Heterosexuality Is Only 150 Years Old  Reading between the
lines. Feb. 9 2012 7:15 AM  No Hetero  Hanne Blank’s lively
history of straights.  A happy and man and woman on their
wedding day. How much of sexual orientation is what we've been
taught to call ourselves?  George Eastman House Collection.
Troy Patterson Troy Patterson     Straight covers an impressive
bit of social-historical ground despite being, true to its
subtitle, a compact production. It runs 264 pages, including
index and footnotes. There are no illustrations, lamentably, so
let's start with the author bio. Hanne Blank is "an independent
scholar," earlier the author of Virgin: The Untouched History,
and her "work has been featured everywhere from Out to
Penthouse"—a gamut that would seem to exclude both Oui and
Playgirl. She is, on the evidence, a rigorous thinker. Tracing
the history of the word heterosexual and homosexual—coined, in
1868, by a pamphleteer opposed to the laws against "unnatural
fornication" being written into the Prussian