The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

by Jane Ward

ass on public transport. . . . The grotesque and murderous aesthetics of necro-political heterosexuality turns my stomach.”3 Sometimes straight culture is quite literally repulsive; we feel it in the gut. We have insufficient language to describe queer people’s experience of finding straight culture repellent and pitiable, given that heterosexuality has been presented to us as love’s gold standard. But even without a suitable name for this contradiction—the fact that the world’s most glorified relationship is often a miserable one—many queers have still spoken this truth. In 1984, a few years before his death, James Baldwin explained to an interviewer from the Village Voice that queers could see the precarity of heterosexuality, even as straights kept it hidden from themselves: “The so-called straight person is no safer than I am really. . . . The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if society itself did not go through so many terrors it doesn’t want to admit.”4 As Baldwin saw it, it is not simply that straight people are suffering and in denial about it but that heterosexual misery expresses itself through the projection of terror onto the homosexual.