Gaydar

The supposed sixth sense that lets gay people spot other gay people at a glance: a play on radar, coined by us and now used by everyone.

Gaydar is the sixth sense that, supposedly, lets gay people spot other gay people: across a room, on a train, in a group photo, at a straight wedding. A look held a second too long, a certain way of standing, the shoes, and the gaydar starts beeping. It is a play on radar, and it is one of the most successful gay words ever, now used by everyone.

It is half a joke and half a real skill. Before phones could show you who was nearby, reading the signals was how we found each other. The old gay slang verb for it was to read someone, meaning to recognize another gay man and keep it to yourself.

Where it comes from

Green's Dictionary of Slang finds gaydar in print in 1982, in The Village Voice, where the writer says his gaydar tells him a good share of the men around him are gay, bisexual or undeclared. By 1991 the San Francisco newspaper Bay Area Reporter was defining it as "the mysterious ability of homosexual men and women to detect fellow homosexuals who may look, dress and act like heterosexuals".

Does it actually work?

Psychologists have tested it, and the answer is: a little. In a 2008 study, students shown photos of men's faces for just one twentieth of a second guessed their sexual orientation right 57 percent of the time, better than chance though far from perfect, and looking longer did not make them more accurate. So there is something there, but most of what people call gaydar is stereotype, and stereotypes miss the masc guy who is very much gay and flag the theater-loving straight guy who very much is not.

That is why the word can be a bit dangerous outside our circle. When straight people use their "gaydar" to decide who is gay, it often turns into gossip about men who never asked to be guessed at.

On the apps

For many gay men of a certain age, Gaydar is also a name: the British dating website of the same name, a gay institution long before Grindr. Today the apps have done most of gaydar's work for it, showing exactly who is gay and how many feet away. The joke survives anyway, and checking whether your gaydar was right is still one of the small pleasures of gay life.

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