Ok. I googled confirmation bias. I think that may be coming into play with me.
I don’t get the confirmation every time. Not even most of the time. But there have been plenty of times that I see a guy making out with his girl and say to myself, “can’t she tell he is gay?”
Gay man here. Until recently, you guys never had gaydar, only we had it. Now it seems like a whole lot of straight people, especially women, think they have gaydar. I have nothing to say about that, except to say that real gaydar, between two gay men, has nothing to do with the mouth. It has to do with the way he looks back at me when he knows I’m looking at him. And the way I respond when he catches me looking at him. I might hold his glance a little longer than a straight guy would. And of course I might be checking out more than his eyes.
But the dead giveaway is when I pass a guy on the street and then we both look back at each other. There’s no ambiguity about that.
But I do have another point: Younger people today, both gay and straight, are much more androgynous than they used to be. In the past, I could tell that about 5% of guys were definitely gay and the rest seemed straight; now, it seems like 5% definitely gay, 5% definitely straight, and 90% may or may not be either or both. That huge 90% in the middle have picked up some mannerisms that used to be exclusively gay, and are now totally acceptable for straight guys. Your “mouth-look” might fall into that category. I bet that most of the guys with that look are straight, so it’s no longer a valid gay characteristic.
You can’t tell just from looking, at least not all the time.
Back in the day, a friend and I would go to goth clubs together. He’s gay, I’m straight. Most night’s we’d make a game of trying to figure out whether a cute boy would be more likely to go home with him, with me, or with either of us… trust me, it’s harder than you’d think when most of the men have an androgynous body type and blur gender lines with makeup/clothing/jewellery.
Later on, in the rave scene, a friend of mine would constantly get hit on by gay men. He’s small, cute in a boyish sort of way, and doesn’t come across as typically masculine… plus, he went to art school and dressed very fashionably. Despite all this, they wouldn’t get very far because my friend happens to be a small, cute, unmasculine straight guy.
Some mannerisms are a dead giveaway, I’ll agree, but in my estimate I’m wrong about 10% of the time - I definitely have a tough time guessing when dealing with very manly-man gays, or very metrosexual straights.
Why would I even need gaydar? There are only four kinds of people:
[ol]
[li] People I want to sleep with and who want to sleep with me[/li][li] People I want to sleep with and who don’t want to sleep with me[/li][li] People I don’t want to sleep with and who don’t want to sleep with me[/li][li] People I don’t want to sleep with and who do want to sleep with me[/li][/ol]
I’ll worry about 2-4 after I get 1 figured out.
My response will be somewhat in connection with what I said in the other thread. Yes, of course their are some things that clue people into whether a man is gay or not – mannerisms, history, ways of speaking, including pronouns used, lack of pictures on workdesk (kidding), etc. However, even some men who are thought as the most obviously gay can get by some people.
I’m a gay man who just tries to be himself. Some people know automatically soon after meeting me (recognizable by how they relate to me). Some never have a clue. I’ve had two really good friends, who when I came out to them after knowing them a year or more, couldn’t believe it. One was still asking me a week later if I wasn’t kidding him. And I didn’t play the game of looking at or picking up girls to fool them either (I used to). There are also men who I would swear are gay who turn out not to be. I could have sworn on a silverplated Guttenberg Bible that Seth Gilliam was gay when I first saw him playing Pam’s boyfriend on the Cosby Show but apparently he’s not.
As I understood the downlown phenomenon when it first began to be widely written and talked about, it seemed to apply mostly to black men who had sex with other men but publicly were involved with women or seen as straight. This was in opposition to what was thought of as white, declaratively gay lifestyle (as mentioned by others upthread).
May I begin by saying thanks for the acknowledgement of my, hopefully, inspiring this thread? And, may I also say, your quoting and linking skills are fierce!
The fact that these men are involved with women and accepted, for the mot part as straight, is proof that one can’t always tell. If a woman who is intimately connected to a man who “downlows” and, presumably has sex with them, and eventually marries him can’t tell, to me, means there’s no universal “provable.”
