How’s your “Gaydar”

[SPARTAN047]

Not particularly good. I'm new to the scene.

Most of my gay friends' gaydar is much better developed.

 

[Britva415]

As far as knowing when a man is interested in you, there's one sign which is probably more reliable than any other single sign other than a direct verbal come-on, and that's: Lots of eye contact when he's not talking to you.

Among Western men, eye contact while talking is normal. Prolonged or repeated eye contact while not talking or not doing some other task which requires it - that's not the social norm, except to the extent that men flirting with men is a social norm. So if you notice a lot of direct eye contact from a man who isn't presently talking to you or hasn't spoken to you yet, that's a strong sign that he's checking you out.

Beyond that, if you want to develop your gaydar to the point where you can just tell someone's gay, find a way to hang around with a lot of different men who you already know are gay. That's how to get a sense of what gay men are like so you can recognize it in a stranger.

I just felt like adding on to this that there's more than one kind of eye contact, They're both clues that a guy is checking you out or seeing if you'll check him out.

Eye-to-eye contact is him trying to get your attention, trying to show himself to you. Trying to start something.
Then there's "eye contact" where he's not looking at your eyes, but just looking you over. Maybe he doesn't want to start something or get your attention, but he's checking you out. Your body, your crotch, your arms, chest, ass, even your face while not locking eyes with you. Sometimes it's brief and quick but there's something behind it which we can tell is not the way a straight guy looks at you, if he looks at you at all.

So those are clues that he has noticed you and is probably kinda gay for you This is different from "gaydar." Gaydar is just telling whether someone seems gay even when they aren't checking you or anyone at all out. @Funinkilts asked about that part, too, and for some people, their gaydar is better than their other radar, and for some people their "he's checking me out" radar is better than their gaydar. Some people aren't good at either one and some people are good at both.

 

[Britva415]

The "he's checking me out" radar is I think rooted in empathy. The skill of getting a sense of what someone's thinking or what their intentions are by subtle observations about their expressions, their behaviors, what they're paying attention to, what's behind their words when they say something without saying it, these are skills we employ in every conceivable social interaction and some people are really good at it and some people really aren't.

The "gaydar" partly comes from the above, but only partly. One can have gaydar without having a well-developed social empathy. So this part of it I think is rooted in the same kind of social perceptions we use to do things like knowing where someone's accent is from, or forming an impression about their education level or class status, or things like this.

It's a lot harder for gaydar to work if we just see a still picture of someone, right, but if we can see them talking or moving on video it's so much easier. The same things are true of the other social clues I mentioned: Have you ever seen a picture of someone and then been surprised when you saw them "live" by the way they talked or acted? Like the impression you got from the photo didn't match how the real live person would be. Without hearing someone talk or see them move or see them interacting with someone else, it's hard from just a face in a photo to know what their personality is going to be like or what their speech is going to sound like.

This is why I recommended hanging around gay people a lot in order for someone to develop their own gaydar. It's a little bit like - just for example, as a Yank, I wasn't able to hear the difference between Australian accents and British accents until I had been exposed to them a lot.

 

[Britva415]

And there's no one single way people "seem gay," there are a lot of different ways.

Some of them are probably cultural and acquired, so for a person to learn to recognize those, that's done the same way the other person learned to express them in the first place: By hanging around gay people.

Some of them are probably not acquired, and they happen because gay behavior really is different in some ways than straight behavior - and I'm talking about besides just sexual behavior. What is it in the nervous system which makes someone want men and gay sex instead of making them want women and straight sex? Hard to say, but whatever it is, I don't think it's controversial to say that it's not acquired and it affects more than just their invisible sexual interests. It affects them in ways other people can sometimes be aware of, because it influences visible behavior traits. They might be subtle and they might not be present or detectable in a lot of gay men, but in other gay men they're pronounced and noticeable.

So again it's a matter of meeting, knowing and getting familiar with a lot of gay men to start to recognize some of the patterns I'm talking about, both cultural ones and innate ones, until you can kind of just tell when you meet one you never saw before and get the feeling they're probably pretty gay.

 

[Foggybottom81]

With my luck I'd get punched in the face

 

[Foggybottom81]

Yep.

 

[SPARTAN047]

Not particularly good. I'm new to the scene.

Most of my gay friends' gaydar is much better developed.

Tough, though gay men also have more feminine tells, to add on to this — more 'emotional' and so on.

 

[Mike130]

Mine’s nonexistent. I did buy a pink shirt the other day with some embroidery around the collar, so I asked my wife if it looked ok or a little feminine. She said it would be a good shirt to wear to Palm Springs when we go in October. Not quite sure what she meant by that. We’ll see if I get any compliments on it and by whom. Since I don’t have gaydar and my wife will be with me it’ll be interesting to see what happens…

 

[Foggybottom81]

Palm Springs is a Mecca for hot gay studs.

 

[SPARTAN047]

Palm Springs is a Mecca for hot gay studs.

Oh, so that's it.

 

[Mike130]

Palm Springs is a Mecca for hot gay studs.

So I’ve heard. The question is, how will I know if I’m being approached without gaydar? Will my wife protect me from a large, juicy cock? Will she even care? Will she join in? Will I submit to suppressed desires?

So many questions…

 

[n2kay17]

non-existent also

 

[AddyB]

Hey!

Ok this might seem like a funny question!

But as I continue my self exploration, I have noticed that some guys sometimes look at me differently.

I wonder if some can tell that I bi, that I have these deep desires to serve and please them.

What are your thoughts? Just my imagination?

Lex
Xo

Broken.