ABSTRACT
The author argues for the need to study the idea of heterosexuality historically. By not studying the concept and term, historians have privileged heterosexuality and heterosexuals as normal, natural, and superior at the expense of homosexuality and non-heterosexuals as abnormal, unnatural, and inferior. Katz provides a periodization of the development of heterosexuality in western societies from 1820 to 1982. Heterosexuality appears as there is an eroticization of sex between men and women, with homosexuality as its complement. As homosexual subcultures become more present in cities across western societies by the turn of the nineteenth century, the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the birth of the heterosexual/homosexual binary and the coining of the terms heterosexual and homosexual to describe, control, and stigmatize individuals, subcultures, and movements that went beyond man/woman.
