“GAYDAR” colloquially refers to the ability to accurately glean others’ sexual orientation from mere observation. But does gaydar really exist? If so, how does it work?
Our research, published recently in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, shows that gaydar is indeed real and that its accuracy is driven by sensitivity to individual facial features as well as the spatial relationships among facial features.
We conducted experiments in which participants viewed facial photographs of men and women and then categorized each face as gay or straight. The photographs were seen very briefly, for 50 milliseconds, which was long enough for participants to know they’d seen a face, but probably not long enough to feel they knew much more. In addition, the photos were mostly devoid of cultural cues: hairstyles were digitally removed, and no faces had makeup, piercings, eyeglasses or tattoos.
Even when viewing such bare faces so briefly, participants demonstrated an ability to identify sexual orientation: overall, gaydar judgments were about 60 percent accurate.
Since chance guessing would yield 50 percent accuracy, 60 percent might not seem impressive. But the effect is statistically significant — several times above the margin of error. Furthermore, the effect has been highly replicable: we ourselves have consistently discovered such effects in more than a dozen experiments, and our gaydar research was inspired by the work of the social psychologist Nicholas Rule, who has published on the gaydar phenomenon numerous times in the past few years.
We reported two such experiments in PLoS ONE, both of which yielded novel findings. In one experiment, we found above-chance gaydar accuracy even when the faces were presented upside down. Accuracy increased, however, when the faces were presented right side up.
What can we make of this peculiar discovery? It’s widely accepted in cognitive science that when viewing faces right side up, we process them in two different ways: we engage in featural face processing (registering individual facial features like an eye or lip) as well as configural face processing (registering spatial relationships among facial features, like the distance between the eyes or the facial width-to-height ratio). When we view faces upside down, however, we engage primarily in featural face processing; configural face processing is strongly disrupted.
Thus our finding clarifies how people distinguish between gay and straight faces. Research by Professor Rule and his colleagues has implicated certain areas of the face (like the mouth area) in gaydar judgments. Our discovery — that accuracy was substantially greater for right side up faces than for upside-down faces — indicates that configural face processing contributes to gaydar accuracy. Specific facial features will not tell the whole story. Differences in spatial relationships among facial features matter, too.
Consider, for example, facial width-to-height ratio. This is a configural physical feature that differs between men and women (men have a larger ratio) and reflects testosterone release during adolescence in males. Given that stereotypes of gender atypicality — gay men as relatively feminine and gay women as relatively masculine — play a role in how people judge others’ sexual orientation, our finding suggests that cues like facial width-to-height ratio may contribute to gaydar judgments.
Another novel finding: in both experiments, participants were more accurate at judging women’s sexual orientation (64 percent) than at judging men’s (57 percent). Lower gaydar accuracy for men’s faces was explained by a difference in “false alarms”: participants were more likely to incorrectly categorize a straight man as gay than to incorrectly categorize a straight woman as gay.
Why might “false alarm” errors be more common when judging men’s sexual orientation? We speculate that people overzealously interpret whatever facial factors lead us to classify men as gay. That is, it may be that straight men’s faces that are perceived as even slightly effeminate are incorrectly classified as gay, whereas straight women’s faces that are perceived as slightly masculine may still be seen as straight. That would be consistent with how our society applies gender norms to men: very strictly. (Decades of research has established that, at least in our culture, it is considered much more problematic for a boy to play with Barbie dolls than for a girl to play rough-and-tumble sports.)
We know that gaydar research may elicit discomfort. To some, the idea that it’s possible to perceive others’ sexual orientation from observation alone seems to imply prejudice, as if having gaydar makes you homophobic. We disagree: adults with normal perceptual abilities can differentiate the faces of men and women, and of black and white people, but such abilities do not make us sexist or racist.
Though gaydar may not be driven by homophobia, it is relevant to discrimination policy. One of the arguments against nondiscrimination protection for lesbian, gay and bisexual people is that if sexual minorities concealed their identities — à la “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — discrimination would not be possible. We believe that such policies are unfair. But fairness aside, scientific experiments like ours indicate that such policies are also ineffective: discrimination against sexual minorities would not be eliminated by nondisclosure of sexual orientation, since sexual identity can be detected through appearance alone.
Should you trust your gaydar in everyday life? Probably not. In our experiments, average gaydar judgment accuracy was only in the 60 percent range. This demonstrates gaydar ability — which is far from judgment proficiency.
But is gaydar real? Absolutely.
from The New York Times / Joshua A. Tabak & Vivian Zayas

