of female sexual desire and of the erotic as central to one’s identity legitimated itself and became respectable through the practice of middle-class whites defining themselves against an “other” that included both same-sex and different-sex interracial relations. Heap focuses on the practice known as “slumming,” in which middle-class whites (and new immigrants seeking whiteness) visited neighborhoods and clubs associated with primitivism, illicit desire, and commercial sex and in so doing shifted the boundaries of what was considered respectable sexual behavior (dating and oral sex, Heap argues, were two practices that slumming helped validate). Whites could maintain their own respectability, even while embracing new sexual practices, by positioning themselves against a degraded, exotic other. “Slumming provided the mechanism through which its participants could use both race and sexual encounters to mediate their transition from one system of sexual classification to another,” Heap writes.59 Both black and tan slumming and the subsequent “pansy” craze, in which middle-class whites visited first spaces in black neighborhoods and then spaces associated with same-sex coupling, helped reshape middle-class sexual boundaries and legitimate the idea of sexual pleasure and desire linked to the emergence of heterosexuality. Interraciality, in short, helped establish the boundaries of what constituted proper and normative heterosexuality and became one of the markers that served to stigmatize same-sex relationships as deviant.
Heterosexuality Post-Loving?
In 1967, the US Supreme Court declared the entire antimiscegenation legal regime unconstitutional after Richard and Mildred Loving challenged the state of Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage. Richard, a white man, and Mildred, a woman of African and indigenous ancestry, had been childhood sweethearts in Caroline County, Virginia.60 But after they married in 1958, they were charged with violating Virginia law and forced to leave the state to avoid a jail sentence. Seeking to return home, they eventually began a court challenge that would result in the invalidation of all the remaining miscegenation laws nationwide. Marriage, the Supreme Court ruled in the Loving case, was a fundamental right that states could not abridge or deny on the basis of race.61
Since that ruling, the number of heterosexual interracial couples in the United States has increased dramatically, especially those involving Asians and Latinos. In 1967, only 3 percent of all newlyweds married across race lines. Today, 17 percent of different-sex new marriages are interracial or interethnic (meaning Latino/non-Latino). The number of black-white married couples has increased from 51,000 in 1960 to 422,250 in 2010. Public opposition to interracial relationships has also declined dramatically since the Loving decision. In 1958, 94 percent of Americans disapproved of black-white marriages; today, only 11 percent do. Americans of all racial groups are more open to intermarriages involving members of their own families. In 2000, 31 percent of Americans indicated that they would disapprove of a family member marrying someone of another race; in 2015, that number stood at only 10 percent. And 39 percent of Americans in a 2017 Pew Research Study said that more people marrying across race lines would be good for society; only 9 percent claimed that more intermarriages would harm society.62
But if cross-race different-sex relationships have been as challenging to heterosexuality as same-sex relationships have and both interraciality and homosexuality have served as the “other” against which heterosexuality was defined, what does the lessening of the taboo against interraciality suggest about the stability and future of the sexual regime of heterosexuality?
To be fair, not everyone agrees that there really has been any meaningful decrease in opposition to interracial relationships since Loving. Pointing to the still small number of interracial couples and to other indicators, many scholars and social commentators argue that interracial pairings remain rare and socially deviant. Fifty years after Loving, whites remain four times more likely than random to marry another white person, and a recent study attributes most of the increase in the number of interracial marriages to demographic change, especially the growth in the US population of Asians and Hispanics and the decline in the white population, rather than to more tolerant attitudes toward interracial relationships among whites.63 Ethnographic studies of heterosexual interracial couples find that they still report feeling hypervisible in public, while studies that seek to probe people’s private racial feelings find that many whites still find interracial relationships off-putting and even something that inspires disgust.64 A recent edited collection of essays by law professors about the 1967 Loving decision almost uniformly takes the glass-half-empty approach, emphasizing all the ways that heterosexual privilege remains outside the reach of different-sex interracial couples. As one writer explains, “mixed race remains a threat to political stability and social respectability,” while another stresses that black-white relationships remain “sexualized spectacles” that observers see as deviant and perverse. Interracial couples, a third essay points out, rarely see relationships like theirs represented in the media or affirmed as normal for their children.65
But given the changes in the past thirty years and the fact that today one in six newlyweds is married to a partner of a different race or ethnicity and that the rate of interracial pairings is even higher among cohabiting but unmarried couples, it seems useful to conclude with at least some questions about what a greater openness to interraciality might suggest about the future of heterosexuality.
Siobhan Somerville lays out one possible answer in her 2005 essay “Queer Loving,” in which she argues that heterosexual interracial relationships became normative—at least in the legal arena—through the increased demonization and stigmatization of same-sex relationships. Normative citizenship, Somerville argues, had been articulated through both discourses of race and discourses of sexuality, as reflected in laws that prohibited interracial marriage and criminalized homosexuality. But just weeks before the Supreme Court handed down the Loving decision, it upheld a 1952 law that made homosexuals and adulterers ineligible to naturalize. For Somerville, this timing is evidence that “the interracial couple was imagined as having a legitimate claim on the state at the same time that the nation was defensively constituted as heterosexual, incapable of incorporating the sexually suspect body.” Loving thus expanded marriage rights by consolidating heterosexuality as a prerequisite for recognition by the state, Somerville insists. Interracial marriage became legitimized in law “in relation to its thorough heterosexualization.”66 In this reading, different-sex interracial relationships became normative—at least in the eyes of the law—because they could be defined against same-sex relationships. Thus, one possibility is that interraciality and homosexuality no longer operate in tandem as others against which heterosexuality defines itself.
While Somerville argues that interraciality became normative by the intensified exclusion of the homosexual, developments since she made that argument in 2005 raise the very different possibility that different-race and same-sex relationships have both become less oppositional to heterosexuality in the past forty years as long as they adhere to certain heteronormative (or homonormative) conventions. It is telling that the past fifty years have witnessed not only the legalization of interracial marriage and an increased acceptance for interracial relationships but also the legalization of same-sex marriage and a lessening of the taboo against homosexuality. Indeed, the popularity of the Loving analogy—or the argument by proponents of gay marriage that since the court upheld individuals’ freedom to marry across racial lines in 1967, it should uphold the right of individuals to marry someone of the same sex—indicates that the increased acceptance of interraciality has helped spur the acceptance of homosexuality too. It seems that both kinds of relationships that heterosexuality defined itself against have become more socially acceptable as long as they
