Gay Men Don't Have a Type. We Have a Wound.
On why some preferences need defending and others don't.
Gino Cosme is a gay psychotherapist with over a decade of clinical work with gay men. This is Unfiltered Clarity, a weekly essay on the patterns gay men live but rarely name.
He wasn’t angry, exactly. But something in his voice arrived fast and flat, the way a door closes before you’ve finished walking through it.
“I can’t help what I’m attracted to.”
I hadn’t suggested he could.
We’d been talking for twenty minutes about why he kept ending up alone. About the dates that went nowhere. About the particular, quiet exhaustion of someone who is actively dating and still managing to stay effectively isolated.
And then he mentioned, almost in passing, that he only ever pursued men who were white.
I asked about that. One question. Gently, the way you’d note that someone always orders the same thing.
What came back was a wall.
The biology argument arrived first, then the autonomy argument, then the “I just know what I like” argument, each one handed over before I’d had a chance to respond to the last.
His jaw was set. The conversation had taken on a shape I recognized, and it had nothing to do with dating.
It had to do with protection.
This happens in a specific sequence, and the sequence is the thing worth studying.
A friend mentions the pattern. Or a date asks an idle question. Or a therapist notes it without judgment. And before the observation has finished landing, the justifications are already arriving.
Biology. Personal experience. The right to one’s own desire. Three arguments handed over in rapid succession to answer a question that wasn’t an accusation.
That’s the tell. Not the preference. The speed.
Consider what doesn’t happen when someone observes that you tend toward taller men, or that you seem drawn to a particular look. You engage with some combination of amusement and mild curiosity.
You might poke at it yourself, “I don’t know, maybe it goes back to,” or you shrug and say you’ve never thought about it. The preference can be touched and it costs you nothing to touch it.
Now notice what happens when someone observes a preference you hold differently. For some men it’s racial. For others it’s around gender presentation or body type.
The observation is the same in structure, a gentle noting of a pattern. But the response isn’t curiosity. It’s a pre-emptive defense against a criticism nobody made.
That specific gap between what was said and what gets defended against is where all of this lives.
When a Preference Becomes a Structure
Before going further, one thing needs to be said clearly: you don’t need to agree with me about where attraction comes from for this to be worth reading.
The origin question, whether preferences are biological, cultural, or some combination nobody has cleanly mapped, is genuinely unresolved. This piece isn’t trying to resolve it.
The observable thing, the thing you can test against your own experience without accepting any particular theory, is the quality of your relationship to the preference.
Does it give when you touch it? Or does touching it produce a sense of threat?
When a preference becomes defended in the way I’m describing, it has usually crossed into structural function. It’s doing work beyond selection. The work varies by person, but the pattern across years of sessions is consistent enough to describe.
The man who filters out femininity tends to make a particular argument when the pattern is named. It goes something like:
“I’m out, I’ve been out for years. I’ve done the work. Saying I have internalized homophobia because of who I find attractive doesn’t make sense.”
That’s the shape of it. Coming out offered as evidence that examination is complete. As if recognizing desire and understanding what desire is doing are the same work, finished simultaneously. He’s done something real, and costly, and he’s conflated it with something else he hasn’t started.
The man who connects his racial exclusions to a settled hierarchy of desirability uses different language. His defense usually invokes experience.
“I’ve tried. I went on dates. It just doesn’t work for me.”
The past tense is carrying a lot. The preference has been tested and confirmed. The story is closed.
What’s rarely in that account is any curiosity about what “doesn’t work” actually meant. Whether what didn’t work was attraction, or something more ambient. Something about what he was supposed to want that was already decided before the dates happened.
Neither man is lying. Both believe what they’re saying.
The defense feels true from the inside, which is exactly what you’d expect when a preference has been doing structural work long enough to feel like personality.
The Diagnostic
A preference that can be examined with ordinary curiosity is just a preference.
