I think and, have thought a lot about characteristics and/or traits that would identify somebody or my persuasion. By that, I mean bi-men. Some guys are just too obviously interested in attracting men. There’s also the case of finding friends in a non-gay setting that has proved very problematic.

Last week on the local sports talk radio the host was mentioning, in a joking way, how it is uncomfortable to walk in the door and have a male co-worker say something like, “Oh, nice haircut. It really looks good.” However, I don’t necessarily think that’s a gay-suggestive comment. My friend Paul had one of his friends say that exact thing to him when we were at a restaurant last week. I just laughed and Paul said nothing. All three of us talked about it later. Those two are straight. I don’t say too much of that to Paul but, I did convince him to get out of his jeans and into some khakis, less t-shirts and more polo shirts and, some casual dress shirts for those casual business meetings. He’s happy about it.

Whatever that otherness is seems to come from somewhere deep within us. It mostly defies our efforts to disguise it. That’s what we mean by gaydar—not the skill of the viewer so much as the telltale signs most gay people project, the set of traits that make us unmistakably one.

The late psychologist and sexologist John Money famously called these the details of our “gendermaps,” which he believed are drawn primarily by life’s experience and social conditioning. Money planted some of the earliest flags in the nature-versus-nurture war by claiming that dysfunctional parents, not inborn biology, is what produced “sissy boys,” tomboys, and other gender variants.

Link: The Science of Gaydar – New Research on Everything From Voice Pitch to Hair Whorl — New York Magazine.