I knew I was doing something wrong but didn’t know what. I’d never had a boyfriend or even slept with a man, and I didn’t particularly like going on dates with men or hanging out with them, but I thought that was normal - all of my friends constantly complained about the guys they were dating. Until then, I had assumed I was straight I was just really, really bad at it. I was excited to meet her, but it was all happening so fast (if you don’t include the 28 confused years preceding it). I had sent Lydia the first message, asking to read the gay Harry Potter fanfic she had mentioned in her profile. It would be my first-ever date with a woman, made approximately 10 days after I came out to friends as “not straight, but I’ll get back to you on exactly how much” at the age of 28. Our first date was for drinks on a Monday night after a workday I had spent trying not to throw up from anxiety. Reuter.Lydia and I met thanks to a quiz, the multiple-choice OkCupid personality assessment, which asks for your thoughts on matters like “Would a nuclear Holocaust be exciting?” (that’s a “no” from me) and then matches you with those you’re least likely to hate. The following books have more information on the "gaydar" phenomenon: "The Man Who Would Be Queen,"by Michael Bailey, and "Gaydar," by Donald F. Bottom row, left to right: straight, gay, gay, straight, straight. Top row, left to right: straight, gay, gay, gay, straight. How good is your gaydar? Here's who's straight and who's gay in our top photo.
The real deal is: gaydar does exist, but it is often wrong. I'm attractive, which automatically means you're gay," he said.Īnd this underscores how all this oversimplifies. The straight test subject who had the highest "gay score" among the straight guys said he was used to being mistaken as gay. There were plenty of wrong guesses on our test too. However, Bailey, in his tests, found gays' gaydar is no better than straights' gaydar. Who else out there has these same things? And you learn to pick up on just the littlest things." One said, "I notice things that are different about myself from other people. On the other hand, many gays said they have better gaydar because they've needed to develop it to find partners. I really have no need to look at you guys and say who's gay and who's straight," he said. One of our straight testers said it's no surprise he guessed wrong. The man who got the highest straight score - was gay. Most testers identified two men as straight, because of their "bad hair."īut of course none of this is 100 percent reliable. It's a gay 1980s outfit."Īnd apparently, there's a straight look. Singling out one subject, a tester said, "It's basically the flannel shirt, the Levi 501s and the combat boots. More people mentioned voices, or clothing. "I think gay men have their eyebrows up," one tester said. Others said a few of the men's eyes tipped them off. What tipped them off? Some said speech patterns did it. I got 60 percent right, so I don't know if I have a good gaydar or not. "The visual part of it, I think, is very important because I socialize with a lot of gay friends, and I think it has to do something with the clothes and maybe their affect. Since a lot of cues about sexuality are tied to the way people speak, I asked her how she knew. Our testers never talked about masculine or feminine, but most claimed to see clear signals - including a deaf woman in our group. And it's an important scientific fact and we need to understand it better," Bailey said. "On average gay men are more feminine in certain ways than straight men. Some gays have criticized Bailey, saying he's just perpetuating the stereotype that gays are effeminate. * Straight men tend to slouch, gay men tend to sit a little more neatly. Gay men do more movements from their elbows down. * Straight men tend to move in their arms from their shoulders more. In his book, "The Man Who Would Be Queen," he gives reasons why. Even when all they saw was a 10-second videotape, or just listened to the subjects' voices, they were right about who was gay more often than not. On average people do far better than chance," said Bailey.īailey's more scientific tests found graders to be accurate more than 70 percent of the time. But they were 60 percent correct - better than chance.
Had they made random guesses, they would have been 50 percent right. On the whole, the testers did pretty well. It wasn't a scientific test, but Northwestern University psychology professor Michael Bailey, who has done scientific tests of gaydar, said the test was valid. No one was allowed to ask any direct questions about sexuality.