In-Queer-Y: The Error with Gaydar

All the time we ask queer people what their sexual identity is. We ask their friends, they ask each other, we take guesses. The world is obsessed with finding out who is queer. On the surface level, this doesn’t seem like that big of a social issue. Labels serve a convenient purpose of seeing who is a possible romantic candidate, and asking someone’s identity is a way to not make assumptions about a person’s identity. But if you take a moment to look at when and how people inquire about each other’s sexuality, you’ll see that it all relates to the social construct of the gaydar, or gay radar, and prejudice.

First, let’s look at whose sexuality we inquire about: people who are perceived as being or possibly being queer. We ask boys with loose wrists and high voices who listen to Lady Gaga. We ask women who shave their hair short and wear flannel. To a certain extent this makes sense. The stereotypical gay person exists, because gay pop-culture exists and the gaydar filters those people out. Like Chicano culture and gay African-American culture, gay culture is the result of a group of people being told they are different in a bad way, that they do not belong. And from that sense of not belonging you see a community form, a minority that comes together and forms an identity separate from the majority, often with a sense of pride.

However, the error with the gaydar is that often it goes from using social markers to identify people who may be queer, to saying that queer people are a certain way when not all queer people fit in with that image. For the people who belong in a community but do not fit the image society has for them, this can create a strong sense of dissonance in one’s identity. Similarly, as a Latino, I have often been told that I do not ‘act very Hispanic.’ But I am Hispanic. Latinos do not ‘act Latino’ because they are inherently different from white people, but because there is a history and culture we are exposed to and often embody. Likewise being queer does not inherently make you ‘act gay.’ The difference is that unlike being black or Latino, being gay is not something we can prove in our skin color or ancestry. Sexual attraction is a personal, psychological experience; personal enough that it allows for people to speculate, bringing us to ask why it is to begin with people want to know if you’re gay.

Many say that the reason they ask is because they want to respect and not make assumptions about a person. But what is the harm in making assumptions? The harm comes from the fact that labels are not okay. We don’t want to risk assuming someone is gay, because being perceived as gay is bad, and you wouldn’t want to offend someone like that … unless they actually were. Some people say this is just to prevent yourself from accidentally flirting with someone who wouldn’t be interested in you. But people don’t only ask about a person’s sexuality when they’re available, like when we already know that they are.

If a gay man assumed his boyfriend is also gay and finds out he’s actually bisexual, what is the big deal? Why do queer people like to distinguish? There is stigma against bisexuals within the queer community. But what about when we aren’t interested in them at all, when we just want to know? “Darn, I was going to ask you out on a date,” is almost never the response someone gets when they answer that they are gay. A more common response is “I could tell.” And in my opinion this is the worst way to use your gaydar, because it comes from a place of taking novelty in someone’s identity, in testing how good your gaydar is, rather than learning about a person’s identity and experience.

While I’m not saying that it is never appropriate to ask someone about their sexual orientation, I think it’s important for everyone to start thinking about why they ask what the implications behind that are.