I don’t think you’re ignorant (at least not in an obdurate way) and I don’t think you’re being harshly judgmental. From what I know of you, I think your spirit, curiosity, powers of observation and willingness to spend time around a number men are gay has sharpened your powers of perception. I just hope you don’t believe you can always know and I hope you can acknowledge, the gay men you’ve missed is proof that you can’t always tell by looking.
My question to you is this: for the men who are gay, you don’t know it and don’t know you don’t know it, what does this say about your theory.
Interesting article. I have a pretty good “gaydar” going by anecdotal evidence (which is all I have.) On my first day of my first class in college, I had a guy sit down beside me. I looked at him (didn’t even catch his eye) and thought to myself “he’s gay.” It took him a while to come out to me, though, because he was from a rural town like mine, where just being gay was enough to create more trouble than you eeeever wanted. We had been hanging out for a long time at that point.
The thing about photo tests is that they limit what we can see. There’s a similar test for identifying Asians of different nationalities, which I failed miserably - but in person, when I see how they dress and act and generally behave, it’s easier to guess. I think it’d be similar for identifying sexuality.
Having said that, I don’t have much of a gaydar. I’m better at it now, having lived in the US for over a year, but when I first came here (fall 2006) I had absolutely no idea. A lot of the guys in my grad school program were gay but I was clueless until told outright. I think this is because I was starting from a blank slate - there isn’t much of a gay culture in Korea, so I had no concept of what would differentiate a gay guy from a straight one. (Or that they are differenced that can be detected in the first place.) That is basically what a gaydar is, isn’t it? A social/cultural frame of reference in terms of how we expect gay men to behave?
The first sentence should have been the last in the post and should have began with “May I [say] . . . my [post], hopefully . . .” Since I’m nitpicking, the second sentence should have ended in a question mark. 
6 out of 16. Nope. I can’t.
Hijack- 5-4-Fighting, have you ever written more about your experiences here on the board?
I"m sure you know that I know there’s no one black/gay experience :), but I’ve wondered things like whether gay blacks experience more anti-gay prejudice than anti-black prejudice (or vice versa).
Historically I have pretty good radar for gay men, up to and including accidentally outing a couple of guys unwittingly. One was an adult Boy Scout leader who was VERY closeted–luckily, my comments were just to him alone because I could have gotten him into dutch if I’d said anything in public! Nowadays I just keep my big mouth shut until someone tells on himself. I think it has something to do with sizing up–a straight guy, no matter how unattracted to a woman he might be, will still size her up for fuckability. Gay guys don’t give that signal at all, and I think that’s what trips me off. A gay guy will generally flirt more with a woman than a straight guy who isn’t interested in a given woman will–doesn’t want to take a chance with her saying yes and having no good excuse. So it’s a good bet that a guy who flirts but gives off no sexual vibe is probably gay–and since I flirt with most people, male or female, I give myself lots of clues with which to make my assessment.
That being said, unless a chick has a mustache I’m pretty hopeless at figuring out if women are gay absent some fairly broad hints (no pun intended!) This might be because I’m kinda butch myself and a bit bi so all the signals are messed up for me. I just generally assume most women are kinda bi whether they act out on it or not, and handle any offers of intimacy with a simple “no thanks.” Unless she’s really hot… 
I had an interesting experience, in high school, in which several of my closest friends came out to me in the space of one week. I was around gay people so often, and around gay people who were mostly closeted, and around gay people who were really closeted and later came out, that I’ve generally come to the conclusion that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s 99% likely to be a duck.
