While our system collectively identifies as gay, we are specifically a veldian - i.e. a gay man.

We default to referring to this identity as "veldian" because it is a single word, it is not named after a person (unlike "turian" - we don't have a problem with Alan Turing but we prefer words not named after people if possible), and it does not have the names of other identities in it (i.e. "gay" and "man").

We have long considered ourselves collectively gay, and we briefly struggled with identfying what KIND of gay we collectively were. At the time, we didn't understand there were superclusters or amnesiac groups, so what may have been conflict over identity was actually passive influence from parts of the system that were trying to rejoin and Unify but hadn't been properly discovered yet.

Some parts of the system are lesbian, and some parts are cenelian or gaybian, but collectively speaking, our system is veldian.

We consider ourselves primarily veldian and not more broadly gay is because the only members of the system who are really interested in getting a romantic partner are men or male-aligned people who are only interested in dating another man or male-aligned person. Therefore, if we were seeking a romantic partner, it would be wisest to present ourselves as a man only attracted to men.

In the past, we have identified in a way that indicates we are attracted to genderqueer people, and this attraction still exists. However, cenelian and torenamoric are no longer the primary words we use for our orientation, even though we do consider those still to be among our collective identities.

Our main collective orientation is veldian at this point, because we are already in several relationships with unaligned genderqueer partners, but not with men or male-aligned people. We therefore consider that attraction more important to signal, as well that as a cenelian identity or similar is potentially what is ASSUMED of us with the relationships we have, requiring us to go more out of our way to signal our attraction to genders we're not currently in relationships with.

This means we would also collectively consider ourselves mspec veldian, although not in the sense of being attracted to binary women or genders other than oneself. Rather, this is in the sense of being a genderqueer multigender man who is attracted to men and genderqueer people, with a preference for men/masculinity/male-aligned genders, who sees all their attraction as gay due to all of it being to a gender category that they are in, and predominantly aligns the type of gay they are with being a veldian (as opposed to other types of gay).

However, some parts of the system, particularly Silent Hedges and other parts of Bryan's Supercluster, are emphatically NOT mspec veldians, at least not in the sense that they consider ALL genderqueer people within their attraction and are more specific about what being a veldian or an mspec veldian means to them.

Due to a series of personal reasons, more priority is currently being given in the collective to the identities of the veldians who are not attracted to genders other than men and male-related genders. This includes in-system relationships tending to be considered veldian/gay male over other alignments of gay/queer.

However, we are still in relationships with unaligned genderqueer people, so we use "mspec veldian" to clarify that these relationships aren't atypical for us as a collective. At the same time, though, we also aren't "mspec veldian" in the sense of "veldian who is actively attracted to or seeks relationships with genders they don't identify as", so adding "mspec" to "veldian" isn't all that important to us, at least in describing the collective (individual importance may vary).

While some people experience all gay attraction as the same, we do not. Cenelian relationships feel different than veldian relationships to us, just like how our relationships with woman-aligned people feel sapphic.

In particular, if my system is with a person who is unaligned genderqueer, there is a feeling of similarity between our and the other person's identity, by virtue of both of us knowing what it's like to have a non-normative identity or to relate your gender to things that are typically not thought of as genders.

However, the male component of our collective gender is stronger, more enduring, more defining, and more clearly-defined to us, such that a relationship with a man or man-aligned person feels MORE "same gender" than a relationship with an unaligned genderqueer person is.

This isn't to say that our relationships with non-male genderqueer people aren't gay, because they are. However, we feel that queer and non-conforming men - which, by virtue of us being a queer man with certain preferences, are the only men we would consider dating - have a more similar gender to us than people who do not have that as part of their gender at all.

Our MLM relationships, in-system, also seem to feature a stronger element of dominant and submissive relationship dynamics. This isn't necessarily in terms of an actual kink dynamic, although it often is. Rather, we tend to experience gay male relationships as more likely to or more naturally lending themselves to a dynamic in which one party is submissive and the other is dominant.

This may be because "masculinity" is a trait that most people who have it see it that you can have more or less of it than someone (e.g. some men are more masculine than others), whereas genderqueer people, at least those who are not aligned to a binary gender, usually do not see their gender alignment as something you can have "more" of - that is, genderqueer is either something you are or you aren't, but there aren't genderqueer people who are "more genderqueer" than others, like how there are some men who are "more masculine" than other men.

Therefore, it tends to be that in our MLM relationships, there is a partner who is more dominant and more (conventionally) masculine, and a partner who is more submissive and less masculine, or less conventionally masculine.

This way of thinking may seem to imply that we see dominance as masculine and submission as feminine, but this is only partly correct. It's true we acknowledge that dominance and being a leader are traditionally seen as a part of masculinity. However, we don't think that the absence of traditional masculinity is the presence of femininity, as we don't view men and women as opposites but rather two things that exist on a spectrum.

Furthermore, while we define CONVENTIONAL masculinity by society, we define ACTUAL masculinity by the much broader spectrum of ways that actual self-identified men actually behave, which includes basically everything. We also view the dominant and submissive nature of the participants of the relationship as something that can be exchanged or reversed at times.

While this doesn't mean that D/s kink is never part of our relationships with genderqueer people, dominant and submissive dynamics do not register as an INHERENT part of NLN relationships to us the way they do in MLM relationships. That is because we see different gender dynamics as existing between us and unaligned genderqueer people, which are different from the gender dynamics that exist between us and men.