You can certainly tell something just by looking, but what? In American slang, the word “gaydar” is commonly used to describe a special skill gay people possess, the ability to know at a glance whether someone else is gay or lesbian. In theory, gaydar decodes factors such as clothing, body language, facial expression, pitch of voice, and overall attitude.
Gay men and lesbians often discuss gaydar very tongue in cheek, as if it’s a homosexual superpower of detection. But gaydar is more than a joke. It raises serious questions. In a world in which most people are presumed to be straight, how do lesbians and gay men find one another? Gaydar is invaluable in helping gay men and lesbians figure out whom they can safely flirt with. Is this a bromance or a potential romance? Is this a date or are we just having drinks after work?
Gaydar is, quite simply, a skill that everybody—gay or straight—has: intuition. We all have developed skills at reading signs and cues to assess whether someone is interested in us romantically or sexually. But intuition is not hard facts. How much do we need to know about a person to make a snap judgment? What kind of knowledge are we talking about here?
The myth that you can tell just by looking is part of an impulse to categorize and sort the world. The belief that it is possible to see, or “get,” someone’s sexuality from visible bodily traits, or listen for it in the lilt of a male voice or the deep alto of a woman’s, comes in part from the widely held view that sexuality, and maybe especially a marginalized sexuality, is evident in every facet of a person’s being. When a gay man walks down the street, he does so like gay men do. When a lesbian laughs at a joke, she is laughing like lesbians do. The individual is seen as inseparable from the group identity. And, if a gay person commits a crime, there is a presumption that it is connected to that individual’s gayness, and that all gay people may want to do this too. In contrast, crimes committed by people who are seen as “mainstream” are never understood to be caused by their belonging to a specific group. When was the last time an editorial argued that Wall Street fraud revealed the potential criminality or untrustworthiness of all white men? If you belong to the dominant group, you get to be an individual. You are not representative of an entire group.
We commonly sort out people by sexuality, race, sex, religion— “just by looking.” We are also frequently inaccurate. None of these identities is as readily detectable as we think. Accurate or not, however, this sorting affects our conscious and unconscious behavior toward people. No matter who we are, we might act differently around a white person (or a person we think is white) than a black person (or a person we think is black). This is also true for someone we identify as a woman rather than a man. Our behavior may also change around someone whose religious identity is visible to us by a yarmulke, turban, veil, or cross. At its worst, for many heterosexuals, the belief that you can tell who’s gay just by looking rests on the belief that gay people will somehow stand out from the crowd because they can never really be part of the crowd.
Gaydar may be useful for lesbian and gay flirting, but there is a history of heterosexual gaydar, too. And it isn’t pretty. Gay people are now allowed to serve openly in the armed forces, but in World War II psychiatrists developed their own version of gaydar to catch them if they attempted to enlist. These doctors assessed whether men and women fit a psychologically based homosexual type. They conducted interviews and physical exams to see if a recruit expressed a sense of superiority or fear because both were associated with homosexuality. They looked for signs of traditional masculinity or effeminacy in men’s bodies, mannerisms, emotional makeup, and interests.1 They used similar calculations for women who enlisted. But this was more complicated since volunteering for military service already placed women into a traditionally nonfeminine role. Of the sixteen million men who enlisted, only about ten thousand were rejected after being identified as homosexual.2 This was far, far fewer than the number of those who were actually homosexual or who would have homosexual relations during their time in the military.
Was the medical gaydar not working? In numerous cases the doctors let lesbians or gay men join because the military needed troops. But the larger reality was that doctors weren’t seeing everything. Their measures were simply not reflective of how people displayed, never mind lived, their sexuality. Worse, the gender stereotypes these tests used led to discrimination and abuse. Some lesbians and gay men could easily “pass” to be accepted, but some could never pass—then or now—even if they wanted to.
The gender stereotypes of homosexuality were connected to then-contemporary explanations of homosexuality. In 1947, psychoanalyst Clara Thompson wrote that lesbianism was caused by improper parental role models and excess leisure time during childhood. Lesbian adults manifested these root causes in later life via gender nonconformity, or mannishness, and aimless lounging about. Thompson believed a trained specialist could spot lesbianism by looking for these signs. Psychiatrists also linked particular professions to these gender stereotypes. People, straight and gay, still equate florist with gay man and UPS driver with lesbian.
These gender stereotypes also shape ideas for straight people about how they are not supposed to look. Many heterosexuals are very careful not to exhibit “gay” looks or behavior. Straight men who go out to dinner together, sometimes referred to as a man date, may choose a restaurant that does not look or feel romantic.
Despite the negative effects of the World War II psychiatrists, not all gender role stereotypes are detrimental. Depending on who is looking, these stereotypes can help gay people find partners and even form communities. For example, by the 1930s, lesbians had created butch, femme, and kiki (indicating women who were neither butch nor femme) gender roles to indicate the kind of sexual partner they desired. Butch/femme borrowed aspects of male/female gender differences, but asserted them in a very different sexual and political context.
Gay men’s and lesbians’ uses of coded signs and stereotypes to spot others were not necessarily a fun game, but vitally necessary for safety. Until 2003, when the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, same-sex sexual activity was illegal in many states. Gay men, for example, developed a system of codes so they could identify one another without being as easily identifiable to the law. They used types of dress, hairstyles, affectation, and gesture to communicate their identity. They might also use phrases with particular vocal stresses to convey interest. There were several meanings to the phrases “Have a light?” or “Nice day.” In the first half of the twentieth century, when gay men needed to form communities in order to find sexual partners, they used these codes to meet in bars and restaurants; paradoxically, homosexual privacy could be had only in public.3 Often the desire for this prohibited socializing, along with the complexity of these secret signs, gave gay male life an added erotic charge.
