1. The Invention of Heterosexuality Jonathan Katz, pp. 68-80

2. Early Victorian True Love 1820-1860: “White”/European perspective of love characterized by “purity,” not pleasure or sensuality. Focus of sex was on procreation and marriage. 1860-1892: “Heterolust” began to be documented. Family went from producer to consumer; consumption of pleasure. “The erotic became the raw material for a new consumer culture.” “The creation of the new Normal Sexual had its counterpart in the invention of the late Victorial Sexual Pervert.” p. 71

3. Heterosexuality: The First Years, 1892-1900 First US use was in a medical journal in 1982. “The idea of heterosexuality as the master sex from which all others deviated was (like the idea of the master race) deeply authoritarian. The doctors’ normalization of a sex that was hetero proclaimed a new heterosexual separatism—an erotic apartheid that forcefully segregated the sex normals from the sex perverts.” (Katz, 73)

4. Heterosexual Hegemony: 1945-1965 1930-1st reference to the hetero/homo duo in the New York Times. Hegemony: is the political, economic, ideological or cultural power exerted by a dominant group over other groups, regardless of the explicit consent of the latter. In 1948, Kinsey challenged the hetero hegemony/norm with his research on sexuality, asking what is normal and abnormal sexuality? “The living world is a continuum.”

5. Social Construction of Homosexuals “…Has led to the development of a powerful gay liberation identity politics based on the ethnic group model. This has freed generations of women and men from a deep, painful, socially induced sense of shame, and helped to bring about a society-wide liberalization of attitudes and responses to homosexuals.” 76 According to Gore Vidal, “There is no such thing as homosexual or heterosexual person. There are only homo- and heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices…we have allowed our governors to divide the population in to two teams. One team is good, godly, straight; the other is evil, sick and viscous.” 76