My husband, however, asserts that I just jump to conclusions based on the strange circumstances of my young adulthood and in fact you can’t really tell. I have been wrong a few times. When my husband once confessed, ‘‘I have something to tell you’’ early in our friendship, I assumed he was going to come out to me. So clearly I have gotten ‘‘nerdy’’ and ‘‘socially awkward around girls’’ confused with ‘‘gay.’’ And also ‘‘British.’’ I confuse that with gay too. Well, it wasn’t a really fair circumstance. I heard my Spanish prof’s odd Spanish lisp for months before I heard him speaking in English and realized the ‘‘lisp’’ is really a British accent. He is clearly not gay because I fantasized about him all the time! :dubious:
My point is, yes, you can basically tell. I’m going to say 80% of the time if you think someone is gay you are probably right. But you can also be very wrong. Obviously people, gay or straight, come in all stripes and colors. But having spent a lot of time around gay men in particular I do have fairly accurate gaydar. The limp wrist and pink button-up shirt can be helpful hints in the right direction, but in the wise words of George Michael, ‘‘sometimes the clothes do not make the man.’’ It isn’t the way they dress or whether they are making a silly face in a photograph, but about how they respond to women. It is a very subtle undercurrent in social interaction that I’ve learned to pick up on over the years.
And actually, I should make that past tense – that I had learned to pick up on… because these days someone’s sexual orientation is about as interesting to me as their shoe size.
This is going to get me bukkake pitted I’m sure, but you can tell by the eyes when a man is gay - it’s almost like Down Syndrome. I don’t mean that it looks like they have Down Syndrome, but that there’s a certain characteristic of gay eyes that immediately reveals that the person is gay. It’s hard to describe - a sort of “pointiness” to the eyes, for lack of a better term. Look at Neal Patrick Harris (gay), Ian McKellan (gay), and you see the gay eyes. I think that it might actually be a convincing argument for a legit biological component to homosexuality.
Naw, we know you TLDR, not worth ANOTHER pitting.
15 out of 16!
I can tell fairly often. I don’t know what it is; I can’t say it’s the eyes, or the mouth, or something else entirely, but somehow I often sense it. Maybe it’s because I used to go out with my gay friends a lot in college, and men would hit on me pretty often. I don’t know.
Example: When I was in law school I had a classmate and slight acquaintance who I was certain was gay. Again, I don’t know why I thought so; I just knew. Then I noticed one day that he wore a wedding ring. So I thought, “OK, maybe I’m wrong, but I still get the vibe loud and clear.”
And then, when a bunch of us were out drinking directly after the bar exam, I ended up talking to him and he said something about his “partner.” I said, “Wait, you’re gay?” He said yes. I said, “But you wear a wedding ring?” (Yes, my ignorance was showing.)
He said, in a rather (and rightfully) testy tone, “Surprise! We form lasting commitments just like straight people!”
I apologized profusely for my obtuseness, and made it clear that I didn’t mean to offend, but had never seen gay couples wear rings. I thought it was really cool, actually.
Anyway, my point: I got the vibe loud and clear from him for three years, during which the evidence pointed to the contrary.
I’m certainly not claiming to be infallible; I’ve got two good friends whom I knew for several years and still had no idea they were gay until someone else mentioned it. (True story: I went to the home of one of them, and wondered idly why he had pictures on the wall of his “roommate” shirtless.) I just never sensed it from them.
But I definitely sense it from some people. I don’t know if it’s body posture, or a different kind of eye contact, or what. But it’s something.
But can she tell? I know a situation where it really does seem that the woman doesn’t want to see what everyone else can clearly see.
Thanks. When I first joined the board, a smart, funny, kind man showed me the ropes*.
I had to look up obdurate.
*Thanks for the skillz, 5.
Even though that’s a whole other discussion, there are people who really don’t know.
I was wondering if you’d thought about this question. There have to be some; even I’ve missed them.
After thinking that over, I guess it means I really can’t tell by looking.
I’ve been surprised so many times that I don’t even bother trying to figure whether people are gay or not. Except for ‘flaming’ gays, I’ve never identified any of my friends as gay until they told me, and I’ve occasionally assumed effeminate men were gay when they turned out to be straight.
Kind of like Cluricaun, I’m still unable to detect available straight women, and thus figuring out other peoples’ proclivities is not important to me.