HUMAN SEXUALITY can be seen as a river ejected from a hot spring that flows downward and divides into a number of discrete streams, all flowing their separate ways until their final currents blend into the all-consuming sea. The dominant river is the straightest one, which, along with the others that wend their way down the mountain, has no awareness of its origins or its oceanic destiny.
This short essay will not deal with the many contradictions that human sexuality underwent as it battled to the death with labels too narrow for its overflowing waters or with social mores that had placed opaque veils over its jets. I discuss here what could be the endpoint of a predestined history as Hegel may have imagined it: the end of a rainbow whose rigid set of colors may have been necessary for
the human eye to discriminate at one time, but which may yet be overcome by a synthesis in our understanding of sexuality.
Gay, bisexual, queer, pansexual, sapiosexual, demisexual… these are but a few of the plethora of labels whose reality cannot be doubted, even if these categories of sexuality are doomed to become a relic of the past. One might say that the tragedy of history lies in the fact that it needed the gay man and the lesbian woman, their social alienation and their struggle held as tokens of their martyrdom for some greater cause or peaceful finality.
Rayyan Dabbous is a Lebanese author, playwright, and director.
