Heterosexuality isn’t normal, it’s just common.

When I moved to New York in the early seventies. I was astonished to meet intellectuals, who, in the fifties, had actually believed that Adlai Stevenson could defeat Eisenhower for the presidency—a wishful misconception that was surely a measure of their psychological and social distance from ordinary Americans in the nation’s heartland. My parents, grandparents, and most of their friends had voted for both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, but all I ever heard about Stevenson when I was growing up in a small town in Michigan was that he was too much of an egghead to have any understanding of ordinary people and their problems. Stevenson’s cultivated speech, such a strong point in his favor among his fellow intellectuals, was seen as a liability by most of the adults who inhabited my childhood world. My grandmother, who before her death at the age of ninety-nine boasted that she had never voted for a Republican, was able to overcome her distaste for Stevenson’s syntax and elevated vocabulary only by recalling the Depression and her beloved FDR. “Adlai talked down to people,” she recalled, “and he didn’t have the common touch. Ike had the common touch and I loved him, but in the end, remembering which party gave us Social Security and which party couldn’t care less about starving old people, I just couldn’t bring myself to vote Republican.”

SUSAN JACOBY, The Age of American Unreason

“The more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee”

The invention of heterosexuality

Photo: D. Winter, NYTimes