Your straight friends believe that you are really straight, but “confused” or “experi-
menting” or going through a phase, like the acronym LUGs (Lesbian Until Gradua-
tion). Your gay friends believe that you’re really gay but too frightened to admit it.
You may be welcome at the campus gay organization—after all, it’s really called the
LGBT,for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered—but you find yourself catego-
rized as gay or lesbian. The classes in LGBT studies on campus are mostly about gay
and lesbian people.
Third, in spite of the jokes and the invisibility, you may also have a great deal of
pride. Bisexuals often argue that they are more spiritual, or more psychologically
developed, than gay or straight people, because they look at a person’s character and
personality rather than at trivial details like gender. They may be exaggerating a bit:
Most bisexuals are just as attracted to certain physical types, and not as attracted to
others, as gay and straight people. They just include some men and women in the cat-
egory of “people to whom I’m attracted.”
Identifying as a bisexual requires a coming-out process, a realization that both
your same-sex and opposite-sex relations “count.” Few organizations exist specifi-
cally for bisexuals, and scholars have not paid them much attention. Within the last
decade, however, things have been changing. Courses about bisexuality have been
taught on several college campuses. There have been anthologies, scholarly studies,
and conferences. But bisexuals still have a long way to go before the average person
stops assuming automatically that a new acquaintance must be gay or straight
(Burleson, 2005; Fox, 2004; Rust 1995, 1999; Storr, 1999; Tucker, 1995; Weinberg,
Williams and Pryor, 1994).Identities as Behaviors.There are other sexual identities based more on sexual
behaviors than the gender of your partner. For example, some people may
experience erotic attraction to specific body parts (partialism) or to objects that
represent sexual behaviors (fetishism). Or they may become sexually aroused by the
presence of real or imagined violence and power dynamics (sadomasochism) or find
that they can be aroused only when having sex in public (exhibitionism) or when324 CHAPTER 10SEXUALITY
The Invention of Heterosexuality
Why do we have sexual orientations at all? In The
Invention of Heterosexuality(1987), Jonathan Katz
discusses the era before 1880, when people were not
assumed to be heterosexual, gay, lesbian, or bisex-
ual. You got married to have children, whether or not
you were attracted to your spouse or even in the
opposite sex at all, and usually your parents made the choice
for you. Same-sex behavior was considered a sin, like adultery
or masturbation—and, like those, were the sort of thing that
anyone might be tempted to do.
By about 1920, people were assumed to be heterosexual, or
not. Most people were attracted to the opposite sex, and they
would never engage in same-sex behavior—by definition they
could not be tempted. What changed in just 40 years?Katz argues that the increasing division of labor, the move
to cities, widespread immigration, and the rise of the educated
middle class changed the way we got married. No longer did par-
ents choose their children’s spouses—you entered a marriage
“marketplace” and made your own decision. But medical science
believed that intercourse was damaging to your health, and
children were an economic burden on city dwellers: So why get
married at all?
The answer was: You got married because you were physically
attracted to your spouse, and to the opposite sex in general, and
toonlythe opposite sex. You had a “heterosexual” identity, as
opposed to the small number of “homosexuals” who were
attracted onlyto the same sex. A heterosexual–homosexual
dichotomy developed, and it is still at work today, in statements
like: “You can’t be gay! You’re married!”Sociologyand ourWorld