Has the definition of what it means to be gay – and to be straight – increased prejudice? For the North American historian Hanne Blank (photo), the answer is "yes", and for a simple reason: the concepts "framed" sexual behaviors.
Blank is interviewed in the magazine's "Ideas" section Time this week, in a text signed by Tania Machado. According to her, the definition of the terms straight and homosexuality was a Western idea transmitted to other parts of the world by cultural imperialism.
For Hank, both words were created by journalist Karl-Maria Kertbeny in a letter from 1851. The American maintains that straightness and homosexuality have always existed, but were previously unidentified. "There was no notion of sexual orientation. Someone could have different sexual desires or engage in different types of sexual acts. These acts could be considered licit or illicit, chaste or sinful. But these value judgments were made about desires and acts specific, never about the person. This only happened with the creation of the word", he argues. "The concept of straightness and homosexuality was not created based on scientific principles, but social ones."
For the historian, from the moment heterosexuality became a consensus and brought with it a whole range of values and traditions, "we started not to question it. We saw it as something normal that we didn't need to talk about." Hank also comments that, before 1868, people's behavior was different in relation to heterosexuality and that sex between men was accepted in certain times and places, even if there was opposition, such as from the Catholic church (the biggest problem was assuming the role passive).
In 1886, according to the historian, the book Psychopathia sexualis, which cataloged sexual deviations and degenerations, helped to expand prejudice and increased the pressure on men to prove "their normality": "In this book, the term heterosexual, or sexual normal, was anyone who was not in the book and involved sexual intercourse between a man and a woman by penetration of the penis into the vagina."
Hanne Blank, who has lived for 15 years with a person who, genetically, was neither male nor female, considers herself neither straight, nor homo, nor bisexual: "I like masculinity, but not necessarily in someone who is biologically a man ", ends.
