On Failing Gaydar

Fred Bernstein writes for the New York Times:

The real reason my gaydar has failed is that there is no such thing as gaydar. No item of clothing, speech pattern, hairstyle or career choice (or even facial topography) is enough to identify someone as gay. In reality, the way you know, when you enter a room, if another man is gay is by seeing how he looks at you. If he maintains eye contact a split second longer than he needs to, or gives you a once-over, he’s gay. After all, those are things a man does if he’s interested in what he sees. So if I don’t have much gaydar anymore, it may be that not many men I come across are interested in what they see. In other words: At 55, I’ve become invisible to them, so they’ve become invisible to me. If they won’t check me out, I can’t check them off.

Gaydar Vending Machine

(Tipped by JMG reader Aaron)

Quote Of The Day - Jon Cryer

"I respectfully disagree. I want to stand up for all the slightly effeminate dorks that are actually heterosexual. Just cause the gaydar is going off, doesn't mean your instruments aren't faulty. I've had to live with that, and that's okay." - Jon Cryer, responding to Pretty In Pink costar Molly Ringwald, who says that his Duckie character was gay but didn't know it. Ringwald's statement has spawned a playful Twitter exchange between Cryer, Ringwald, and fellow cast member Andrew McCarthy.

RELATED: Ringwald will be a grand marshal of this year's Los Angeles Pride.

Rosie Sends A Gaydar Gun To Bachmann

Gaydar Inducts Marcus Bachmann

A clever PR move by Gaydar:

In light of Marcus Bachmann’s spike in popularity on gay and gay-friendly blogs across the U.S., internet dating megasite Gaydar.net is offering the the husband of Tea Party presidential candidate Michele Bachmann (R-MN) a complimentary lifetime membership. As a rep at Gaydar HQ explains, “Marcus Bachmann is popping up on everyone else’s gaydar, we figure he might want to be on the real Gaydar! With over six million members, we like to think Gaydar is the picture of inclusivity–from swarthy barbarians to piggy politicos–all are welcome!”

(Tipped by Andy Reynolds)

Three Angelic Hotties Were Waiting For The Pope As He "Swished By" In Britain

The gay dating site Gaydar stationed the above winged hotties on the Pope's route today. Via press release:

It's day two of the Pope Benedict's state visit to the UK. This morning he visited St. Mary's University in Twickenham, the same town where gay dating megasite Gaydar.net* is based. On arrival he was met by a large crowd of protestors, including a posse of Gaydar Angels, sent down to underscore the Pontiff's anti-gay stance. Much to the amusement of the gathered press, his procession took him past Gaydar's flock of winged muscle boys and not the eagerly waiting nuns at the other end of the street!

Do angels wear codpieces? More photos at the link.

You Know One When You See One

Dutch scientists say that an experiment using geometric shapes showed that homosexuals were more adept at identifying smaller shapes within larger ones, leading to the curious conclusion that there really is such a thing as gaydar.

A total of 42 men and women were shown pictures of outlines of large squares and rectangles, each of which was packed with smaller shapes. Our brains are wired to take in the bigger picture, meaning that if we are shown a square filled with rectangles and asked what is inside, we can easily be fooled into saying 'squares'. When the men and women were asked similar questions, the heterosexuals replied more quickly but were less accurate, the journal Frontiers in Cognition reports. The homosexuals took longer but got more answers right, particularly when asked about the smaller shapes, suggesting they were able to see the small details as well as the bigger picture. Or they were able to see the trees as well as the wood.

In everyday life, this attention to detail could help them work out people's sexuality. Researcher Dr Lorenza Colzato, of Leiden University in the Netherlands, said: 'This is the first time that scientific proof has been found for the existence of a gaydar mechanism amongst homosexuals. ‘This perceptual skill allows homosexuals to recognise other gay people faster and we think it's because they are much more analytic than heterosexuals.' Adopting such a perceptual style presumably increases the likelihood of detecting perceptual clues indicative of homosexual orientation, which facilitates finding like-minded social peers and potential friends and sex mates.

My "perceptual skill" tells me this study is crap.

Im Augenblick

According to a new study, gaydar works faster than we thought.

They showed men and women photos of 90 faces belonging to homosexual men and heterosexual men for intervals ranging from 33 milliseconds to 10 seconds. When given 100 milliseconds or more to view a face, participants correctly identified sexual orientation nearly 70% of the time. Volunteers were less accurate at shorter durations, and their accuracy did not get better at durations beyond 100 milliseconds, the team reports in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. "What is most interesting is that increased exposure time did not improve the results," says Ambady.

Romantic attraction likely works just as fast, notes psychologist Paul Eastwick of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. "If people make accurate judgments about sexually relevant aspects of a person this quickly," he says, "you have to stop and wonder how we size up one another's romantic potential in a matter of milliseconds."

Just 100 milliseconds to clock a 'mo. The story doesn't mention the orientation of the testers, but I'd bet you and I could cut that down to 50 milliseconds, easy.

Kleenex, Xerox, Gaydar?

England-based Qsoft Consulting, owner of the gay dating site MyGaydar.com, has filed a trademark infringement suit in Delaware, claiming they own the word "gaydar" after another company began using a similar domain name for their own gay and lesbian dating site. Qsoft's suit also contends that TDTong Ltd. violated the "Can Spam Act" by sending unsolicted messages to users of Gaydar.com's chat rooms.

This is sort of a reverse on the situation faced by products such as Kleenex or Xerox, who famously fought (some would say unsuccessfully) to keep their brand names from becoming generic terms for all similar products. Trademark lawyers say Qsoft will have a difficult time proving their case, saying "gaydar" is already a generic term.
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Homoblivious

Today's Word Of The Day over on UrbanDictionary.com is "homoblivious": Not having the ability to recognize homosexuals as being homosexuals; a lack of gaydar. Example: "He was so homoblivious that he didn't know that guy was coming on to him." Everybody got that?
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From The "That Was Fast" Department

Author and editor Ted Gideonse is pursuing his PhD in Anthropology and has just submitted this au courant paper: "So if you're a fag, He hates you, too: Donnie Davies, the phenomenology of gaydar, and the feminist call for parody."

"Davies" is a professional comedic actor. His parody of a “reformed homosexual” and Christian bigot, possibly unknowingly, does exactly what Weiss and Butler desire: subversion, disruption of performance, a “[recognition and affirmation of] the power of individual agency in the construction of, deconstruction, and reconstruction of the very terms of corporeality.

And later...

Effeminacy, then, except when done deliberately as camp, as it often is in Western gay culture, is an unconscious habitus-like movement, mimicry of “feminine” behavior. Once they reach adulthood, most gay men are keenly aware of how their behavior is interpreted. In order to pass, we will consciously sublimate whatever seems to be feminine in our movement and our speech; we become “the I that moves forms movement.” This constant policing of our behavior makes us particularly observant of effeminacy in others. Hence “gaydar.

Fascinating stuff. Read the paper here.
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