Gay male body type explained

When used to talk about gay people, they’re meant to describe certain body types and, sometimes, stereotypes or personalities associated with them. We’re here to give you the full rundown on the gay body types, personality types, and how to find yours, as well as answer your burning questions about the gay community. Gay men often categorize one another into groups, like jocks, bears, otters, twinks, cubs, and wolves.

Find out your gay male type with celebrity photos as a reference. Can a stereotype be sexy? Why don’t you ask a daddy?

wolf gay body type

Here are the types of gay men, so you can identify your tribe — and the ones you’d like to mate with. Some guys are primarily attracted to physical types of gay men (eg: bears, twinks, and muscle guys) while some find characteristics in men most attractive (eg: warmth, intelligence, and humour).

Others mix and match and understanding these distinctions is important. In the spirit of combating stereotypes by reclaiming and celebrating them, BBDO NY Art Director James Kuczynski and illustrator Paul Tuller have created a “Guide to Gay Stereotypes,” a series. With no X-rated mags to be found, gay men in search of bare flesh turned to bodybuilding magazines, some of which — most notably Physique Pictorial and Beefcake — became gay media staples in their own right, transforming everyday muscle men into objects of desire.

This fixation with physique only grew over time. Artists like David Hockney preserved the essence of physique culture through homoerotic paintings; Tom of Finland ramped up the aesthetic exponentially, creating explicit artwork featuring giant-dicked policemen fucking on the streets.

His aim? To queer the notion that gay men were inherently feminine, something that was — and still is — weaponised against us. It makes sense that we could be running from stereotypes by bulking up our bodies, or even by appropriating masculine aesthetics like the handlebar moustache or the skinhead both famously popular amoung gay men in the 70s and 80s.

We live in a misogynistic world which stigmatises and regulates femininity, and this reality is stamped all over gay beauty standards. Arguably, none of these subcategories are as culturally dominant as the palatable white gay norm, established when advertisers earmarked gay men and lesbians as a lucrative market as early as thirty years ago. In the context of the AIDS epidemic, it was also politically-charged. Some even say that hairlessness was particularly desirable, a way to display a body free of lesions.

Issues around gay male masculinity and femininity have gone underexplored, but the pressure to fit into rigid beauty standards is collectively punishing us. I remember being scarred when I was jokingly told that fat and feminine gay men were particularly marginalised, and for years I internalised the idea that I could be too fat or too queer to be desirable. I policed my masculinity and abused my body, drowning it with alcohol and using food limitation tactics to shape it into something more conventionally attractive.

Unfortunately, research indicates that too many of us are still doing the same. We all walk through life differently, but ultimately we can be a community; the more we dismantle and disrupt archetypes of gay beauty, the more we can strengthen the ties that bond us.