Compulsory Heterosexuality and Its Discontents

Last week, I had the honor of discussing the new movie Am I OK? on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. Co-directed by Tig Notaro and her wife Stephanie Allynne, the movie’s main focus is on Lucy, a highly anxious and somewhat awkward woman, finally accepting that she’s a lesbian at age 32— coincidentally, the exact age at which I took my own bisexual identity from theoretical to confirmed. Just 89 minutes long, the movie goes down easy and, although its brevity prevents the film from truly earning some of its emotional beats, I found its depiction of Lucy’s relationship to the closet to be valuable and potentially illuminating.

While discussing the movie with Glen Weldon on PCHH, I mentioned the concept of “compulsory heterosexuality” and I wanted to expand on what the term means, and the role it can play in stifling queerness. Compulsory heterosexuality does not generally refer to the violent suppression of homosexuality, like conversion therapy or criminalizing gay sex. It’s something quieter and more insidious: it simply means that we live in a society where every person is presumed to be straight until they prove themselves otherwise. What Am I OK? demonstrates so effectively is how stifling generating that burden of proof can be for queer people, especially anyone who is private, shy, or any other variety of diffident.

Growing up under both the patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality, Lucy’s in a real bind. On one hand, the patriarchal messaging will have left her convinced that sex is unlikely to be an enjoyable activity for her as a woman and that speaking about having sex is deeply embarrassing. Then, on the other hand, compulsory heterosexuality mandates that, in order to establish her queerness as legitimate, she has to have a lot of sex with women, and she has to talk about it with everyone. The kind of people she wants to have sex with should be apparent just from looking at her, or mentioned within minutes of meeting someone new, or else she could be characterized as misleading or a tease. Even in the most liberal and accepting spaces, Lucy’s queer identity is something she’ll have to spend the rest of her life performing. When put this way, it’s no longer that surprising it took her until 32 to embrace her queerness. What’s surprising is that she found a way to embrace it at all.

Having a queer identity that’s subdued enough to require coming out is still, in a society that’s hostile to queerness, a comparative luxury. To be inescapably queer, to be incapable of “passing” no matter how vital it might be to your safety, is to be target, and it’s something people who visibly challenge the gender binary have to live with every day. But compulsory heterosexuality is part of how that violence is enacted: by making demonstrating queerness so onerous, it guarantees that the people who do embrace their queerness are easy to other. For example: if women married to men can never credibly “prove” their bisexuality, they cannot offer queer people the protection their comparative privilege affords them. It also makes asexual queerness impossible to “prove”— when the only path to legitimate identification is through sexual activity, an identity based around not experiencing sexual attraction is forever perceived as conditional. “Well, how can you know if you’ve never tried it?”

I know I can still get tripped up by this kind of thinking about asexuality because, before I’d had good sex, sex was not something that held much interest for me. If claiming asexuality as an identity had been easy at that point, I sometimes fear I would have embraced it and thereby closed myself off from the positive sexual experiences that eventually let me understand myself better. But too-easily-embraced asexuality is a lot less destructive to a healthy sexual culture than, for example, telling women that expecting sex to be a pleasure is unrealistic, or telling men that their sexuality’s validity is tied to how violently their needs manifest. Moreover, if identities were something we could try without coming out, without onerous compulsory performance, they might also feel like something we could safely set aside if they ceased serving us. So accepting a friend’s asexual identity is not confining them to a sexless life. It’s refusing to be part of the societal machine that makes being something other than straight so fucking exhausting.

This is part of why, this time last year, I made the case for straight-presenting women to speak more about the queer attraction they experience, even if it’s something their committed relationships prevented them from demonstrating:

I know it can feel uncomfortable, and perhaps even disingenuous, to speak of yourself as queer when your queerness still feels theoretical and your life is largely insulated from homophobic hatred— like stolen valor, but make it gay. But, as what I jokingly call an “anxiety bi”, I really do think I would have benefitted from knowing how much other women thought about kissing other women, even if they didn’t do a lot of it. I actually know, with great confidence, that if I hadn’t had the benefit of a passel of slightly younger friends who felt a lot more confident and comfortable speaking of themselves as bisexual, I might never have started identifying that way at all. So, in addition to believing that you should kiss lots of girls (if that’s what you’re into), I believe that it’s really valuable to talk about wanting to even if your life does not leave space for you to do so. I think it can be easy to feel like you’re taking up space in a conversation that doesn’t belong to you, but more often you’re bringing the conversation to new people it might not otherwise have reached.

Done properly, claiming this identity can be an act of solidarity— sacrificing some of the comfort and ease with which you pass through a hostile society in order to create safety for others who might not have it. But the onus is on you to show up for the fight, not just the parades. It means letting your queer identity radicalize you against oppression in all its forms, because none of us are safe until all of us are safe.

XO/Dame Margaret