The history of how lesbian and gay men communicated desire between one another tells us that looking is only one aspect of telling. Messages between people make sense only in a larger context and in relation to others. What there is to tell depends on what you’re looking for: immediate sexual pleasure, flirtation, conversation, or something else. People aren’t always looking for the same thing. They may not even know what they’re looking for. Desire and attraction are not straightforward or logical. They are filled with ambivalence, ambiguity, and mystery.
Eyes—how we look—communicate many things. A steadily held gaze can be a form of sensual touch and invitation. Looking can also be a form of aggression, in the sense of staring someone down. Experts on body language say that we hold our gaze with people we like or we want to like us.4 Eye contact is one of the most intimate forms of communication because a look or gaze can only be held between two people at a time. If someone does not meet and return our gaze, we assume that person is not interested. A long, lingering look between two people is often quickly sexualized. While we don’t really know what other people are thinking, our imagination fills out their thoughts, making our desirous conjectures very real. We then wonder, “Will the other person imagine along with me?” And if or when this look becomes a stare, we worry, “Will the other person beat me up?” Looking brings to the surface many possibilities, some good, some dangerous.
Recent experiments on the science of gaydar have explored how we process our impressions, and even our desire. Mainstream media have frequently exaggerated the modest, preliminary conclusions of many of these studies and proclaimed, “Yes, gaydar is real!” As we’ve seen, there is something very real about it. We also must place all such claims about gaydar in context. These studies help us understand how much more complicated and unknowable that context might be.
Nicholas Rule, an openly gay psychologist, has taken the lead on exploring the science of gaydar. He has conducted experiments that ask participants to determine whether a person is gay or straight based on how that person appears in a photograph. The photos are taken from profiles of people who self-identified as gay, lesbian, or straight on dating and hookup sites. Participants look at these photos out of their original context. They have no clue whether a particular photo was taken from a gay, lesbian, or straight site. Fascinatingly, Rule’s studies show that the accuracy rate in picking out lesbians and gay men from straight men and women is, on average, 64 percent. This result is “significantly better,” he explains, than the 50 percent that chance guessing would yield. Most important, this accuracy rate holds steady even when a participant views only a subject’s eyes, excluding eyebrows and even wrinkles, or just the mouth. The race or gender of the participants who were trying to determine the subjects’ sexual identity, or that of the subjects themselves, had no effect on the accuracy rate. Neither did racial stereotypes of, for example, Asian men as effeminate and, thus, gay, or of black men as masculine and, thus, straight.
The results of Rule’s experiments become even more suggestive when you consider that the accuracy rate has remained the same when study participants view the images, including just the eyes or mouth, at millisecond speeds. We don’t know what participants “saw” in a face or eyes or a mouth. All that these studies prove is that participants often connected something in these images with the photographic subjects’ self-identified sexuality.
How can we explain these results? Could self-identifying as gay or straight affect how a person’s eyes or mouth appear? Is that just magical thinking? Does the legibility of sexual identity in these studies have something to do with the subject “wanting” to be read as one of three supposedly distinct identities: lesbian, gay, or straight? Importantly, people who identified as bisexual were not accurately judged at levels higher than chance.
We all decipher desire—whether cruising in a bar, attending a work party, sitting in the bleachers at a ball game—according to certain rules. These rules vary with the situation and shape our actions and responses accordingly. Rules can take the form of signs that cue us in to what might be an appropriate response. But what happens when we do not have obvious cues or stereotypes to lean on? What are we supposed to do then? Can our very desire to know something about a person also function as a kind of constraint, or rule, that directs where and how we look? The fact that our imagination is at play here does not make gaydar any less accurate. Empathy works in a similar way. When we feel empathy for others, we often want them to know that we know how it feels to be in their shoes, because we’ve experienced something similar. Empathy allows people to infer or read emotion across cultures and groups. Of course, greater familiarity with a particular culture offers additional help. One of Rule’s studies shows that gay men are more consistently accurate in identifying homosexuality than straight men. Might desire and empathy be working together?
We want to know more. We want to see more. This does not mean we instinctively know what is behind a face. Nor does it mean that the totality and complexity of each person’s sexuality can be seen with complete accuracy. Rather than thinking about a person’s sexuality as his or her essence, or even as a containable and, thus, an easily identified and measurable part, we should think about sexuality as a process. When two people, gay or straight, are looking at each other with desire across a room, maybe they are asking themselves what they like about each other and who they really are.
If we think about sexuality in this way—as a form of unspoken communication, as an ongoing question rather than an answer—it may open up an intriguing possibility for all the manifestations of gaydar. At heart, maybe gaydar has nothing to do with seeing either gayness or gayly, but seeing desire. Can a person indicate by look and demeanor, even in a photograph, that he or she is approachable? Sexuality is a matrix of associations that paints a picture of each of us. Looking creates an intimate world of human relations. Can telling by looking, and the give and take between people, not just communicate desire but actually instigate it? In some ways, “You can tell just by looking” may be a very subversive idea. It opens the door to new conversations about what we see, how we see, and what it means to us. Gaydar is less about spotting (for good or ill) gay people than it is about how we all communicate desire.
The hysteria surrounding homosexuality in our culture betrays a deep-seated fear: gay people are not really different from other people but rather too much like everyone else—and maybe everybody is a little bit gay, and a little bit straight. The myth that you can tell just by looking reveals that sexuality and sexual desire do not so readily sort themselves into the categories of gay or straight. When you lock eyes with a person, whether or not you’re attracted to each other, you can make sense of the world you create together only by leaving many preconceived ideas, beliefs, and identities behind.