By Dara L. Schur, PAI, Inc. who modified excerpts from "Out of the Closet & Into Your Agency" by The Alliance for Diverse Aging Community Services.

Heterosexual privilege refers to the daily ways of providing supports, assets, approvals, and rewards to those who live or expect to live in heterosexual pairs. So explains Peggy McIntosh in her 1988 working paper, "White Privilege, Male Privilege," issued by the Wellesley College Center. McIntosh goes on to warn that unpacking the content of heterosexual privilege is most difficult because heterosexual advantage and dominance are so deeply embedded in our culture.

1. Living without ever thinking twice, confronting, engaging or coping with anything on this list.

Heterosexuals may address these phenomena but social and political forces do not require them to do so.

2. Marrying with these privileges:

• Public recognition and support for an intimate relationship, i.e. receiving cards or phone calls; celebrating commitments to another person; supporting activities and social expectations of longevity and stability for  committed relationships; joint child custody;

• Paid leave from employment when grieving spouse’s death; property laws, filing joint tax returns, inheriting from spouse automatically under probate laws;

• Sharing health, auto and homeowners’ insurance policies at reduced rates;

• Immediate access to loved ones in case of accident or emergency;

• Family-of-Origin support for a life with a spouse.

• Being able to marry someone from another country and have them immigrate legally to the United States

3. 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.

4. Validation from the culture in which you live

• Living with your partner and doing so openly to all;

• Talking about your relationship, or what projects, vacations and family planning you and your lover/partner are creating;

• Expressing pain when a relationship ends from death or separation, and having other people notice and tend to your pain;

• Receiving social acceptance by neighbors, colleagues and good friends;

• Not having to hide and lie about women/men-only social activities;

• Dating the person of your desires in the teen years;

• Working without always being identified by your sexuality/culture (i.e., you can be a farmer, artist, etc. without being labeled “the heterosexual farmer”)

• Employment Opportunity: increased possibilities of getting a job, receiving on-the-job training and promotion;

• Receiving validation from your religious community, being able to be a member of the clergy;

• Being employed as a teacher in pre-school through high school without fear of being fired any day because you are assumed to corrupt children;

• Adopting children, foster-parenting children;

• Raising children without threats of state intervention, without children having to be worried  about  who will reject them because of their parent’s sexuality;

• Being able to serve in the military.