It's time to break down the queer/straight binary

Words: Asa Seresin

In hindsight, becoming obsessed with heterosexuality was one of the first signs that I needed to pursue a sex change, though not one I could decipher at the time. Around this point, when I was about 20, I was a member of a sorority-type organisation. I was there under false pretenses, which gave me the eye of an ethnographer. I loved when women talked about men, in murmurs, blushing, groaning, eyes rolling. If I could have assembled every straight woman in the world and heard them describe, sincerely, what they loved about men, I would have been in heaven.

Most of the time, though, the women I knew spoke about dating as a chore and sex as intrinsically embarrassing. It was not that desire was completely absent from these conversations, but rather that it was occluded in complex hieroglyphs of resentment and disgust. Their primary purpose was female bonding, men reduced to instruments of homosocial ritual.

"I enjoyed playing around with the idea of being straight, even if it ultimately felt out of reach and unreal"

In the constant negativity with which straight people discussed heterosexuality, I detected a mirror of my own dysphoria. Every day I woke up hating being a woman and hating being a lesbian as if there was categorically no alternative. (“If I really wanted to try hormones obviously I wouldn’t keep thinking about how I can’t try them,” as Daniel M. Lavery once wrote.) Rather than interrogating this in myself, I launched an investigation into straight people. Are you sure you hate being straight? Are you sure you don’t love men? Why are you saying this? What are you hiding? 

Personally, I was hiding the fact that while walking around claiming to be a lesbian I was secretly having sex with men. Was I a closeted heterosexual? It didn’t feel like that, mostly because despite my best efforts I was entirely unconvinced I was a woman, and because the men I was fucking were gay, or bi, or at the very least deeply mired in a sort of old-world obsession with each other that was deeply erotic whether or not it involved sexual contact. But I enjoyed playing around with the idea of being straight, even if it ultimately felt out of reach and unreal. 

"When queers write about heterosexuality it feels like participation in some kind of unspoken competition over who is the least straight of all"

Still, despite all this sneak-dicking, I never harboured any anxiety about the legitimacy of my own supposed lesbian identity (even as, looking back, I probably should have). This anxiety has become a fixture of the online world, likely because those conversations are often spearheaded by teenagers who feel an intense affinity with queerness without yet having had sex with anyone at all. (Fair enough. They are teenagers!) It’s unsurprising that as the migration of much queer life to the digital sphere has produced intense fixation on virtuality and its hazards: who gets to claim which identity, whose words are whose, who is “valid” and who is faking. 

Maybe this is the reason why so often, when queers write about heterosexuality – and believe me, I read every piece – it feels like participation in some kind of unspoken competition over who is the least straight of all. What do we gain from this constant eschewal of heterosexuality? A weird politics of purity, a misguided race to radicality, an essentialist view of sex and gender that doesn’t help anyone become more free. 

"There are all kinds of straight people who are marginalised specifically for their sexuality"

What do we lose? Cathy J. Cohen provides an important answer in her canonical 1997 essay “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens.” Reducing our understanding of sexual deviance to the binary of heterosexual versus queer misconstrues how the discipline of sexual deviance actually works, and misses out on important opportunities for solidarity. “Whether in the infamous ‘I Hate Straights’ publication or queer kiss-ins at malls and straight dance clubs, very near the surface in queer political action is an uncomplicated understanding of power as it is encoded in sexual categories: all heterosexuals are represented as dominant and controlling and all queers are understood as marginalized and invisible,” Cohen writes. “How would queer activists understand politically the lives of women – in particular women of color – on welfare, who may fit into the category of heterosexual, but whose sexual choices are not perceived as normal, moral, or worthy of state support?”

There are all kinds of straight people who are marginalised specifically for their sexuality. As Cohen reminds us, this includes women on benefits, whose relationship status, cohabitation, and pregnancy are subject to state surveillance and punishment. It includes disabled people, who in the US risk losing state support if they live with their lover or get married. It includes the unhoused, who are too often forced to choose between accepting shelter and staying with their partners, as it is extremely rare for housing to be provided for couples. It includes sex workers. It includes people suspected of being sex workers because they are trans, or poor, or racialized, or HIV positive, or simply because they are carrying a couple of condoms in their handbag. It includes the many women currently incarcerated as accomplices because their boyfriends or husbands were selling drugs or owned weapons. It includes the disturbing number of people, most of them women, who end up being imprisoned for being the victims of domestic violence. It includes migrants separated from their partners by brutal border laws.  

"Sex, including straight sex, is interesting, so much more than we often allow it to be"

Zooming out from the purview of legal discrimination, there are also innumerable ways that straight people are socially disciplined for their sexuality, usually on racial grounds. You only have to look at the full, actual, real world of heterosexuality for two seconds to realise how much it fails to resemble the meme of what Cohen calls a universal “dominant and controlling” power.

The current queer obsession with maintaining maximal distance from heterosexuality also blots out an enormous part of our own history, which is the tendency to use straight life as source material for all kinds of aesthetic, comedic, and erotic antics. Think of Cole Escola’s recent work of genius Oh Mary!, which reimagines Mary Todd Lincoln in the tradition of the demon twink. In this telling, Abraham Lincoln is a horny, closeted gay guy who (embodying a certain hetero tradition) doesn’t like his wife because he doesn’t like women. 

And being a demon twink doesn’t make Escola’s Mary any less of a woman. She struts, she teases, she gossips, she faints (or at least feigns fainting), she terrorises everyone around her and still wins our hearts and our fundamental sympathy. She is incredibly bored, forbidden from doing anything interesting and especially from her great love, which is drinking herself to death. She is a deranged homosexual trapped in the body of a straight woman trapped in the body of a non-binary fag. If Escola had adopted the dour, “poor straight people their lives are so boring and ours are so much better” disposition that sometimes feels requisite in certain corners of the queer world, none of this comedy would have been possible. The greatest play of the generation, as Oh Mary! labels itself, could never have existed.  

"In my own case, my obsession with heterosexuality began because I loved men and wanted to become one"

“As someone interested in sex both physically and intellectually, I tend to question subjects like myself—Black, male, writing, sleeping mostly with women—about our sex,” the writer Joseph Earl Thomas observes. “It interests me; it should be of interest to us.” When it comes to heterosexuality, this last phrase is the flag I am trying to wave. Sex, including straight sex, is interesting, so much more than we often allow it to be. 

In my own case, my obsession with heterosexuality began because I loved men and wanted to become one. Now I am a man and am married to one, and the obsession endures. The experience of transition, of sleeping with and pursuing relationships with people on pretty much every point of the sex/gender spectrum, has left me with the impression that what we take to be fixed is so much more unstable and multidirectional than it seems, and that heterosexuality cannot be reduced to any simple, boring, or tired image. But that is just my story. We all have a relationship to heterosexuality, even the queers who hate it with every fibre of their being. It touches us in ways that are mysterious, complicated, hard to summarise, and it is a much more variegated and strange phenomenon than it pretends to be. 

It should be of interest to us!