ABSTRACT
We are living in the midst of a long, unfinished but profound revolution that has transformed sexual and intimate life. Since 1945 there have been dramatic changes in family and marriage, erotic behaviour, sexual identities, parenting, relationships between men and women, men and men, women and women, adults and young people, as well as in laws, norms, and values. These changes have remade everyday life in Britain, and in many other parts of the world. But these changes have become so assimilated that the true nature of the transformations is forgotten. They are taken for granted, and the complex history that produced them can all too easily be obliterated. A good index of this is the ways in which the dramatic sex reforms in the second half of the Blair government have been almost completely ignored in discussions of the former Prime Minister’s legacy (Weeks 2007: 192). Yet these changes have enshrined the most significant change in the legal framework of sexuality for a hundred years, instituting a new discourse of equality between heterosexuality and homosexuality in the regulation of sexuality. That, in turn, is a response to transformations in the ways in which sexuality and intimacy is lived.
