Sexual orientation describes who you’re sexually and romantically attracted to. The most widely recognized categories are heterosexual (attracted to the opposite sex), gay or lesbian (attracted to the same sex), and bisexual (attracted to both sexes), but these are far from the only identities people use. Modern understanding treats sexuality as a spectrum rather than a set of fixed boxes, and a growing number of terms reflect that range. In 2024, a Gallup survey found that 9.3% of U.S. adults identify as something other than heterosexual, up significantly from previous years.
The Core Three: Heterosexual, Gay, and Bisexual
These three labels remain the most commonly used worldwide. Heterosexual (or straight) describes attraction to the opposite sex. Gay describes men attracted to men, and lesbian describes women attracted to women. Bisexual describes attraction to both men and women. In the 2024 Gallup data, 85.7% of U.S. adults identified as straight, 5.2% as bisexual, 2.0% as gay, and 1.4% as lesbian, making bisexuality the single largest non-heterosexual identity by a wide margin.
The American Psychological Association notes that even these familiar categories don’t capture the full picture. Sexual orientation occurs on a continuum, and many people experience attraction that doesn’t fit neatly into one label.
The Spectrum Model
The idea that sexuality exists on a sliding scale dates back to the Kinsey Scale, developed in the 1940s. It uses a 0-to-6 rating system: 0 means exclusively heterosexual, 6 means exclusively homosexual, and ratings 1 through 5 capture varying levels of attraction to both sexes. A rating of 3, for example, means roughly equal attraction to men and women. The scale also includes an “X” category for people who report no sexual attraction or sexual contacts at all.
The Kinsey Scale was groundbreaking because it showed that many people don’t fall at either extreme. It has limitations, though. It only measures attraction along a single male-female axis, which doesn’t account for attraction to nonbinary or gender-diverse people. Newer models of sexuality try to capture that broader range.
Pansexual, Omnisexual, and Polysexual
These three identities all describe attraction to more than one gender, but they differ in the details. Pansexual means attraction to people of all genders without gender playing a role in that attraction. A pansexual person might describe it as being drawn to the individual regardless of whether they’re male, female, nonbinary, or anything else. In the 2024 Gallup survey, about 0.1% of U.S. adults specifically identified as pansexual, though actual numbers are likely higher since not everyone uses the term even when the description fits.
Omnisexual also involves attraction to all genders, but gender does factor into the experience. An omnisexual person might feel attraction differently depending on someone’s gender identity, even though no gender is excluded. Polysexual means attraction to multiple genders, but not necessarily all of them. Someone who is polysexual might be attracted to women and nonbinary people, for instance, but not men.
In practice, the boundaries between bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual, and polysexual are blurry. Many people choose their label based on which community they connect with or which word feels most accurate to their own experience.
Asexuality
Asexual people experience little to no sexual attraction. This doesn’t necessarily mean they lack all desire for closeness. Many asexual people still want romantic relationships, emotional intimacy, or physical affection. The distinction between sexual and romantic attraction matters here: someone might identify as asexual but heteroromantic, meaning they don’t experience sexual attraction but do feel romantic attraction toward the opposite sex.
Within the asexual community, people use additional terms to describe where they fall. Demisexual means only experiencing sexual attraction after forming a strong emotional bond. Gray-asexual (sometimes called graysexual) describes people who rarely experience sexual attraction or only under specific circumstances. About 0.1% of U.S. adults identified as asexual in the 2024 Gallup survey.
Queer as an Identity
Queer has two related but distinct uses. As an umbrella term, it covers the entire range of non-heterosexual and non-cisgender identities. But it’s also increasingly used as a standalone identity label. People who call themselves queer often do so deliberately, choosing it over more specific terms like gay or bisexual because those labels feel too narrow or too rigid for their experience.
The word has a complicated history. It was used as a slur for decades, and some older LGBTQ+ people still find it offensive. For many younger people, though, it’s been reclaimed as a term of empowerment and intentional ambiguity. It signals belonging to the broader community without requiring a precise definition of who you’re attracted to.
Questioning
Questioning simply means a person is exploring their sexual orientation and hasn’t settled on a label. This isn’t a lesser or temporary identity. For some people, questioning is a phase that leads to a more specific label. For others, it’s a long-term state, and the exploration itself is the identity. The “Q” in LGBTQ+ can stand for either queer or questioning, depending on context.
Sexual Fluidity
Sexual fluidity refers to the capacity for attraction patterns to shift over time. This doesn’t mean orientation is a choice. It means that for some people, the gender they’re drawn to can change across months, years, or life stages. Research on sexual fluidity in women has identified at least four distinct forms: a general responsiveness to your less-preferred gender, situational variability in that responsiveness, a gap between who you’re attracted to and who you actually partner with, and day-to-day instability in attraction patterns.
Interestingly, these four types of fluidity aren’t strongly correlated with each other. Someone whose attractions shift from day to day isn’t necessarily more likely to partner with their less-preferred gender, for example. Only one type, overall responsiveness to the less-preferred gender, was specifically associated with a bisexual identity. This suggests that fluidity is more complex than simply “moving along the spectrum” and that people experience it in very different ways.
How These Categories Evolved
The way professionals and society understand sexuality has changed dramatically. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, a turning point that shifted the conversation from “what causes homosexuality and how do we treat it?” to “what are the health and wellbeing needs of LGBTQ+ people?” That single change reshaped decades of research, policy, and clinical practice.
Today, no mainstream medical or psychological organization classifies any sexual orientation as a disorder. The focus has moved toward understanding the diversity of human attraction, and the vocabulary continues to expand as more people find that existing labels don’t fully capture their experience. The rising numbers in surveys like Gallup’s don’t necessarily mean more people are non-heterosexual than in previous generations. They likely reflect a cultural shift in which people feel freer to name and explore what they’ve always felt.