Living in a gay Mecca often gives one the opportunity to witness an interesting psychic phenomenon -- gaydar. That's the ability to determine another human's sexual preferences at first sight.
It seems to work. Sure, there are some visual cues that could "explain away" the phenomenon in the case of determining the sexuality of, say, a guy wearing pink tights and high heels, or a large woman wearing black motorcycle leathers and a T-shirt that says, "Don't laugh...this tongue has been inside your girl- friend more times than yours has," but it seems to work with more subtle people of the gay persuasion as well. Gays rarely seem to have made a mistake when approach- ing a member of the same sex with an assumption that they are fellow gays. I suspect it's a psychic phen- omenon of some sort, and related to centuries of having what they were being a *crime*. You didn't *dare* approach a member of the same sex with sex on your mind if you weren't sure that they were gay, too. So how do you *know*? What skills do you develop to "tell," skills that are important to your non-incarceration and continued survival? I think the skills are psychic. It's something that has more to do with the person's aura than it does their dress or mannerisms or speech. Maybe it's as simple as the metaphor "batting for the other team." It comes down to doing an instantaneous psychic scan when you meet someone, along the lines of, "Would I want this person playing for my team or for the other side?" Women claim to have better gaydar than men. The ones I'm friends with say that they can tell within a few seconds of meeting a man whether they're gay or not. Then again, I've seen the disbelief and the frantic paddling up the well-known river in Egypt when it's been pointed out to them that they are mistaken. "I *couldn't* have been wrong...I felt him looking at my ass." They don't want to believe that the guy in question was looking at their boyfriend's ass. And most of the women I've met have been absolutely *hopeless* at determining the sexuality of lesbians, whereas I tend to "detect" them pretty quickly, often when they're gazing raptly at the same female ass I am. Straight guys, in my experience, tend to focus on sur- face stuff when assessing another guy's sexuality. Does he "talk macho" enough? When the subject of "tonight's game" comes up, does he know *which* game, or even which sport, and if so who the odds-on favorites are? Their gaydar is, on the whole, about as accurate as their predictions as to who is going to win tonight's game. Me, I'm hit and miss. I have a tendency to form long and really fun friendships with lesbians, and so I tend to pick up on that aura fairly quickly. There is some- thing wonderful about having long, across-the-cafe-table conversations with someone with whom the whole sex thang is OFF the table. My gaydar is less reliable with guys, possibly because I'm not attracted enough to guys to spend any time checkin' out their auras. Who knows? And even though I'm clearly single, and clearly live in an apartment that fronts onto the gayest street in the gayest town in Spain, I rarely get mistaken for gay myself. Maybe it's simply that I'm not buff enough. Again, who knows? But still, the power went out in my apartment earlier today, and so I'm sitting in a sidewalk cafe across the street waiting for the electrician to arrive, and so I get to watch the Sunday Stroll. People of every pos- sible sexual persuasion are parading past my table en masse, because parading in front of cafe tables is just what Spanish people of any sexual persuasion DO on a Sunday. I wonder if there have ever been any scientific *tests* of gaydar. Select male and female subjects and arrange for them to sit down across a table from other men and women for a maximum of one minute and then write down whether the subject thinks that the sexuality of the people they met is hetero-, homo-, bi-, or a-. I suspect the results would be as fascinating as the crowd walking past me this Waiting For The Electrician, Or Someone Like Him afternoon...
