of the “lavender menace” (Meyerowitz 1994b, 1460).

The 1950s were the end of an era of conformity in American history. The grievances of sexual, gender, and racial minorities that had been ignored and overlooked would be heard and publicly aired in boycotts, marches, and riots, as well as in courtrooms, workplaces, and govern- mental bodies. The next decades would bring forth a civil rights move- ment that would inspire women and lesbians and gay men to challenge gender and sexual oppressions in unparalleled ways, building their own communities, organizations, and social movements in the process of transforming gender and sexual norms, expressions of identity, and

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their communities’ marginalized statuses. Heterosexual and homosex- ual boundaries would be contested, and the cultures of straights and gays would no longer remain so separate, distinct, and unknown to each other.

Challenges to Heterosexual Hegemony and the Decline of the Closet, 1960s–1990s

From 1920 to 1960, a culture of sexual liberalism dominated the erotic lives of heterosexual Americans. It promoted limited sexual experi- mentation on a pathway to a lifetime marriage for many heterosexual American men and women. With the decline of a culture of sexual lib- eralism, the 1960s witnessed the rise of a culture of sexual pluralism, where practices of premarital sex, cohabitation, divorce, and nonproc- reative casual sex, especially with the availability of the birth control pill, made heterosexual and homosexual intimate practices start to look more and more alike (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012; Faderman 1991). With the growing strength of a national LGBT movement during this period, heterosexual hegemony faced a set of wide-ranging struggles in expressions of sexual and gender identities, relations, and, more crucially, political movements against homophobia and normative heterosexuality.

Alongside sexual pluralism, gender norms and dynamics changed with the rise of second-wave feminism and a new generation of women workers in the labor force. Although poor and working-class white women and black women had a long history as wage earners in America, now middle-class white wives and their daughters were the new entries into the workplace during the 1960s and 1970s, and at unprecedented levels (Hochschild and Machung [1989] 2012). While heterosexual women’s femininity was not socially enhanced by working, as work remained associated with masculinity, heterosexual women did gain power in their marriages through their economic contribution to the family (Hochschild and Machung [1989] 2012, 131). As a result of heterosexual working women’s new financial power in the family, heterosexual men’s social statuses suffered a blow. No longer could heterosexual men see themselves as the lone provider for the family. Consequently, the roles of husband and father lost some of

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their normative standing in constructing an ideal heterosexual mas- culine status among straight men. Most heterosexual men also could no longer afford to enact their role as a family patriarch due to men’s declining wages and salaries in an uneven and alternately stagnant economy. Since the 1970s, heterosexual couples and families have increasingly needed dual incomes to be financially stable, let alone to purchase homes and send their children to college (Collins 2009; Ehrenreich 1995; Gerson 2010).

To replace the traditional masculine roles of breadwinner husband and father, other forms of heterosexual masculinity became promi- nent. One of these, of course, is the heterosexual bachelor. Heterosexual bachelorhood, as cultivated by Playboy magazine’s ideology of promis- cuity and sexual fun, was reinvigorated and presented as an alluring model of straight masculinity to both married and single heterosexual men (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012, 303). Alongside the heterosexual playboys, the hippies of the late 1960s and 1970s inaugurated a differ- ent and androgynous model of straight masculinity. Hippie men with their long hair, beaded jewelry, and shapeless clothing blurred gendered norms of style and presentation between men and women (Ehren- reich 1983). Popular fashions for men’s clothing also commoditized the “androgynous drift” of the hippie style for mainstream American male consumers. “In the early seventies, retailers redid their stores as discos. . . . In men’s clothing, the old austere division between business and sports clothes broke down with the coming of bell-bottomed pants, tie-dyed shirts, denim jackets and broad, outrageously colored ties” (Ehrenreich 1983, 114).

