A 1923 dictionary listed heterosexuality as a morbid passion
When Merriam-Webster first included 'heterosexual' in 1923, it defined the word as a medical term for a morbid sexual passion for the opposite sex. Only in its 1934 edition did the dictionary recast it as normal sexuality. The word itself had been coined in 1869 alongside its partner, homosexual.
Karl Maria Kertbeny created both terms in 1869, part of a nineteenth-century fashion for classifying personalities. They fell out of use until Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll revived them around 1890. Heterosexuality as an abstract noun turns up in 1900 and the clipped hetero in 1933, and the noun did not become common until the 1960s. The prefix comes from Greek heteros, meaning other or different.
Straight began as mid-twentieth-century gay slang, from the phrase 'to go straight', meaning to stop having same-sex relationships. One of the earliest recorded uses came in 1941 from the author G. W. Henry, in a book of conversations with homosexual men that applied it to so-called ex-gays. It later became an everyday synonym, though some object to it for implying that others are crooked.
Surveys consistently find a large majority identifying as heterosexual, with the exact figure depending on the question. A 2010 survey by Britain's Office for National Statistics found 95 percent, and an October 2012 Gallup poll put the US figure at 96.6 percent. Studies of lifetime experience find 89 to 98 percent reporting only opposite-sex contact, falling to 79 to 84 percent once same-sex attraction is counted. A 2016 review by Bailey and colleagues found that in recent Western surveys about 93 percent of men but only 87 percent of women called themselves completely heterosexual, with 10 percent of women saying mostly heterosexual.
Researchers have not pinned down a single cause of orientation. They point to a combination of genes, prenatal hormones and brain structure interacting with environment, and find more evidence for biological than social explanations. Reproduction, though, does not require the orientation at all: orientation describes an enduring pattern of attraction and bonding, while conception needs only a single act.
Source: Heterosexuality