Mitch Stein (center), partner Hugo Horta (left), daughter Devynn (right)

COVINA, CALIFORNIA – A corn dog and a few drag queens were never meant to wreak such havoc.
But there they were, captured in photos deemed inappropriate because of their “sexual content.”
It was an August afternoon and Mitch Stein was asked to see the principal of Covina’s Charter Oak High School, where he worked as an assistant water polo coach. Someone had anonymously dropped off printouts of Stein’s Facebook and Myspace pages. The envelope included a photo of Stein wearing eyeliner and surrounded by men decked out in bustiers, wigs and makeup. Another showed him at the L.A. County Fair, pretending to take a large bite of a batter-dipped hot dog.
Harmless photos taken in good fun, Stein insisted. But administrators weren’t amused. Stein was fired.
The 36-year-old has since filed a wrongful termination suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court, accusing Charter Oak Unified School District of “animus toward gay and lesbian employees” and of holding him to a different standard because he is gay. He seeks an unspecified amount of money in damages and wants the incident expunged from his personnel record. Stein also wants his coaching job back.
In the wake of Stein’s dismissal, parents and students have rallied around the former assistant coach, who still helps raise funds for the team. At the same time, the case has revived old accusations of anti-gay sentiments within the school district’s administration.
Taking the position seemed a no-brainer to Stein when he began in May 2011. Charter Oak was his alma mater, he knew the head coach, and his daughter would be attending as a freshman. He had a lucrative and flexible job as a producer in the TV industry and years of experience coaching water polo.
He led the boys junior varsity team through an undefeated summer season and was preparing to continue his role in the fall when he was summoned by the school’s principal, Kathleen Wiard. In her possession was the corn dog photo and one of Stein among drag queens. Stein said Wiard called the photo “obscene” and asked whether he would approve of a male teacher posing with his daughter in a swimsuit.
“I was like, ‘Now you’re calling me a pedophile?’ ” Stein said. “How does one have anything to do with the other?”
Wiard declined to comment for this article, saying it was a personnel matter.
Stein had posted the photos online several years earlier and never worried that they might cause problems. The corn dog photo had been a joke. The drag queens had an act in a weekly variety show he used to produce at a gay bar in Long Beach. One night they gathered around Stein, who made the devil horns sign with one hand and grinned as the camera flashed.
“I just didn’t feel there was anything to hide,” said Stein, who made his pages private only in the hopes of being reinstated. The photos in question merely represented gay culture, he argued.
Terry Stanfill, an assistant superintendent of Charter Oak Unified, said that the district follows a non-discrimination policy and that teachers and coaches are held to a “higher standard.” He said there were no specific policies about social media and declined to discuss the matter further.
It’s not the first time the district, which serves a dozen schools in Covina and Glendora, has faced accusations that it harbors an anti-gay sentiment. In 2003, a gay male teacher filed a sexual orientation discrimination complaint saying he was harassed by an administrator. Stanfill said a thorough investigation was conducted and there was nothing to substantiate the claim.
That teacher, who has left the district, wrote a letter to Stein recently saying he believed administrators expected him to conceal his sexual orientation. The teacher wrote that he has since worked in other districts and that the social climate was more welcoming than at Charter Oak.
According to Stein, other gay employees at Charter Oak Unified have also reached out. Stein said one had told him that he, Stein, had not been “the right type of gay” because he spoke openly about his fiance, Hugo, and never hid his sexual orientation. Another described the climate as toxic, Stein said.
Stein grew up in Covina and graduated from Charter Oak in 1993. Back then, he kept his relationships quiet. Upon his return to the school last year, he was impressed that there was a gay student association on campus. But he said he learned quickly that the administration was a different matter.
“It was a lot like the military, very ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ ” Stein said. “You don’t feel welcomed.”
Since his termination, Stein has been offered coaching jobs from three other districts. But he wants to stay near his daughter Devynn, a swimmer and ranked water polo player.
He has remained a fixture at the school despite being stripped of his title. Still referred to as “coach” by students, he coordinated a beach clean-up that netted $3,500 in corporate donations, shopped for items for the snack bar, hauled tubs of nacho cheese to the matches and manned the refreshments station. The $900 he made as a summer coach was donated back to the team.
Parents voted him in unanimously as president-elect of the aquatics booster board.
“I’ve seen the photos and I don’t think they’re inappropriate at all,” said Raymond Adams, 43, who has two sons on the water polo team.
“I don’t agree with homosexuality, but at the same time we shouldn’t be judging anybody,” Adams said. “His private life has nothing to do with coaching the water polo team. I believe the school made a huge mistake, and they should just come forward and admit it and stop wasting the school district’s money. I see Mr. Stein as a servant to the community and the kids more than people that I go to church with, including myself.”
Stein said he is pursuing the lawsuit for current and past employees who are afraid that making waves would jeopardize their livelihoods.
“I don’t have to worry about it affecting my profession,” Stein said. “I’ll take this all the way. There’s only one outcome and that is that I get put back on the pool deck.”
from The Los Angeles Times
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Queen Latifah

