All communities are labeled, whether it has to do with sexual preference, religious preference (100's and 100's of these), political preference, dietary preferences, these things are important to everybody, we all have communities we identify with most. If you think the gay community has a lot of labels for preferences -- check out the world of underground electronic music. House music alone has more than 40 sub genres including dub, garage, nrg, booty, ghetto tech, tribal, freestyle, anthem, eurodance, progressive, and on and on ... trance has about 30 sub genres, and there are 5 other main genres. There may be more musical preferences then religious preferences! re: comments Hmmm... that's pretty weird -- I live in San Francisco, a "gay mecca" of sorts, and I don't hear people talk about who they don't mate with. But I know this -- I'm into trance too and there's no way you'll get me into a country music club looking for a dance. I don't care how pretty the boys and girls in those clubs are. I'm comparing the gay community to every community -- we all have preferences, and we all label them.

To take a different slice (but similar to peter b's): we're labelling creatures. The human mind is a highly evolved instrument, and one of the things its very efficient at is creating categories and sorting all of its experience into those categories. In common language, its "boxing everything up". This is actually a very useful ability, it allows us to build complex models of reality in nested layers of concepts, each with more detail. There's a downside though: anytime you take something like a human being and "box them up" by placing them in a generalized category, you have to chop off all of the individual details about that specific person in order to get them to fit in the box. That's the part we don't like: nobody wants to lose their individuality and be merged with an abstract bunch of concepts. We sense (correctly) that its a dehumanizing, oversimplifying, and distorting process. Lots of people have tried to somehow get rid of this "boxing people up", as if we could somehow rip out our own wiring and throw it on the garbage heap. "Oh, how terrible! You should never label people". But we sense that this solution doesn't really work either -- how can a labelling machine stop labelling? In order to decide that we shouldn't label, we have to form an abstract category called "labelling", assign specific actions to that category, and then assign the characteristic "bad" to it. In other words, the whole attempt to avoid labelling is really just more of the same. What's missing in the whole mix is awareness: understanding what the mind does, and why it does it, along with an understanding of the distortions which are a *necessary and inseparable* part of the conceptualization process. When we understand that clearly, we don't get confused: we can label things without getting fooled into thinking that our labels really capture all of the richness and detail of the original thing (or person) we're labelling.

I believe in sexuality PERIOD. Attraction occurs between people and not genitalia. You may have a preference when it comes to sexual acts, but in general, LOVE IS LOVE. just my penny and a half...

No, it's a way to converse. A label is just another word for a name which is just another word for a word. Using the same word for everybody is fine as long as everybody's facing the same issues and challenges. Where there are differences, those differences can't really be discussed without using different words.

first of all its not only the Gay community that puts these labels on people ... now as to why because, I am Bi not Gay or Lesbian so I have no problem with this label. As for closet it means not in the open , again totally right label, so what IO am saying is if the label is right then no problems ..if its wrong then there is problems