Identifying your sexual orientation can be a confusing experience: lots of different messages are being sent to you and you may have lots of different feelings inside of you. Only YOU can identify your sexual preference and identity. A good look at your feelings and your psyche can help you to be more clear about who you are and what feels right for you. And remember, your feelings may change over time. 

With that said, many people who strongly identify themselves as LGBT or Q report knowing from an early age that they had feelings that were different than the majority of the population. So a good place to start is by looking at your feelings:

To whom are you attracted? 

When you kiss someone of the opposite sex, how did it feel? 

Do you think mostly about one sex or another?

Have you had crushes on people of the same or opposite sex?

If you have crushes on the opposite sex, daydream about the opposite sex, are attracted to the opposite sex and felt “excited” when kissed by the opposite sex, well then chances are you are heterosexual. If you have a mixture of answers and feelings, then you may be bisexual. If your answers to the above questions focus on the member of the same sex as you, then you may have an orientation that is homosexual.

Understanding that sexual preference is a personal and often unique thing is important in helping people to feel comfortable with who they are. In fact, rather than using terms that label people as one thing or another, some people view sexual orientation as a sliding scale with heterosexual on one end, “bisexual” in the middle and “homosexual” on the other end. This allows people to recognize that many sexual preferences exist. For examples, some people are strongly heterosexual whereas others may feel heterosexual most of the time but have feelings for the same gender sometimes, even though they don’t feel they want to label themselves as bisexual.

Homosexual___________________Bisexual______________________Heterosexual

In addition, when trying to identify your sexual orientation, look at your own behavior:

Do you find yourself daydreaming about one sex more than the other?

Do you linger around one sex more than the other because you want their attention?

Do you try to be close to someone “just because?”

Do you get jealous if someone starts dating someone else? What sex is that person?

These questions will help you to start thinking about your sexual preferences. Don’t be scared if the answer is not clear. Sexual preferences, for some people, emerge over time and are not clear right away. To help you even more, read the next post to help get rid of some of the myths about being LBGTQ.