What are the categories of gay?

Answer 1

Well, yes and no.

No, like any people, gay people do not fit into systematic patterns of caracteristics they automatically have. People are not pokemons.

However, like all kind of people, you can roughly draw groups by sorting through one or another criteria. Like any people, gay people can be sorted by income bracket, by job type, by ethnicity, by age, by interest. But this has obviously nothing to do with sexuality.

Now there are also stereotypical categories specific to gays and lesbians. There are basically three types of those: per behaviour, per opinion, per sexual attitude.

It's important to know that these kind of "categories" are stereotypes. This means they neither are accurate (nobody fits the bill perfectly) comprehensive (not everyone falls in a category) nor sufficient (it's not because you roughly fall into a cliché that you are nothing else than that cliché). It's also important to know that those stereotypes, although widely used in the LGBT community, are viewed as a little offensive, especially when used by non-gay people, because they are often used to present gays as walking stereotypes, and as being nothing but gay (sexuality is just one part of your identity. But a gay person generally defines herself first based on other criterias, such as his hobbies, job, personnality...)

That being said, those "categories do somehow exist":

Per behaviour, you've got a large set of clichés: the flamboyant gay, the butch lesbian, the lipstick lesbian, the gay bear, the gay twink, the vegan lesbian , the gay hipster, and so on.

On the opinion field, you've got the militant gay, the shamed gay, the closeted gay, the casual gay, the heterorthodox gay...

In the sexual sphere, beyond the top/bottom/versatile rift among gay/bi men, some people are into very specific things, like s&m, leather fetish, dominant, cuddly and what have you.

Notice how these categories are things that you can also find amongst heterosexual. But for some reason, in the gay community, they have acquired a more formally aknowledged quality. But you don't need to be lesbian to be a butch female.