HISTORIAN JONATHAN NED KATZ first published his essay “The Invention of Heterosexuality” in 1990, which he later expanded into an award-winning 1995 book of the same title. The beauty of Katz’s approach was its inversion, so to speak, of popular constructionist arguments about homosexuality. Recall Michel Foucault’s famous declaration that the homosexual as a “species” was “born” in 1870.
Or Adrienne Rich’s classic formulations of “lesbian existence” and the “lesbian continuum.” David Halperin discovered an antiquity populated by molles (effeminate men) and tribades (masculine women), and George Chauncey’s early 20th-century gay New York City was a world that had a place for “trade,” “husbands,” “wolves,” “fairies,” “third-sexers,” and “punks.” And don’t forget Monique Wittig’s quip that “lesbians are not women.”
While others had offered revisionist histories, Katz refocused the narrative from a homo- to a heterosexual one, challenging the assumption that heterosexuality is, in his own words, “unchanging, universal, essential: ahistorical.” In its place he offered an intriguing alternate hypothesis,
Amin Ghaziani, author of The Dividends of Dissent: How Conflict and Culture Work in Lesbian and Gay Marches on Washington
