“He’s definitely gay.” How can we tell if another man is into men? Gaydar isn’t a superpower, but it isn’t a complete fabrication either
You’re sitting in a café and at the next table is a man you know absolutely nothing about. Then he looks at you. You look back at him. The eye contact perhaps lasts a fraction of a second longer than is usual between two strangers. A few minutes later, you’re whispering to a friend: ‘I reckon he’s gay.’
But when asked how you knew, you suddenly can’t answer. His voice? His gaze? His gestures? His clothes? The way he reacted to you? Or simply ‘something’?
It is precisely this feeling that is popularly known as ‘gaydar’ – a portmanteau of the words ‘gay’ and ‘radar’. It is supposedly the ability to recognise a homosexual person without them directly revealing their sexual orientation. In the queer community, it’s both a popular joke and a quite real experience; sometimes we simply feel that we can recognise other gay people.
But the human body doesn’t have a built-in homosexuality detector. And there certainly isn’t a single hairstyle, voice, hand gesture or facial feature that can be used to reliably determine someone’s sexual orientation. Nevertheless, the whole phenomenon is more interesting than simply saying ‘gaydar doesn’t exist’.
Some studies have found that people get it right more often than by chance
Researchers have been studying the ability to guess sexual orientation for a surprisingly long time. One well-known study published in the journal *Archives of Sexual Behaviour*, for example, asked participants to assess whether people in photographs, short videos and voice recordings were homosexual or heterosexual.
The result? The estimates in the experiment were better than pure chance, but they were far from flawless. The researchers also found that people reacted strongly to displays of masculinity and femininity when making their judgements. The study ‘Dissecting gaydar’ in the *Archives of Sexual Behaviour*
And this is where we get to the crux of the matter. The fact is, people probably do not perceive ‘homosexuality’ as such. Instead, they observe various traits that their brain has associated with it – manner of speech, gestures, dress style, facial expressions, intonation or behaviour – and form a quick conclusion from these.
Gaydar is therefore perhaps less like a radar and more like a lightning-fast statistical estimate that the brain makes without us consciously thinking about it. And, like any estimate, it can be right or completely off the mark.
Can a gay man recognise another gay man just by looking at his face?
This idea is extremely appealing. Some older experiments did indeed suggest that people can determine a person’s sexual orientation even from a very brief glance at their face. However, subsequent research has shown that the whole concept has fundamental flaws.
A series of five experiments published in *The Journal of Sex Research* focused specifically on whether sexual orientation can actually be ‘seen’ in a face. The authors reached a considerably more sceptical conclusion – according to them, the so-called ‘facial gaydar’ cannot simply be regarded as the ability to read sexual orientation from facial features. A large part of these judgements may be shaped by other circumstances and, above all, by stereotypical expectations.
A man may appear very masculine and be gay. He may appear very feminine and be heterosexual. He may have perfectly groomed eyebrows, love fashion and have been living with a woman for ten years. Or he may wear a tracksuit top, drink beer, watch football and have a husband at home. Sexual orientation is not an anatomical feature.
Czech researchers also studied the voice
Interesting data was also provided by Czech research conducted by Jaroslava Varella Valentová and Jan Havlíček. In the study, participants assessed Czech men based on photographs and voice recordings.
When it came to voices, the assessments of gay men and straight women corresponded to some extent with the sexual orientation that the men themselves reported. When judging photographs, gay men were successful in this particular experiment, whilst straight women were not. However, the authors also pointed out that judgements are influenced by stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity and can easily lead to errors.
Even the so-called ‘gay voice’ is therefore no proof at all. More recent experiments focusing specifically on voice recordings have, in fact, yielded much more sobering results. In one such experiment, participants were generally inaccurate when making a binary judgement of ‘gay or straight’. Whilst they did rate some voices as sounding more homosexual, this is not the same as being able to reliably identify the actual sexual orientation of the person speaking. So perhaps we can pick up on something that strikes us as ‘gay’. That does not in any way mean that we are actually listening to gay people.
But why is a single glance across the bar sometimes enough?
Because in real life we have something at our disposal that laboratory photographs simply do not contain – interaction . This is perhaps the biggest difference between saying ‘judging by that photo, I reckon he’s gay’ and a situation where a stranger at a party returns your gaze for the third time. At such a moment, you don’t actually need to work out his sexual orientation. You can simply recognise interest.
Eye contact is a universal part of flirting. What’s important isn’t just that someone looks at you, but the whole sequence of reactions: a glance, looking away, another glance, a smile, turning their body in your direction, or looking for an opportunity to make contact.
