One of our straight testers said it's no surprise he guessed wrong. The man who got the highest straight score - was gay. Most testers identified two men as straight, because of their "bad hair."īut of course none of this is 100 percent reliable.
It's a gay 1980s outfit."Īnd apparently, there's a straight look. Singling out one subject, a tester said, "It's basically the flannel shirt, the Levi 501s and the combat boots. More people mentioned voices, or clothing. "I think gay men have their eyebrows up," one tester said. Others said a few of the men's eyes tipped them off. What tipped them off? Some said speech patterns did it. I got 60 percent right, so I don't know if I have a good gaydar or not. "The visual part of it, I think, is very important because I socialize with a lot of gay friends, and I think it has to do something with the clothes and maybe their affect. Since a lot of cues about sexuality are tied to the way people speak, I asked her how she knew. Our testers never talked about masculine or feminine, but most claimed to see clear signals - including a deaf woman in our group. And it's an important scientific fact and we need to understand it better," Bailey said. "On average gay men are more feminine in certain ways than straight men. Some gays have criticized Bailey, saying he's just perpetuating the stereotype that gays are effeminate. * Straight men tend to slouch, gay men tend to sit a little more neatly. Gay men do more movements from their elbows down. * Straight men tend to move in their arms from their shoulders more. In his book, "The Man Who Would Be Queen," he gives reasons why. Even when all they saw was a 10-second videotape, or just listened to the subjects' voices, they were right about who was gay more often than not. On average people do far better than chance," said Bailey.īailey's more scientific tests found graders to be accurate more than 70 percent of the time. But they were 60 percent correct - better than chance. Had they made random guesses, they would have been 50 percent right. On the whole, the testers did pretty well. It wasn't a scientific test, but Northwestern University psychology professor Michael Bailey, who has done scientific tests of gaydar, said the test was valid. No one was allowed to ask any direct questions about sexuality.