A preference that cannot be examined without producing defensive language, pre-emptive objections to criticisms nobody made, or a faint sense that something important is under threat, that one has been promoted to something more than selection.
Somewhere it got load-bearing. And the intensity of the defense tells you roughly how much weight it’s holding.
The question worth sitting with isn’t whether the preference is right. The question is what it would cost you if it shifted.
If you woke up tomorrow and the pattern was different, if your taste had simply moved, would that feel like new information about yourself? Or would it feel like losing something?
As I’ve written about in Your Shame Thinks It’s Keeping You Safe, shame’s primary function is protective. It designates load-bearing status to whatever is holding together a story about self-worth, then defends that structure against examination because examination feels indistinguishable from collapse.
A preference shame has designated as structural won’t yield to curiosity. It yields to biology, to rights-based argument, to the stated authority of your own lived experience, all of which are ways of ending the conversation before it gets close to whatever the preference is actually doing.
What You’re Actually Defending
The man who filters out feminine men is usually defending a specific distance. Not from femme men in the abstract. From a version of himself he put away at a particular cost, in a particular period, because holding it openly was too expensive at the time.
He doesn’t need to know this consciously. He just knows that seeing certain qualities in another man produces an aversion that has always felt completely natural, the way old survival instructions feel natural because they’ve been running long enough to feel like instinct.
The specific tell here isn’t the preference. It’s the insistence that having come out means he couldn’t possibly have retained anything worth examining. As if the closet was the only place formation happened.
The man whose dating history excludes entire racial populations is often defending proximity to a hierarchy of desirability he absorbed before he had language for what hierarchies were.
His defense tends to be empirical, pointing to experience as evidence. What the empirical account quietly skips is the question of whether the experience was running on a preference that was already decided, and whether decided things tend to confirm themselves.
The man who needs a partner who can pass, who experiences any visible queerness in a date as a dealbreaker, is often carrying an old calculation about safety. Being seen with someone who reads as gay in the wrong room still costs something for him.
The preference is not about attraction. It is about threat management applied to who he chooses to be seen with.
In each case, the preference points at something. As I mapped in The Man You Built Because Nobody Showed You One, the man assembled under pressure tends to build preferences into the architecture without recording that he’s doing it. They become load-bearing quietly.
And then one day someone asks a gentle question and the whole structure responds.
That response is information.
Back to the Room
He sat with the wall up for a moment. I didn’t push. There’s nothing to gain from pushing.
“I just know what I like,” he said eventually.
He does. He knows exactly what he likes. That was never what the question was about.
What I noticed, sitting across from him, was something in the quality of the knowing. How completely settled it was. How little space existed inside it.
Most things we know about ourselves come with some give. Some room for the thing to be slightly different than we remembered, slightly more complicated than we’d told ourselves.
He held this one like a fist.
Not angry. Just closed.
And something in me wondered, the way I do in these moments, what he thought would happen if he opened it.
Until next week,
Gino xx
P.S. If this named something you’ve been avoiding looking at directly, send it to the person you talk to about this kind of thing. Or the person you don’t.
If something in this essay landed, that’s usually worth paying attention to. I provide online therapy for gay men across the UK and Europe, and coaching for clients in the US and Canada.
All examples in this piece are composites drawn from patterns observed across therapeutic work with gay men. Details have been altered to protect confidentiality. No single story represents an individual person.
This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not replace therapy, diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition.
Entire friendships can end over things like this.And have.
It has always been a somewhat alien conversation for me because I’ve always just basically been attracted to people who felt safe. People become attractive when you start to know them (for me). And I know how to trace that to my own fears and issues.
So your article was particularly fascinating for me and helping me understand what’s beneath attraction for some people. ☺️
Fascinating reading as always! I truly enjoy being introduced to such concepts and really appreciate the comments! Coming so late to some of the ideas shared here I can only personally relate in memories, but I’m ever so grateful to have the knowledge.