Most of us think of categories like "heterosexual" and "homosexual" as timeless features of human life. Yet the ways people have understood attraction, sexual behavior, and sexual identity have changed dramatically. Drawing on history and philosophy, this talk explores how ideas about sexuality developed, why familiar categories are often more recent than we assume, and what changing standards of beauty, attraction, and identity can teach us about the relationship between experience and the labels we use to understand it. No prior background is required, only curiosity.