Answering questions: How do I know if I'm gay?

I put some time into recent responses on Quora and figured I'd share them here, too, since I clearly need to work on writing more consistently.

How do I know if I'm gay?

Only you know and can decide, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to. It can be tricky because not everyone’s sexual orientation matches neatly with their romantic orientation nor with their behaviors or preferences.

The short answer is that it’s entirely up to you to identify as you wish, and it’s totally valid, too, if your feelings change over time.

The longer answer requires asking yourself if you feel physical or sexual or romantic attraction toward people of the same gender as you, and whether you feel those things toward only the same gender as you or maybe in differing degrees toward people of various genders.

Popular discourse rarely separates the types of attraction, instead assuming that people uniformly feel physical, sexual, and romantic attraction in the same way. However, people can find themselves experiencing any mix of heterosexual, bisexual, pansexual, homosexual attraction paired with heteroromantic or homoromantic or biromantic attraction or even various shades of aromantic, demiromantic, asexual, or demisexual feelings.

These are the simplest definitions (though each has more individual nuance that you can learn about through your own research) for these terms:

• heterosexual – experiencing sexual attraction toward people of a gender different from your own
• homosexual – experiencing sexual attraction toward people of a gender the same as your own
• bisexual – experiencing sexual attraction toward people of genders both like and unlike your own
• pansexual – experiencing sexual attraction toward people of any gender
• asexual – when one generally does not experience sexual attraction toward other people and/or does not desire sexual activity with other people (There’s more info at asexuality.org)
• demisexual – falls under the umbrella of asexual but can mean that one only very rarely experiences sexual attraction toward other people and/or only experiences sexual attraction if there is first a romantic/emotional connection with a person, and many similar caveats (It’s not just “being picky” about sexual partners. There’s more info at asexuality.org)
• heteroromantic – experiencing romantic feelings (attraction/connection/affection) toward people of a gender different from your own
• homoromantic – experiencing romantic feelings(attraction/connection/affection) toward people of a gender the same as your own
• biromantic – experiencing romantic feelings (attraction/connection/affection) toward people of genders both like and unlike your own
• panromantic – experiencing romantic feelings (attraction/connection/affection) toward people of any gender

So it is possible that someone could be both heteroromantic and asexual, someone else could be biromantic and heterosexual, someone could be bisexual and demisexual and homoromantic, and so on.

Most of us have never thought about these particulars and might not know immediately, but knowing there are more spectrums, axes, and nuance to sexual orientation is a great starting point for understanding and determining or defining what our own is.

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