Q&A: Hanne Blank
Some straight talk on heterosexuality
Heterosexuality is, on its surface, easy to define. Being straight is the vanilla cone of sexual orientations — the default, the norm. Consider author Hanne Blank and her partner, however, and definitions blur. Blank’s partner has an unusual set of chromosomes, XXY, which mean he has male genitals but looks androgynous, with little facial hair. People meeting the couple have
assumed Blank, a woman, must be straight, or gay, or something in between. In her refreshingly jargon-free new book, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of
Heterosexuality, Blank uses her relationship as a way of showing the words “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” are just that — words that limit, shape and constrain the world as much as they describe it. She deftly reveals the shifts and anxieties in western culture that led to the invention of “straight” fewer than 150 years ago. Q: You write there were no heterosexuals before the year 1868. What happened then? A: That year, an Austro-hungarian journalist named Karoly Maria Kertbeny coined both terms, heterosexual and homosexual, simultaneously in a letter he wrote to a fellow protester of a German sodomy law that made it illegal for two men to engage in certain sexual behaviours that would be completely legal if they were engaged in by a pair of people who happened to be of different biological sexes. Kertbeny thought human beings were sexual, and the desire to be sexual and engage in sexual behaviour was a human quality, and that heterosexual, from the Greek word for “different,” and homosexual, from the Greek for “same,” were simply two ways in which human beings could do that. Q: You’ve said in interviews that our culture’s current fixation on orgasms is opening us up to changing ideas of gender. What do you mean by that? A: Once you start counting orgasms, and that becomes your unit of measure, then how that orgasm is produced is somehow a whole lot less relevant than the fact than an orgasm takes place. Q: So without knowing it, women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan are tearing down gender norms? A: If you closely read an issue of Cosmopol-
itan, there are definite scripts about how you’re supposed to get there. On the other hand, Cosmopolitan is perfectly fine if your path to orgasm includes all kinds of things that are nowhere close to putting a penis in a vagina. Q: A lot of scientists have looked for the differences between homosexual and heterosexual brains, or even a so-called “gay gene.” Are they right to expect gay people to be biologically distinct?
A: My skepticism about this is we do not know what a heterosexual body looks like. We have assumed there is one, and we have assumed it is the default condition of the human animal, but we have not proven it and no one’s ever tried to. You can talk about a gay genome and I will say, “That’s fantastic, and what are you comparing it to?” You’ve got to characterize a control if you are going to make a claim that you’ve found a statistically meaningful difference. If you’re going to start pulling things out of
the air and say, “It look that’s not science. Q: You write about bio Sterling, who says hu five major sexes. Do w categories for gender entation?
A: You can’t abolish th have, it’s too entrench add to it. The combina and using the ones we anced way is what’s go already starting to, cha Fifteen years ago, no o tersex was. Now we’ve got the wh story a couple years ag is suddenly all over the are talking in complete rums about how bodie always come in one of Q: Many gay rights ad about saying homose
ks different to me,” ologist Anne Faustomans have at least we need multiple new r and sexual ori
he vocabulary we ed. You can certainly ation of adding terms e have in a more nuoing to, and what is ange the picture. one knew what inhole Caster Semenya go, where “intersex” e papers, and people ely mainstream foes do not necessarily f two possible types. dvocates get nervous exuality is anything
but innate and unchangeable. In January, there were some negative reactions to actress Cynthia Nixon’s comment to The New York Times that being gay was a choice. How does the LGBTQ community protect its rights without arguing that being gay is not a choice?
A: One thing I say is that being a human being and simply showing up should get you some dignity, full stop. Another thing I say is this: if you are going to yoke yourself and your freedom and your ability to exist and have full rights in a society to a paradigm where somebody in a position of power has to tell you that you must prove yourself according to a standard that they cannot prove for themselves, that is abusive and wrong. Because heterosexuals cannot prove that it’s congenital, they cannot prove that it is innate, they cannot prove that they were born that way. Q: The classroom is arguably the place where adults get the most worked up
about agreeing on what’s normal. If you designed a sex-ed curriculum for fifth graders, what would it teach?
A: I think teaching consent — that there’s all this sexuality out there, it’s something everyone has in one way or other, and when you have these desires, these urges, that they must meet with consent and preferably enthusiastic and informed consent — I think that would be a really useful way of teaching kids about sex. Q: Go to a dating site and you’re greeted with boxes you must tick. Should we be adding more boxes or eliminating them entirely? A: What I would do is eliminate those types of ticky boxes entirely and I’d have a multiple-page questionnaire about what you actually like to do. Frankly I find that kind of stuff much more interesting. You’d have to do a lot more work. This interview has been edited from a longer version.