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5:48pm on Wednesday, 10th March, 2010:

Gaydar

Anecdote

Oh, here's something I haven't mentioned before: for some reason completely unknown to me, I have an excellent gaydar. Basically, I'll see or hear someone and out of nowhere will just know that they're gay. I don't ask to know it, and I don't seek to know it, I just suddenly know it. I have no idea how or why it happens, it just does. I noticed I was developing the ability in my late 20s, by which time I was married; I don't know if that has any bearing on it, but there you go.

When the signal goes off, I'm almost invariably right (at least I have been in cases where the result could be confirmed). That doesn't mean it goes off for every gay person that falls within its range, but it does trigger a lot quicker and a lot more often than it seems to for other people — even for some gay people. It's a bit annoying, actually, because the information is utterly useless to me: imagine what would happen if, every time you saw someone with red hair, suddenly you became aware that they were red-headed — that's how it is. Unless I were specifically wanting to discuss some matter of red-headedness with a redhead, why would I want an alert every time I spotted a redhead? Yet that's what happens with gay people. It's bizarre.

There are some limitations:

• It doesn't go off for women anywhere near as often as it does for men. This may be because I encounter fewer homosexual women than homosexual men, or because it doesn't detect them.
• It doesn't go off for gay men every time; it didn't go off for Stephen Fry, for example.
• Very, very rarely it can go off for men who aren't gay. Well, it's happened once as far as I'm aware: it triggered for a Californian guy whom I knew wasn't gay — in fact he was extraordinarily successful at attracting women. Maybe they thought he was gay, too, and lowered their defences?
• Sometimes, it only triggers when I discover from other sources that someone is gay. For example, although I sensed that Derren Brown had had some kind of self-identity problem in his past it didn't trigger for him; when I read in the paper that he was gay, suddenly it triggered. Great, tell me something I don't already know...
• It doesn't trigger for someone it's already triggered for, assuming I remember them.
• If it doesn't trigger, it doesn't warn me when I'm told someone is gay and they're not (which has happened in the past).

I mention this as a personal quirk that I can't help having and have no use for; I guess it could say something deep-rooted about my emotional attitude to homosexuality (which is basically DOES NOT COMPUTE), but actually I don't think this is the case — it's purely an observational thing. Hmm, I'll maybe explain what I mean some time in a post I've been intending to write for some time but have yet to get around to — look out for a future mention of bananas, fonts and Chinese women from behind...

Captain Jack — ping! But why?

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Copyright © 2010 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).