Meanwhile, changes in homophile politics, the first political homo- sexual groups in the United States, which fought for reform and accommodation in the 1950s and 1960s, would give way to libera- tionist lesbian and gay politics in the 1970s that demanded attention and expressed anger against their oppression in a new way. Prior to the Stonewall riots of June 1969, lesbian and gay political organizing had been confined to a small number of protesters during the politi- cal events of the 1950s and 1960s. While these homophile groups suc- ceeded in challenging discriminatory statutes, gaining the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, and picketing the White House to protest the federal ban on gay and lesbian employees, their homosexual

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identity politics were narrowly focused and circumscribed in their effects on American society in the 1950s (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012). During this period of homophile politics from 1950 to 1969, gay men and lesbians generally “came out” only to other gay people and passed as straight at work, with nongay friends, and with their own families as well. After Stonewall, gay liberationists refashioned “com- ing out of the closet” to mean coming out to heterosexuals. This was new, and it made everyday acts of coming out the strategy and goal of the movement (D’Emilio 1989). Reframing lesbian and gay identities as public demands for recognition by society at large had social, cul- tural, and political consequences for gays and straights and started the dismantling of the closet of state repression. By making coming out to straights the strategy and goal of LGBT social movements, Stonewall politics effected a revolutionary social and cultural shift, and it is this social-historical development that conditions today’s social integration of LGBT persons and the newfound mass media visibility of LGBT images.

The success of the new politics of coming out is demonstrated by the huge growth in gay organizations throughout the country. As the his- torian John D’Emilio (1989) observes, “On the eve of Stonewall, after almost twenty years of homophile politics, fewer than fifty organiza- tions existed. By 1973, there were more than eight hundred lesbian and gay male groups scattered across the country” (466). With the solidi- fying collective sense of lesbian and gay identities and the number of growing organizations, there came a series of movement victories in the 1970s. For instance, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973, while half the states removed sodomy statutes from their penal codes during this decade as well (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012, 324).

As gays and lesbians claimed public recognition and demanded rights and respect, heterosexual men and women faced a series of choices in deciding how to accommodate this new out and visible gay “minority.” For instance, lesbian feminists, emerging alongside sec- ond-wave feminist organizations, opened up the boundaries between heterosexual women and lesbians in an unparalleled way. The soci- ologist Arlene Stein (1997), in Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a Lesbian Generation, documents a generation of “new gay” women, many of

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whom had been heterosexual housewives, girlfriends, and mothers, who came out through consciousness-raising groups and a woman- centered culture, based in bookstores, community centers, politi- cal groups, and annual music festivals. This generation of “new gay” women was focused less on sexual desire for women than on making women the social and political center of their lives (Faderman 1991; Stein 1997).

Lesbian feminists created a specific form of feminism that argued against viewing lesbianism as simply a sexual desire or identity, but rather pushed for thinking of it as a totalizing cultural project to remake women’s lives. They highlighted lesbianism as a form of woman identi- fication. This sensibility is best captured by the classic statement, “The Woman-Identified Woman,” written by the cultural collective Radi- calesbians (1970). In it the authors argued that lesbianism was more about political and social identification with women’s values, expe- riences, and interests than an erotic desire. As a result of the overlap and cultural collapse between feminism and lesbianism, Stein (1997) explains, “the new discourse of lesbian feminism enabled many women who had never considered the possibility of claiming a lesbian lifestyle to leave their husbands and boyfriends—some for political motives, others in expression of deeply rooted desires, many for both reasons” (41).

From the emergence of political and legal organizations (such as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Human Rights Campaign, and Lambda Legal Defense) to the development of domestic partner benefits to the passage of gay adoption laws and the spread of antidis- crimination ordinances across the country, the decline of the closet as a form of state repression is seen in the rights, changes in state policy, and recognition garnered by lesbians and gay men throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

It is in the context of the decline of the closet and the rise of a post- closeted culture that I explore shifts and changes in the social construc- tion of heterosexual identity performances. That is, heterosexual men and women negotiate the establishment of their identity statuses in an era of lesbian and gay tolerance, visibility, and rights, and their perfor- mances of heterosexual masculinity and femininity are increasingly varied as a result. From their relations with lesbian and gay coworkers

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and acquaintances to friends and family members, heterosexuals face a set of choices in deciding what kinds of boundaries to employ in their interactions with LGBT individuals. They may choose to be supportive (antihomophobic), indifferent (that is, maintain the normative hetero- sexual status quo), or unsupportive (homophobic), or they may com- bine these possibilities in their attitudes, interactions, and relationships with LGBT people today.

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