The Obsession With Gaydar

Dear Straight People,

Have you ever wondered how gay men are able to recognise one another? Since you clicked on this article, I assume that you do. In fact, this is actually something that I get asked pretty often. For some weird reason, straight people seem pretty keen to find out how gay men seem to have the uncanny ability to suss one another out.

I mean, just look at how desperate this random netizen on Yahoo is at finding out the answer!

Most straight people depend solely on their gaydars to tell them if someone is gay or not. The problem with that is that the gaydars of straight people is largely dependent on gay stereotypes.

How Straight People Think Gaydar Works

Like for example:

If a man is too pretty, too well-groomed or too muscular, heterosexuals will suspect that he is gay

If he takes too many selfies or has too many Instagram followers, that’s another sign

If he worships divas the same way straight white women worship Ryan Gosling, then your gaydars are probably ringing off the hook!

While those are definitely signs that allude to the guy in question being gay, stereotypes unfortunately do not apply to everyone which means that your gaydar wouldn’t work a lot of the time.

How The Gaydar Actually Works

The answer to how gay men figure out if someone else is gay is that we stare. Yes, that is all there is to it. We just stare. Like not a playful or seductive kind of stare. More like a really intense stare, the kind of stare you would imagine a serial killer give to his or her potential victims before they slit their throats out and throw the corpse into the freezer (Sorry I’ve been watching a lot of Scream Queens).

But ok back to the topic. So yes, the secret to how gay guys are able to recognise one another is that we simply stare the hell out of each other. If this gif epitomises your current reaction right now, let me explain

 The reason why we stare so intensely at other guys is that if the recipient of our creepy serial killer stare was straight, our strong eye game will make him feel really uncomfortable and so naturally, he will look elsewhere. If the guy in question is gay too, he will return our creepy intense stare with an equally creepy intense stare before one of us eventually breaks the tension by smiling and then we go on a date and live happily ever after.

Of course, the downside of this technique for recognising other gay guys is that if the recipient of our creepy stare is gay but not interested, he will look away as well. Which means we go back to depending on stereotypes and our gut feeling just like what straight people do in oder to determine the sexuality of other men. Except in our case, our gaydar will probably still be more accurate than yours because it’s easier for gay people to identify other gay people since we are gay ourselves.

Plus, as a lonely gay single man, my gaydar is switched on all the time so I don’t miss out on any potential prince charmings. Straight people on the other hand, only have their gaydars activated when the guy in question possesses a lot of typically gay attributes.

So there you have it straight people, the answer to your question is that gay guys are able to recognise one another by staring murderously into each other’s eyes. I hope that random netizen on Yahoo can finally chill now.

You might also like to read:

10 Straight People Tell Us What Turns On Their Gaydars The Most

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