Queen Latifah wants to be clear: Despite speculation online, her performance at Long Beach’s Lesbian & Gay Pride event on May 19 was not a signal that she was coming out as a lesbian. “That definitely wasn’t the case,” she tells EW. “I’ve never dealt with the question of my personal life in public. It’s just not gonna happen.”
That said, the 42-year old was thrilled to participate in the event and even recalled an earlier performance for gay audiences. “To me, doing a gay pride show is one of the most fun things,” she says. “My first show that paid more than $10,000 was in a gay club on New Year’s Eve in San Francisco. Tupac happened to be in town, so he came to kick it with me. This was the early ’90s. And the boys were like, ‘Take your shirt off, Tupac!’  He wasn’t doing that. But we had a blast in there.”
Latifah — who’s starring in an upcoming remake of Steel Magnolias for Lifetime — also reiterated her support for her gay fans. “I know that the most important thing and the only thing I have to give is love. When people are going through hatred and bullying, the biggest thing to fight that is love,” she says. “So that’s all I encouraged my audience to do that night: to share their light and share their love. Period.”
from Entertainment Weekly
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Queen Latifah To Headline Long Beach Gay Pride Festival

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Jason Alexander

Jason Alexander has issued an apology for comments he made during an appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on May 25.
The Seinfeld actor was talking to host Ferguson about the game of cricket, and called it a “gay game.”
“You know how I know it’s kind of really a gay game? It’s the pitch,” he said before doing an imitation of the motion. “It’s not like a manly baseball pitch. It’s a queer British gay pitch.”
On June 2, Alexander issued a lengthy apology for his comments. He said that after he made his comments, many people reached out on Twitter to tell him how offended they were by what he said. He admitted that at first, he did not understand why.  However, after talking to his gay friends, he said he figured it out.
“The problem is that today, as I write this, young men and women whose behaviors, choices or attitudes are not deemed “man enough” or “normal” are being subjected to all kinds of abuse from verbal to physical to societal. They are being demeaned and threatened because they don’t fit the group’s idea of what a ‘real man’ or a ‘real woman’ are supposed to look like, act like and feel like,” he said.
“For these people, my building a joke upon the premise I did added to the pejorative stereotype that they are forced to deal with everyday. It is at the very heart of this whole ugly world of bullying that has been getting rightful and overdue attention in the media. And with my well-intentioned comedy bit, I played right into those hurtful assumptions and diminishments,” he said.
Alexander appeared on The Late Late Show to talk about the Julie Harris Award for Lifetime Achievement, which he will receive on June 10 from the Actors Fund. He has served as artistic director of the Reprise Theatre Company in Los Angeles since 2007.
“I can only apologize and I do. In comedy, timing is everything. And when a group of people are still fighting so hard for understanding, acceptance, dignity and essential rights – the time for some kinds of laughs has not yet come. I hope my realization brings some comfort,” he concluded in his statement.
from The Hollywood Reporter