What’s wrong with being straight?
Heterosexuality is now deemed déclassé.
As a gay man — I know that awful phrase is usually followed by irrelevant twaddle, but please bear with me. As a gay man, I have always found heterosexuality quite fascinating. I have made something of an unconscious study of it. I remember going to house parties, as a teenager, where my heterosexual peers would divide across the room, boys one side and girls the other, and then gradually pair off to fumble in corners to the mating call of Spandau Ballet. I felt like David Attenborough lurking in the undergrowth or a birdwatcher in his hide, excitedly whispering “And now the spawning begins!” and jotting down copious notes in a tattered exercise book.
Back then, heterosexuality looked as easy as falling off a log. They say that onlookers see most of the game, and I found the push and pull of it all, the simple animal processes overlaid by human sophistications, endlessly interesting. I still do.
Today, though, heterosexuals are an endangered species. A recent survey uncovered that 21% of young adults (born between 1997 and 2003) in America identify as “LGBTQ+”. It also reported the frankly incredible stat that the number of self-identifying non-heterosexuals in the American population as a whole has doubled since 2012, from 3.5% to 7.1
It is, of course, vanishingly unlikely that a fifth of a population has turned spontaneously away from heterosexuality overnight. The rise of the insubstantial concepts of TQ+, which have little to do with sexual orientation but have been bolted on to LGB for some reason, obviously accounts for some of this. “Queer” is a particularly slippery category; it now seems to include anything from straight chaps wearing eyeliner to straight girls dyeing their hair shocking pink. Thus, it has elevated attendees of a Rocky Horror night or a Depeche Mode concert to the status of a persecuted minority.
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