I know a bunch of women who have gone out with, or been interested in, guys who later turned out to be gay. For some of them it’s happened more than once. I think I have better gaydar than they do.
Oh, I have great gaydar. Just about every man I look at and think “mmmm, I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers,” he turns out to be gay. It’s enough to make me bang my head against a wall.
Gaydar is mostly a matter of not assuming the other person is heterosexual.
I think it’s a couple of factors.
You can ask a man if he’s gay. If he’s gay, hey, no harm done. If he’s not gay, hey, you can turn it into a compliment by saying it was because of his taste in clothes or something
Doesn’t work quite so well the other way around given the stereotypical lesbian. Even if you really do like her crew cut.
Then there’s bad data. Ladies, show of hands, have you ever tried to get rid of a drunk guy in a bar by claiming to be a lesbian? Worked, didn’t it? I don’t think the male equivalent occurs with any frequency worth noting.
I suppose straight women do have the problem with dating repressed gay men who “discover” their orientation… but I figure that’s rarer than the aforementioned “I’m a lesbian” to get rid of a drunk guy. It also provides an example of subtle clues with which to hone one’s gaydar, rather than false positives.
I donno. As the token Gay guy at work, whenever a new temp comes, the women in the office flock to me if they think he might be Gay (as if that person has given me the secret handshake or something).
I would say one or two women have pretty good Gaydar, but most of them don’t. Most women usually only ask if the guy is single, doesn’t weigh 290 pounds and bathes regularly. They seem to think all good-looking single guys have to be Gay, otherwise they wouldn’t be single.
But nobody was better at it than my late friend, Candy. She was proud to be FagHag Numero Uno…she could walk into a sold out Yankee Stadium, and if there was only one guy in the entire stadium who was Gay, Candy would pick him out in a megasecond. She was always fun to go out with on weekends…I think she seriously was able to figure out if a guy was Gay sometimes even before that guy realized he was.
I must go to the wrong bars. Usually this gets me an even more interested and now drooling drunk guy, who wants to know if he can “watch.” Ugh.
I usually tell them I have to call the babysitter and check on the kids. All 6 of them*. They’re more scared of single mothers than lesbians. 
*Untruth, BTW. I was a single mom for 6 years, but only of one small boy. He really wasn’t that scary when you got to know him. But I noticed the pattern, and now use my powers only for good.
I’d believe that. I have terrible gaydar.
No, you don’t go to the wrong bars, that’s how most guys are gonna react. Which is why I tell female friends NOT to do that.
A friend of mine was dancing at a club in England about a year ago. This girl, and her female friend, were both tired of being stared at and hit on that particular evening, so my friend came up with a brilliant idea: “Let’s kiss!” So they did.
You can imagine how that turned out.
No, no, WhyNot, I simply meant that your spelling of the word ‘romantic’ as romatantic sounded like something our fearless (if somewhat less than literate) leader might well say. I’m sure you wouldn’t say it out loud that way, though.
Just to keep this legal, I think I have excellent gaydar as pertains to men; not so accurate when it comes to women. I used to hang around a gay bar where it was simple for me to identify the men, although straight guys would also come in for a few drinks. However, a lot of the time, women whom I had pegged as fag hags would turn out to be strictly gay. I had to stop making passes at some of those women; it was getting embarrassing.
Dude I’d rather you just hit on me instead. THAT I know how to deal with. I wouldn’t be mad at you for asking me if I was gay. But still, I think I’d be a little embarrassed if you just flat out asked me like that. Plus that’s a little bruising to the ego as well.
This goes times infinity if you asked me in front of my guy friends. Jeez! I’d never hear the end of that one…
Anyway, that’s just me though…
What would be the best way to ask something like that? Wait until you aren’t surrounded by such folks?
fizzy will routinely say, when I comment with some amount of certainty that a particular person is not heterosexual, “[myname]. Not EVERYONE is gay!”
To my credit, I have never been proven wrong. However, it isn’t all that common for such information to be divulged, either.
There are only two people, if memory serves, who correctly guessed that I was not straight at a time when I was not flaming. Both female, neither straight herself. Take that as you will.
I find that women have better gaydar because they’re often more perceptive. Also, while homophobia is a universal reality between genders, homosexuality in women is at least accepted by many men. So women can be more open about being GLBT and having a gaydar.
Oh, and for further refutation of the idea that women automatically have stronger “gaydar”? Look at Liberace! Practically ALL of his fans were women, and most of them seemed utterly oblivious to the obvious!
My grandmother loved him, and more than once I heard her wondering aloud why such an attractive, talented man never married.
Sigh… I guess he just never met the right girl, Nana!
I strive to have lousy gaydar. I don’t want to pigeonhole people according to sexual preferences, and the attached stereotypes. Unless a man makes a point of acting like a “stereotypical queer,” then it’s none of my business where he sticks his dick. If he makes a pass at me, though, I guess he has made it my business to politely turn him away. That’s rare; I suppose they have better gaydar than I do.
It has been my observation that male gaydar works quite well on men, and female gaydar on women. I (straight male) grew up (let’s not talk about the number of decades ago, here) near what we called a “gay town”. We are talking 7 large gay bars, and a population of around 2000 people. I never once thought a guy was gay when he wasn’t, even if they outed much later. Obviously, I wouldn’t know if I thought a guy was straight and he wasn’t. Even more than now, back then, a guy just didn’t ask another guy if he was gay. While my accuracy was better than most, I only know one guy with worthless gaydar. Oddly, his wife has to tell him their gay waiter is hitting on him in front of her; apparantly, this happens a lot. (I’m about as straight as they come, and only one gay has ever hit on me, so I gay male gaydar seems to work fine most of the time too. Or, I’m just not very appealing.)
Most women I know have worthless gaydar on men, but they are much better at detecting lesbians. Heck, two of the five houses on my street are owned by three lesbian women. The only reason I know is that they are open about it. (Well, I could figure out the couple, but my gaydar is worthless.)
Of course, as long as we are dealing with sweeping generalizations, I’ll even claim guy’s “jerkdar” works better on guys than women’s. I’m sure the reverse works out, also. But, that would be a different thread.