'When I encounter a functioning straight couple nowadays, I want to cheer.' Credit: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty

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.
But still, the survey finds that 57% of the respondees (of all ages) claiming to be non-hetero say they are bisexual. So, either this was always the case, but people concealed their sexuality due to social stigma. Or — and this is the far more likely scenario, in my opinion — heterosexuals are becoming socially embarrassed by their heterosexuality and trying not to be déclassé.
The reason I believe this is the more likely scenario is that heterosexuality, among the great and the good, now seems more fraught than being bisexual did a decade ago. The grim academic neologism “heteronormativity”, thanks to Tumblr and Twitter, is everywhere. The last few days are representative: Trisha Greenhalgh, a Professor of Primary Care and a member of independent SAGE, exhorting her followers to avoid “preaching heteronormativity”; an Indonesian magazine telling its readers that heteronormativity was the creation of Dutch colonialism; and Dr Nick Gah of Harvard stating that history isn’t called “herstory” because — well, you’ve guessed it. (This will come as a surprise to anybody who knows the Greek word histor meaning witness).