DESPITE the wedding band on her finger and all the other conventional markers of femininity—the makeup, the dress, the pretty, delicate features that would make most people read her as “straight”—Nancy Unger does not wish to identify herself, in her words, “as straight, as queer, as anything.” Unger, a professor of history at a Jesuit university in Northern California, teaches gay and lesbian history courses. But in her private life she’s a heterosexual woman who’s married to a man.
Unger is one of thousands of people, many of them younger and many in academia, who are rejecting the label of “straight” in spite of their (hetero) sexual orientation. This refusal can manifest itself as the repudiation of identity categories altogether or as the adoption of words such as “queer,” “queer heterosexual,” “queer straight,” or “post-straight” to describe oneself. While this phenomenon goes back to the early 1990’s following in the wake of queer theory, its influence has been growing in more recent years. I recently sat down with some opposite-sex-oriented scholars to get their views on this topic.
Have GLBT people become so coolified by the recent spate of gay and lesbian pop cultural representations (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Will & Grace, Queer As Folk, the L-Word); has it become so chic to be queer that hip heterosexuals no longer want to identify with straightness or heterosexuality? A slightly more sinister possibility is raised by Annette Schlichter in her recent article “Queer at Last? Straight Intellectuals and the Desire for Transgression,” where she hypothesizes that some in academia are “coming out as [queer-in-theory] at a time when queer theory has become a form of cultural capital in the academy.” Is there a weird sort of reversal at work, in which some scholars of sexuality and gender worry about risking their legitimacy by coming out as straight? Or is this a sign of queer theory’s success at persuading heterosexuals of the historical and cultural specificity of gender and sexual orientation, and hence their instability and mutability, compelling these folks to refuse to participate in a hegemonic structure that privileges heterosexuality over other forms of sexuality? According to Linda Williams, a professor of Film Studies at Berkeley who prefers not to be identified by any label even though she’s heterosexual in practice, the rejection of the term “straight” is a way of “not asserting heteronormativity.” She thinks that in some ways it has become “a term of reproach” at a time when many people, at least in the academy, do not want to appear fixed in an identity category. Turning away from the word “straight” is also a way to challenge the binary thinking that pits straight against gay. “Whenever you have a binary opposition, one of the definitions is usually marked in a negative kind of way,” says Williams. In the case of the hetero-homosexual binarism, invariably “homosexual was the one that was marked.” Although we’re still a long way from escaping this binarism, she believes that the rejection of “straight” by some heterosexuals, along with and proliferation of self-identifying terms in the GLBT community—words like “transfag,” “boi,” “transmale,” “genderqueer,” to name but a few—is helping us to “get away from the binary, where you have straight and other. To that extent, it’s interesting—and good. It’s part of the ongoing process whereby this binary breaks down.” Ultimately none of these terms works very well, she adds, because all are fraught with baggage of various kinds. Laura Kipnis, a professor of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern, who does not affirm any sexual identity or disclose her sexual object choice(s), has a more Foucauldian rationale for resisting self-categorization, and believes that practicing a “radical privacy is the best response to State forms of surveillance and categorization.” Glenn Hendler, an English professor at the very Catholic University of Notre Dame, is married to a person of the opposite sex, but has never seen himself as straight. “From a very young age,” the jovial Hendler explains, “I’ve projected myself, both in fantasy and in reality, into social, political, and intellectual settings in which the predominant social-sexual personæ were not hetero.” One manifestation of this was his youthful idolization of David Bowie. Hendler reminds us that people’s de-identification with the word “straight” goes back to the 1960’s and 70’s, when it connoted “someone who didn’t do drugs, didn’t identify with any of a myriad countercultural movements,” who was perhaps seen as straight-laced or “straight and narrow.” Sally Chew, a lesbian editor at POZ magazine, says she can easily understand why opposite-sex lovers reject the label, explaining that “since the 50’s, the word has had this bland, conformist feel.” Schlichter echoes this thought when she writes about the unappealing image the word often conjures, namely that of “a white suburban couple committed to reproduction, ignorant of the joys of transgressive sex, immersed in consumerism, and fully in sync with power structures.” Berkeley’s Barrie Thorne associates the renunciation of “straight” with the parallel rejection of “white” as a status that automatically confers privilege. Thorne, who was born in 1942, “came out of the era of arch-1950’s heterosexuality,” never wore a wedding ring, never changed her name, and tries to avoid terms like “my husband.” She points out that these “symbolic gestures go way back to the 70’s,” when feminists began to resist the practice of flaunting their status as heterosexual and/or married. One consequence may be that her students assume she’s gay, which is fine with her. However, just as one should acknowledge the privileged status that comes from being white, she is mindful of the privileges of heterosexuality and acknowledges that she does not actually occupy a “queer space [in my]emotional outlook.” Consequently, she has decided to identify as “queer friendly” rather than as “queer,” except “insofar as queer means critical of the boxes and heterosexualized binaries.” A gay man who has written perceptively on these matters is Rutgers University’s Michael Warner, who observed that “‘queer’ does not signify any specific sexual identity,” so asserting that one is gay or lesbian is different from asserting that one is “queer,” a category that “gets its critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual.” Warner sees no problem with heterosexuals-in-practice rejecting the word “straight” in favor of “queer.” Nor does Lisa Duggan, a professor of American Studies at New York University: “The term ‘queer’ can be used, not as a term of personal sexual identity, but rather as the name for an anti-normative sexual politics. Like the term ‘feminist,’ one does not have to be a woman to be a feminist; being a feminist does not depend on any particular personal gender identity.” Warner and Duggan’s understanding of the term “queer” is pregnant with the most radical of social and political possibilities. On the other hand, as David Halperin observed about the term in Saint Foucault, its lack of specificity, which is its major advantage, is also its main drawback. For one thing, “it provides a means of de-gaying gayness [by]de-specifying the realities of lesbian and gay oppression, obscuring what is irreducibly sexual about those practices and persons most exposed to the effects of sexual racism.” Do “queerly aspiring straights,” as Calvin Thomas describes them, who drop “straight” and pick up “queer,” participate unwittingly in a greater obfuscation of the latter term, “concealing the specific perspectives and interests of the individual groups that participate in it”? Are they harming more than helping? Is their denial of “straight” and self-naming as queer politically and ethically suspect? While there are no easy answers, I think it’s a sign of progress that some people are rejecting a term that confers normality and legitimacy and aligning themselves instead with a term that challenges and destabilizes their privileged status as heterosexuals. The larger question for me is this: is this phenomenon going to trickle over the walls of academia into mainstream society? Already I hear of twenty-somethings who’ve been intellectually raised on queer theory refusing to accept identity categories or to pigeonhole their heterosexual relationships as straight. Considering this phenomenon, along with gay male culture’s influence on straight American men’s masculinity, are we moving toward a world in which polarizing identity categories are a thing of the past? Are working-class tough guys in small-town America going to stop feeling the need to assert their heterosexuality? Is the word “straight” going to be as passé as “Negro”? It won’t happen overnight or even terribly soon, but it’s not impossible to imagine. Stephanie Fairyington is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.
