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cases they are demonstrably affected or directed by culture and socialization. We don’t just want what we want because we want it; we want what wewant because that’s what we’ve learned to want.
    With this in mind, we can proceed to take a look at the history of heterosexuality. As we should, because whether we like it or not, the idea of heterosexuality is embedded in each of us, in our actions and reactions, our emotional responses, and our intellectual assertions. We can see its distinctive imprint in the things we believe about love, in the ways we pursue pleasure, in the things we expect from our relationships, our work, our government, and our genitals. This concept we call “heterosexuality” doesn’t just shape our sex lives; it shapes the ways we understand the world to work and, consequently, the ways it does. Heterosexuality reaches too far beyond the merely personal, and in too many profound and pervasive ways, for us to write it off as a simple matter of biology or nature or even Divine plan. It cannot be reduced to economics, the search for pleasure, or even to true love. It certainly cannot be reduced to a few checkboxes on a clinic form. All of these things may play a part in what we think of when we think about heterosexuality, but none of these things
are
heterosexuality.

CHAPTER ONE
The Love That Could Not Speak Its Name
    One of the “top ten new species” of 2007, according to the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University, was a fish by the delightful name of
Electrolux addisoni.
But was
Electrolux
actually new? The ornate sleeper ray was familiar to the scuba divers and snorkelers who were sometimes greeted by it as they swam its home waters off the South African coast. Doubtless local fishermen had known about it even longer. But in another sense,
Electrolux
was genuinely novel. It became “new” on the day a biologist confirmed that it hadn’t previously been documented, gave it a name, and triumphantly added it to the rosters of official, openly shared, systemic human knowledge.
    As the case of
Electrolux
demonstrates, there is a difference between simply
being
and
being known.
No one would attempt to argue that this fish had no existence prior to the time it was given a scientific name. Yet suddenly, in 2007, it was “new.” Written documentation of a particular kind, by an authority figure of a particular kind, was what turned
Electrolux addisoni
from a thing that just
was,
whether anyone knew about it or not, into a thing that
was known.
    In the nineteenth century, a similar thing happened to heterosexuals. Prior to 1868, there were no heterosexuals. There were no homosexuals either, for that matter. For most of human history, love might have been romantic or platonic, brotherly or maternal,
eros
or
agape,
but it was definitively not heterosexual or homosexual, straight or gay. The names did not exist, nor did the categories they now describe. In the mid-nineteenth century, Western people in general were only beginning to think or speak in terms of there being different types of human beings who were differentiated from one another by the kinds of love or sexual desire they experienced.[ 1 ]
    Specific sexual behaviors, to be sure, were named, categorized, and judged. This was nothing new. They had been for more than a thousand years. The most famous example of this is the term “sodomy.” As a term and an idea, if not as a practice, “sodomy” arose from the Catholic Church, which for much of Western history was the highest authority on matters of behavior and morals (among rather a lot else) in the West. The Catholic Church has historically disapproved, on principle, of all sexual activity that is not potentially procreative. This is the broadest definition of “sodomy.”
    Sodomy was sodomy no matter whom it involved. Sodomy could take place between a man and a woman, two men, two women,