What threatens the recently established, and still disputed, naturalization of the sexual is a growing awareness that not only do the meanings of the sexual change as the sociohistorical context within which it is experienced changes, but also that the very nature of the sexual may change as well. In other words, the possible need for new concepts regarding the sexual does not follow merely from the inadequacies or errors in the older concepts of sexuality but from the fact that sexual realities have undergone and are continuing to undergo substantial change.
The “sexual revolution” may in fact have been just that: a revolution— one that created a temporal compression such that, both within and across cohorts, it becomes difficult to speak of many dominant sexual homogeneities, except at the most overly concrete levels, the level of organs and orifices. It becomes increasingly possible that individuals separated from each other by only a few years or only by small differences in their respective personal histories may experience identical sexual behaviors in vastly different ways and often with vastly different consequences. Behind the deceptive stability of language (“a kiss is just a kiss”), the meaning of experience and the experience of meaning change.
Recognizing the existence of a plurality of homosexualities has been, and remains, a slow process. There may be even greater resistance to recognition of the existence of a plurality of heterosexualities. One major source of the resistance to this recognition has been the naturalization of sex with its commitment to concepts of the sexual as a matter of organs, orifices, and phylogenetic legacies.