@SuitAndTieX:
I was thinking and if we were to consider the hypothesis of the categories being represented only by text, we could do it as follows:
Starting from the idea that this is a gay site and the LGBT flag has 6 colors, which are: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet.
We could create 6 Main Categories: Physical, Age, Entertainment, Ethnicity, Sex and Fetish, for example. Each Main Category would be represented by one of the colors mentioned above.
After defining which color would represent each category, we would transform the existing categories into subcategories and distribute them among the main ones:
Physical: Hunks, Bear, Twinks …
Age: Mature, Old and Gray, Youngblood ...
Entertainment: TV, Books, Magazine, Comic, Games ...
Ethnicities: Asian, Latino, Black ...
Sex: Anal, Bareback, Oral, Orgy, Solo, Straight ...
Fetish: Uniforms, BDSM ...
The icon would be very discreet: It would have a transparent background, the name of the subcategory with a font in white and an underline of the color defined for the category. I put some models that I made attached, but it's just the basics, it would be interesting to define a cool font later.
And there is also the possibility to rename, unify and create new categories as mentioned earlier, to be able to better represent or cover more things with a single category
I agree with the use of text and color only. I hate to say that after all of the work that obviously went into the icons with the illustrations, but the whole point of a pictogram or ideogram is that text is not needed. However, the meaning of most of the icons would be difficult to figure out if they didn't also have text. That makes the illustrations more of a distraction than helpful.