I always knew this…

Sexual Orientation Revealed by Body Type and Motion, Study Suggests

An individual’s body motion and body type can offer subtle cues about their sexual orientation, but casual observers seem better able to read those cues in gay men than in lesbians, according to a new study in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

…

"We already know that men and women are built differently and walk differently from each other and that casual observers use this information as clues in making a range of social judgments," said lead author Kerri Johnson, UCLA assistant professor of communication studies. "Now we’ve found that casual observers can use gait and body shape to judge whether a stranger is gay or straight with a small but perceptible amount of accuracy."

Johnson and colleagues at New York University and Texas A&M measured the hips, waists and shoulders of eight male and eight female volunteers, half of whom were gay and half straight. The volunteers then walked on a treadmill for two minutes as a three-dimensional motion-capture system similar to those used by the movie industry to create animated figures from living models made measurements of the their motions, allowing researchers to track the precise amount of shoulder swagger and hip sway in their gaits.

Based on these measurements, the researchers determined that the gay subjects tended to have more gender-incongruent body types than their straight counterparts (hourglass figures for men, tubular bodies for women) and body motions (hip-swaying for men, shoulder-swaggering for women) than their straight counterparts.

In addition, 112 undergraduate observers were shown videos of the backsides of the volunteers as they walked at various speeds on the treadmill. The observers were able to determine the volunteers’ sexual orientation with an overall rate of accuracy that exceeded chance, even though they could not see the volunteers’ faces or the details of their clothing. Interestingly, the casual observers were much more accurate in judging the orientation of males than females; they correctly categorized the sexual orientation of men with more than 60 percent accuracy, but their categorization of women did not exceeded chance. 

Emphasis mine.  Why am I not asked to participate in experiments like these?  This is the one area where my weak gaydar seems to work most reliably.  I love to watch beautiful guys walk.  There’s just something about the sight of the male body in motion.  And in the gait, sometimes, I can just see it.  Some guys just have a more beautiful, or at least a more attractive to my my eye, gait then others.  The gay ones.  Makes my heart beat. 

There’s this Bob Segar song…  I realize that, according to the story, he’s singing about about a specific person…but ever since it started playing on the radio, whenever I hear it I just mentally flip a pronoun and rock to it…

But oh, they love to watch him strut…

The play on words about how they all respect her, but…doesn’t quite work with the male pronoun so I end up mentally adjusting the lyrics further as the song goes on.  But I seldom pay that much attention to the lyrics of a rock song anyway…it’s about the music, and the music of that particular song is just about right for watching beautiful guys walking.  And sometimes you just find yourself following along…er…you know…to the rhythm of it…

But there’s a disquieting side to all this, that you also need to pay attention to…

The findings build on recent research that shows that casual observers can often correctly identify sexual orientation with very limited information. A 1999 Harvard study, for example, found that just by looking at the photographs of seated strangers, college undergraduates were able to judge sexual orientation accurately 55 percent of the time.

"Studies like ours are raising questions about the value of the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy," Johnson said. "If casual observers can determine sexual orientation with minimal information, then the value in concealing this information certainly appears questionable. Given that we all appear to be able to deduce this information to some degree with just a glance, more comprehensive policies may be required to protect gays against discrimination based on their sexual orientation."

The findings also are part of mounting evidence suggesting that sexual orientation may actually be what social scientists call a "master status category," or a defining characteristic that observers cannot help but notice and which has been scientifically shown to color all subsequent social dealings with others.

"Once you know a person’s sexual orientation, the fact has consequences for all subsequent interactions, and our findings suggest that this category of information can be deduced from subtle clues in body movement," Johnson said.

A lot of gay guys,,,myself included…just assume most of the time that we’re not really all that "obvious".   In particular, those of us who grew up being fed a lot of stereotypes about swishing and limp wrists and lisping and that kind of crap, tend to assume that to the degree we don’t fit the stereotype, we’re probably passing.  Well guys…it looks like they can see right through us anyway.

And in a world that’s been so relentlessly polarized, gays so relentlessly demonized by this kind of republican party crap…

…that can have, as the article points out, consequences.   

Have you ever had a business interaction that all of a sudden just turned negative and you couldn’t quite put your finger on why?  You’re talking to a clerk at a store somewhere, or trying to arrange to have some professional come and do some work on your house, or your car, or whatever, and suddenly they turn all cold and contemptuous and suddenly find a million excuses why they can’t sell you what you were looking for, or do the work for you that you need done?  I’ve had that happen over and over again and usually I put it down to being a longhair in bluejeans and sneakers, and the lingering resentment some folks still feel toward the 60s counter-culture. But what if it really is homophobia?

It’s all too easy to fall into the suffocating trap of putting every negative reaction down to prejudice against gay people.  But there’s another side to that coin and it’s called denial.  I don’t think I have any obvious effeminacy to me, I’m no macho guy by any means, but I’ve always pictured myself internally as pretty much an average middle class, suburban American guy.  Okay…so I don’t much care for sports.  I love fast cars, firecrackers, and hard rock.  I am a stereotypical male in so many ways, some pretty embarrassing.  No…I don’t ask for directions.  I hate shopping for clothes.  Weekends when I’m cleaning house, I am always scolding myself for not picking up after myself like I should.

But maybe none of that matters anyway.  Maybe none of it ever mattered.  The clues are subtler, and they’re hard wired into us.  The way we talk, the way we move, even according to this 60 minutes article, the way we sit…

Bailey and his colleagues set up a series of experiments in his lab at Northwestern University. In one study, researcher Gerulf Rieger videotaped gay and straight people sitting in a chair, talking. He then reduced them visually to silent black and white outlined figures and asked volunteers to see if they could tell gay from straight. The idea was to find out if certain stereotypes were real and observable.

Based on physical movement and gestures of the figures, more often than not, the volunteers in the study could tell a difference. 

You can be flaming and you can be quiet and reserved and it doesn’t matter.  You can be fabulous and you can be a geek whose clothes never seem to fit quite right and it doesn’t matter.  The people we interact with on a daily basis may never even be aware consciously what it is they’re picking up on.  They just know, somehow, that they’re dealing with a homosexual.  And that can have consequences.   Especially after so many elections where gay people were painted as the demons who were going to take over America, prey on children, spread AIDS and destroy marriage and family if the democrats won.