When I was writing my undergraduate honors thesis in 2023–2024, I was struck by the inconsistent ways in which scholars have attempted to categorize non-heterosexual men: homosexual, gay men, MLM, MSM, and queer men. I often noticed mismatches between the terminology used and the analytical scope of a given study. An exaggerated example would be using MLM (men who love men) in a scientific study of contraceptive use during sex or using MSM (men who have sex with men) in a cultural study. Likewise, scholars sometimes use gay to refer to the entire group in question, even though gay, in its most fundamental sense, is an identity.

Academic terminology matters. Categorization and de-categorization matter, and we must take care to maintain terminological accuracy when analyzing groups of people across both the sciences and the humanities. This is not only a matter of precision, but of disciplinary responsibility. If gender and sexuality studies are to remain globally attentive, they must strive for terminology that is consistent, analytically neutral, and less likely to reproduce colonial or Orientalist frameworks.

Thus, in this article, I examine and problematize the terminology commonly used in academic and media contexts to categorize non-heterosexual men. I propose Men Attracted to Men (MAM), a term I first introduced in my undergraduate honors thesis, as a more precise and inclusive analytic framework for studying this population.

Before turning to those terms, one clarification is necessary. I set aside the term homosexual at the outset. It is outdated, widely stigmatizing, and should no longer be used as a general analytic category in academic writing except when quoting other scholars or when its historical usage is itself under examination. Given its pathologizing and demeaning history, I do not treat it as a neutral term for the population under discussion here. When I need a broader and more neutral term, I use same-sex desire instead.

I begin with the term “gay.” The analysis that follows also applies, in many respects, to the term “queer men.” Although the term gay circulated in limited subcultural contexts in the early twentieth century, it entered global mainstream discourse much more forcefully in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall riots. To be sure, the longer semantic history of the word gay and its eventual “queering” reaches further back into Europe, but that genealogy is not necessary for the argument I make here. What matters is that gay, as a modern social identity, became legible through a specifically Western post-Stonewall political formation, from which contemporary LGBTQ+ discourse also emerged. Today, LGBTQ+ has become a global phenomenon, fueling local activist movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In that sense, it has also produced a transnational community of individuals who identify as gay.

There is nothing inherently wrong with using gay or queer men in academic analysis. However, we must define the scope of those terms precisely. If we use them analytically, the population under study should be limited to those who have adopted gay as a social identity, rather than assumed to include all men whose desire is directed toward men. Yet some men may experience desire for other men without ever adopting any social identity associated with LGBTQ+ at all. As Charles Horton Cooley’s “Looking Glass Self” suggests, identity is formed relationally rather than in isolation. In that sense, desire may remain internal, but identity becomes social only when it is made legible in relation to others. Therefore, gay cannot be assumed to travel cleanly across all regions, cultures, or persons, since not all men understand themselves through the broader LGBTQ+ identity framework within which it now often operates. Ultimately, gay cannot function as an all-encompassing analytic category for this population.

Thus, the term “MSM” emerged within the specific context of public health as a response to the discipline’s need for categories based on behavioral risk rather than self-identified sexual orientation. In epidemiological research and HIV/AIDS intervention strategies, MSM (men who have sex with men) reflected a deliberate move to disentangle sexual identity from sexual behavior in order to more precisely address patterns of transmission and health outcomes. The term’s focus on sexual behavior achieves two primary objectives within this disciplinary context. First, it erases identity discourse by encompassing all men who engage in sex with men, regardless of whether they identify as “gay,” “bisexual,” “straight,” or otherwise, thereby including groups such as sex workers whose identity may not align with their sexual practices. Second, it reflects a broader attempt within global public health to create categories that are not rooted in Western identity frameworks, enabling practitioners and researchers to engage populations in diverse cultural settings without presuming the universality of identity-based categories. In this way, MSM functions as a pragmatic tool for disciplinary specificity in global health research.

Yet MSM begins to fall apart outside the disciplinary logic of public health. At its core, it is a category designed to track behavioral and epidemiological flows. When used outside that context, the term sex becomes too narrow and too scientific. It privileges observable sexual behavior while excluding forms of relationality that may never culminate in sex at all. Even in contexts where MSM may still be useful, such as studies of sex work or pornography, I would expect it to be supplemented by a more precise category that captures the social and cultural specificity of the population being analyzed.

On the other extreme, the term MLM has increasingly appeared on my TikTok For You page, with creators tagging posts #MLM, meaning “men who love men.” The term seems to have gained popularity in online spaces and may appear more inclusive than simply gay because it de-categorizes and gathers men under different labels into a broader affective umbrella. Yet MLM is limited as an analytic category because it assumes love to be the defining mode of relation, even though love cannot be generalized across the population in question. It also seems to circulate primarily in Anglophone online and community discourse rather than as a broadly legible transnational category. MLM may be socially useful, but it is not a stable general analytic term.

It is for these reasons that I propose the term Men Attracted to Men (MAM). The key to this term is the word attracted, which indicates non-relationality. A man may be attracted to men without ever claiming that desire to another person, acting on it sexually, or translating it into a social identity. In that sense, MAM includes those men who may elsewhere be described as gay, queer, MSM, or even MLM, but it is not limited by the identity, behavior, or affective assumptions built into those terms. Its analytic advantage lies precisely in its broader reach. MAM captures the group omitted by all of the above: men whose desires remain internal and socially invisible, yet who are still shaped by the legal discourses, institutional structures, and cultural norms that govern same-sex desire. In this way, MAM provides a more neutral, inclusive, and precise framework for studying men whose lives are shaped by desire for men.

Having now introduced my intervention, I want to return to sex work that I mentioned briefly as an example earlier because its fit within MAM is more complicated. In this case, same-sex conduct is shaped by labor, performance, or economic exchange rather than attraction itself. In such cases, attraction cannot be inferred from conduct alone. Yet neither can it be ruled out on that basis. A man may engage in sex with men without being attracted to them, but commercial or performative sex with men does not in itself rule out attraction either. These contexts, therefore, do not weaken MAM so much as clarify its analytic value: attraction remains distinct from behavior, even when behavior is highly visible.

At the same time, I do not think that a study that names MAM as the population of focus should apply the same conclusions to male sex workers. This is because, unless it is specifically defined within the scope of the study, sex workers experience a more complex web of stigma, institutional regulation, and social marginalization. In such cases, the issue is not one of categorical exclusion, but of analytic sufficiency. MAM may name one dimension of the subject’s experience, yet it may be too general to support broader conclusions about sex workers. For that reason, these populations warrant their own representative study, with conclusions drawn from their specific realities rather than being absorbed into the broader discussion of a general MAM study.

In conclusion, terms such as gay, MSM, and MLM each retain value within their own domains, but none can function as a fully general analytic category for the population in question. I therefore propose Men Attracted to Men (MAM): a term that names attraction without requiring its conversion into identity, sexual behavior, or love. MAM thus offers a more precise, culturally portable, and analytically neutral framework for studying men whose lives are shaped by that attraction. Adopting a category such as MAM would allow scholarship on gender and sexuality to become both more inclusive and more analytically accurate.