Furthermore, a gay man may observe such signals sent by other men more attentively than most heterosexual men. The reason need not be anything mysterious. For his romantic and sexual life, the question ‘is this man also interested in men?’ is considerably more relevant. And the human brain is exceptionally good at recognising social patterns.
If someone has been meeting men for years, going to gay parties, using dating apps and flirting with other men, they gradually gain a vast amount of experience. They can then interpret a whole range of subtle cues automatically, without being able to describe exactly what led them to that conclusion. This is how that mysterious feeling arises: ‘I just knew.’
But are gay men really better at ‘gaydar’?
This might deal a minor blow to queer people’s self-confidence. It’s not actually the rule. A study that directly compared heterosexual and lesbian, gay and bisexual listeners in determining sexual orientation from a voice did not find that LGBT people possessed any clear-cut ‘superpower’. Instead, another interesting difference emerged – queer participants were less likely to automatically assume someone was heterosexual.
And this may explain part of the supposedly brilliant ‘gaydar’ in a surprisingly simple way. Heterosexuality is often regarded as the default in society. When you meet an unfamiliar man, most people automatically assume he is attracted to women until they are told otherwise. A gay person, however, may keep a second possibility open in their mind. What if he’s into blokes too? And if they allow for that possibility more often, they will inevitably spot it correctly more often as well.
The biggest pitfall of gaydar? ‘He’s carrying a handbag, so he must be gay’
And now comes the less amusing side of the whole phenomenon. Gaydar may just be a nice way of describing something that, under other circumstances, we’d simply call stereotyping.
Is he perfectly dressed? Gay.
Does he have a higher-pitched voice? Gay.
Doesn’t watch football? Gay.
Did he order an Aperol instead of a beer? Twice as gay.
The aforementioned series of studies published in *The Journal of Sex Research* revealed something even more remarkable. When researchers presented people with the claim that ‘gaydar’ really does exist, participants subsequently relied more heavily on stereotypical characteristics when determining sexual orientation. When, on the other hand, they were told that ‘gaydar’ might simply be another name for stereotyping, their reliance on stereotypes decreased. This has quite a significant social implication. If we say ‘it’s just that my gaydar works’, it may seem innocent to automatically associate homosexuality with a certain voice, profession, fashion sense or behaviour.
But a more elegant name doesn’t make a judgement any more accurate. What’s more, we have a psychological weakness – we remember the hits and forget the misses. If we label someone in a bar as gay and spot them on Grindr an hour later, it’s a story we’ll still be telling a year from now. When we confidently declare, ‘He’s definitely gay,’ and five minutes later his girlfriend turns up, we usually don’t count this failure as part of our gaydar’s lifetime statistics.
The problem lies in the very question: ‘gay or straight?’
Research into gaydar has another weakness, one that’s more apparent today than it was a few years ago. It often presents people with two options – homosexual or heterosexual. But human sexuality doesn’t necessarily work that simply.
What about a bisexual man? A man who identifies as heterosexual but has had experiences with men? Someone who is only just discovering their orientation? Or someone who doesn’t want to use any label at all? There is also a difference between sexual orientation, sexual behaviour, attraction and identity. In everyday life, these may overlap, but they are not necessarily one and the same. This is yet another reason why the idea of an infallible device that categorises men into ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ boxes is fundamentally problematic.
So, does gaydar exist, or not?
It depends on what we mean by the word. If we’re talking about a mysterious innate ability to look at a stranger and determine their sexual orientation with certainty, such a ‘gaydar’ has no scientific basis. Moreover, studies show that belief in it can reinforce stereotypical thinking.
However, if by ‘gaydar’ we mean the ability to pick up on many subtle social cues, experience gained from spending many years in queer circles, a sensitivity to flirting, and a willingness to even consider that the man in front of us might not be heterosexual, then the whole phenomenon doesn’t sound quite so absurd.
Some studies have indeed shown that, under certain laboratory conditions, estimates of sexual orientation can be more accurate than chance. At the same time, other research shows how easily these estimates are skewed by stereotypes and how much depends on the design of the experiment. So ‘gaydar’ isn’t a sixth sense. It’s more a mixture of observation, experience, context, flirting, cultural cues, unconscious assessment – and, unfortunately, sometimes prejudice too. And if you really want to find out reliably whether that charming man at the bar is into men? Even after dozens of scientific studies, humankind has not come up with anything more accurate than striking up a conversation with him.
