What is Heterosexual Privilege?

• Public recognition and support for an intimate relationship, such as receiving cards or calls celebrating your commitment to another person.
• Joint child custody.
• Paid leave from employment when grieving death of your spouse.
• Property laws, filing joint tax returns, inheriting from your spouse automatically under probate laws.
• Immediate access to your loved ones in case of an accident or emergency.

Not questioning your normalcy, sexually and culturally:

• Having role models of your gender and sexual orientation.
• Learning about romance and relationships from fiction, movies and television.
• Having positive media images of people with whom you can identify.

Validation from the culture in which you live:

• Living with your partner and doing it openly.
• Talking about your relationship, or what you and your partner are doing together. Expressing pain when a relationship ends from death or separation, and having other people notice and tend to your pain.
• Dating the person of your desire during your teen years. Working without being identified by your sexuality/culture (for example, you get to be a farmer, artist, etc., without being labelled the heterosexual farmer, etc.)