Do you sound gay? What our voic tell – and what they don’t | David Shariatmadari | The Guardian

Contents:

• GRDR'S NEW "GAYMOJI" OFFER A WHOLE VOBULARY BEYOND EGGPLANT AND PEACH
• GAY SE
• DO YOU SOUND GAY? WHAT OUR VOIC TELL – AND WHAT THEY DON’T
• SUMMER THE CY: A GAY MUNICH WEEKEND TRIP
• PHYSIL, BEHAVRAL, AND PSYCHOLOGIL TRAS OF GAY MEN INTIFYG AS BEARS

GRDR'S NEW "GAYMOJI" OFFER A WHOLE VOBULARY BEYOND EGGPLANT AND PEACH

Whout beg aware of , most people n accurately intify gay men by face aloneAlthough I've always wanted this particular superhuman power, I've never been very good at tectg other men's sexual orientatn. Fdgs om a recent study published the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, however, suggt I may be unrtimatg my gaydar abili. The January 2008 study vtigated people's abily to intify homosexual men om pictur of their fac alone.

GAY SE

In an ial experiment, rearchers Nicholas Rule and Nali Ambady om Tufts Universy pesed onle datg s and refully selected 45 straight male fac and 45 gay male fac.

The 90 fac were then shown to 90 participants random orr, who were asked simply to judge the target's "probable sexual orientatn" (gay or straight) by prsg a button.

DO YOU SOUND GAY? WHAT OUR VOIC TELL – AND WHAT THEY DON’T

Surprisgly, all participants (both men and women) sred above chance on this gaydar task, rrectly intifyg the gay fac. Then, they did a send search to fd other Facebook ers who had posted photos of the gay men their own profile.

"Th, " the thors wrote, "by g photos of gay and straight dividuals that they themselv did not post, we were able to remove the fluence of self-prentatn and much of the potential selectn bias that may be prent photos om personal advertisements. Aga, the thors superimposed the male fac (this time 80 gay and 80 straight) onto a whe background. And even wh the more strgent ntrols, the participants were able to intify the gay fac at levels greater than chance—aga even on those trials where the fac were flickered on the screen for a mere 50 lisends.

For example, when shown only the eye regn ("whout brows and cropped to the outer nthi so that not even "crow's-feet" were visible"), perceivers were amazgly still able to accurately intify a man as beg gay. That is to say, people seem to have honed and librated their gaydar whout knowg they've done so. But they also acknowledge that 's impossible to know om the fdgs what exactly is about the facial featur that give gays away.

SUMMER THE CY: A GAY MUNICH WEEKEND TRIP

I was cur enough about Rule's fdgs to look up "gay face" the Urban Dictnary, a popular Web se that offers rmal, er-ntributed fns of everyday (often crass) saygs. "A man, ually homosexual, wh a distctly effete facial stcture wh some very specific featur; a strong jawle [sic] that lacks promence, space between the ey that rell people wh down syndrome [sic], and a slopg, long forehead. Now, that one's rather silly and sensatnalized—even polilly spect—and there's certaly no scientific evince support of the claims about the "mongoloid" featur of homosexual men's fac.

Sce effemate gay men utilize siar facial exprsns as women, they velop female agg and mcle ntractn patterns their face. For example, gay face clus tightns around the mouth om pursg the lips, a facial exprsn mon to gay men and women—but not to heterosexual men. Also, gay men are more emotnally exprsive, leadg to a general 'tightns' and mcular activatn throughout the entire face.

Lbians also have a versn of gay face that emulat the facial mcular age patterns of straight men. For example, the send experiment, participants uld still ferret out the gay face when shown the eye regn sans eyebrows and cropped to the outer nthi.

PHYSIL, BEHAVRAL, AND PSYCHOLOGIL TRAS OF GAY MEN INTIFYG AS BEARS

In addn, ntrary to this urban fn, there may ed be subtle, yet prently unknown, differenc between gay and straight fac. (For example, one of my PhD stunts, David Harnn-Warwick, has a sual hunch that gay men may have sharper, clearer iris than straight men.

It was only a few years ago that rearchers disvered that, unlike straight men, gay men tend to have hair whorl patterns that n a unterclockwise directn. Grdr, the gay hookup app, released a new library of emojis, or “Gaymoji, ” this week, which clus h tak on the symbols we’ve been g for all of about three years now. I worry that by makg our sir rtoonish, we will all befuddle ourselv and actually seek out eggplant shaped genalia and will only want to sleep wh someone a bunk the Gaymoji are gog to go global and bee an entire new way for all to exprs our sexualy, then ’s wise to let gays try them out durg their clunky fancy and we will let you know how ’s gog a few.

Gay men ed a hanky the 1970s to signal their sexual appet, placg them the right or left back pocket to signal top or bottom. )But there was a time there, at least om, say, 1987 to 2003, when gay guys had to e old-fashned words and speech to nvey how we felt or what we wanted.