The Science of Gaydar

If sexual orientation is biological, are the traits that make people seem gay innate, too? The new research on everything from voice pitch to hair whorl.

EXAMPLE A: Hair Whorl (Men)

Gay men are more likely than straight men to have a counterclockwise whorl.

Are gay people the “third-sexer” -- the category advanced by the gay German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld 100 years ago? The label fell into disrepute, but lately a number of well-known researchers in the field of sexual orientation have been reviving it based on an extensive new body of research showing that most of us, whether top or bottom, butch or femme, or somewhere in between, share a kind of physical otherness that locates us in our own quadrant of the gender matrix, more like one another than not. Whatever that otherness is seems to come from somewhere deep within us. It mostly defies our efforts to disguise it. That’s what we mean by gaydar—not the skill of the viewer so much as the telltale signs most gay people project, the set of traits that make us unmistakably one. (New York)

A study found that 75 percent of gay men sounded gay to a general audience. Were they responding to a recognized gay “accent”?

EXAMPLE C: Digit Proportions (Female)The index fingers of most straight men are shorter than their ring fingers, and for most women they are the same length or longer. Gay men and lesbians tend to have reversed ratios.