Opinion: The Essence of Gay?

“My gaydar is a hundred percent effective!” exclaimed a friend of mine a few weeks ago, in response to my concerns about how I’m going to locate lesbians after moving to Norway. To conclude that we’re both KD Lang fans does not require a gaydar – her with a buzz-cut and me dressed entirely in Topman’s finest, it would merely require a set of half-functioning eyes – but I started to wonder about this gaydar thing. In the queer community it’s entered quite smoothly into our common lexicon (we all remember that L Word episode where the gang loitered around Dana’s tennis club on “a mission to ascertain the disposition and intent of one Miss Lara Perkins”), but is there really such a thing? And if there is, does it transcend cultural borders?

Some people describe tripping on salvia as experiencing infinity, but a number of others would argue that to achieve the same effect one could merely stroll into any gay club on a Friday night. Line after line of glittering, shimmying, slender gay boys ordering WKD Blues, continuing ad infinitum. Obviously that’s a huge generalisation, but isn’t it the same generalisation that lends credence to the concept of a quasi-Platonic Form of the Gay, of which all mortal gays are merely shadows reflected in the real world, and which forms the basis for this thing we call 'gaydar?'

Surely, the entire concept relies upon this hegemonic notion that all gays share a certain characteristic – whether that is something as obvious as raging flamboyance, or something a bit subtler like body movements or face shape? Defenders of the idea that gaydar exists in a real, useful way could point to a recent study from the University of Washington. The study was conducted to find out if we are able to guess a person’s sexuality from a their face or voice. The researchers found that we are correct a little more often than chance alone would predict. But, while this was a university study and is therefore fairly reliable as data, it also only used something like 200 students, which isn’t very many. This research, and similar studies, have been almost exclusively conducted in the United States so far, which provides us very little cross-cultural evidence for the gaydar.

In fact, anecdotal evidence from people I know who have travelled to other, vastly different parts of the world predicts that a western gaydar would be fried in cultures where it is normal for two men to walk down the street holding hands (as it is in parts of India). Faced with such a scene most of us would conclude that they’re definitely gay – I mean, they’re HOLDING HANDS – but surely what that actually represents is a collection of our own, westernised, perceptions about masculinity, femininity, social norms, and how each contribute to this idea of inherent gayness. We see two men holding hands as gay because it would be unthinkable in our culture for two bros to be walking to the pub hand in hand. So, unfortunately for me and my quest for Nordic lesbians, even though the concept of a gaydar is supported by some research, it probably works in much the same way as your region 2 DVD boxset of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy – disappointingly, only in the U.S.