I doubt that any child before the onset of puberty truly understands what sexual attraction actually means. And plenty who have reached puberty or even adulthood don’t know. Nobody has anything to compare his or her feelings to. It is a completely unknown phenomenon. I’m heterosexual and as a girl I was attracted to boys in a way that was different than anything I felt for girls. I liked girls and I liked boys, for completely different reasons, which I was unaware of. I had no real understanding of what sexual attraction actually was until I was maybe 12 or 13. Even then it wasn’t clear. Many adults say they can point to a time when they realized --from an adult perspective–that they were having special feelings either for the same or opposite sex. But it could not have been clear to the child at the time, who has no frame of reference. He knows he feels special ferlings for some people and not others. That’s probably as far as it goes in his undeveloped mind and body. I doubt there is a child under 12 who can say, unequivocally that he is gay or straight. There are probably many adolescents and adults who can’t say that. It’s a difficult process to go through and to understand and it takes maturity to work through it. Adults can look back on their childhoods and pinpoint certain ideas from an adult perspective they could never have pinpointed or understood as a child. This goes for people who are anywhere on the sexual orientation continuum. It’s easy for someone to say once they have matured and decided what their orientation is that they knew all along whether they were gay or straight. I doubt that. It is obvious only in retrospect.