ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the key features of sexual transition rapidly shifting terrain. As sexuality is shaped by social forces, so new social challenges shape and reshape the possibilities and potentialities of sexual life. As the eruption of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s confirmed, steady moves towards social toleration can be wildly disrupted, as it turned out, only temporarily. The politics of sexuality are subject to dramatic moves, if not always in the ways intended, as the Thatcher years showed. Major elements of the changing landscape, especially the communications revolution and the rise and rise of the internet, have incalculable effects. As people are living these shifts, experiencing an ever changing history in this often bewildering new world, need to understand their dynamics and implications as best. A key claim about the late modern world is that people witnessing a transformation of intimacy, based on growing elements of choice and equality between partners, both heterosexual and homosexual.
