Traits of gay guys

But their life, relationships, and primary attractions are overwhelmingly same-sex directed.

A Kinsey 4 person has more substantial heterosexual attraction alongside their predominant homosexual orientation. This fluidity is distinct from delayed recognition of orientation—it involves actual shifts in who you’re attracted to rather than just coming to understand existing attractions better.

Lisa Diamond’s longitudinal research on women’s sexual fluidity showed that some women experience changes in the balance of same-sex and opposite-sex attractions across their lifespan.

Your creative teammate is probably high in Openness, while the spreadsheet guru may be high in Conscientiousness. This is less common but does occur. Respecting how people identify themselves, even when you’d categorize them differently, remains the best practice.

FAQs About Homosexuality and Sexual Orientation

Is sexual orientation fixed or can it change?

For most people, sexual orientation is relatively stable throughout life.

Someone might have same-sex fantasies but opposite-sex behavior, or same-sex arousal patterns but heterosexual identity. Many people engage in same-sex sexual behavior without identifying as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. But social pressure, internalized homophobia, lack of opportunity, and other factors can create misalignment between these dimensions.

Why do some people come out as gay later in life?

Late recognition and disclosure of homosexual orientation happens for multiple reasons.

A 4 is predominantly homosexual with significant heterosexual attraction. There’s often grief over years spent living inauthentically, alongside relief at finally understanding themselves.

Late recognition of homosexual orientation is distinct from sexual fluidity—where orientation actually changes over time. It’s based on decades of global research, it predicts real outcomes, and it recognizes that people are complex.

The diversity of human sexual orientation can’t be captured in 10 types, or 20, or 100. The journey often involves recognizing this difference, understanding what it means, coming to terms with it internally, and then navigating coming out in family, social, and professional contexts.

Exclusively homosexual individuals sometimes face skepticism from both straight and bisexual people who assume everyone has at least some capacity for opposite-sex attraction.

Gay Men and Understanding Personality: The OCEAN Model

Gay Men and Understanding Personality: The OCEAN Model

By Ken Howard, LCSW, CST – Founder, GayTherapyLA.com

Understanding what makes us who we are can deepen our relationships and improve how we connect with others. Do you identify based on your sexual orientation or romantic orientation?

High Neuroticism often means feeling things deeply — from anxiety to passion. His interviews revealed enormous variation in people’s sexual histories and attractions.

The Kinsey Scale rates individuals from 0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (exclusively homosexual), with points in between representing varying degrees of bisexuality. A rating of 1 indicates predominantly heterosexual with incidental homosexual attraction or experience.

Most LGBTQ+ advocates discourage using “gold star” language because it divides communities and invalidates people’s identities based on behavioral history rather than actual orientation.

How common is exclusively homosexual orientation?

Estimates vary depending on definitions and methodology, but exclusively homosexual orientation (Kinsey 6) appears less common than the broader category of non-heterosexual orientations.

Men tend to have a stronger sex drive, to want more sexual partners, and to find casual sex more acceptable than women do.

Two people who both identify as gay might have completely different experiences of their sexuality, different relationship patterns, different levels of attraction to other genders, and different journeys to understanding their orientation. This complexity is what we’re actually exploring when we talk about “types” of homosexuality.

The most influential framework for understanding this diversity remains the Kinsey Scale, developed by Alfred Kinsey in 1948.