I never really thought that the gaydar phenomenon was a reality, although I'm sure the wives of Governor McGreevey and Senator Craig wished they had such an ability. And I'm also sure that if anyone has seen RuPaul sashay, no one is going to mistake him for a construction worker, but then the dress probably gives him away. It appears that recent testing involving observers evaluating a given subject's gait showed that the walk is a dead giveaway. I think that is overstating the obvious but it's an interesting supposition. Check out an excerpt from the "gay walk" article, courtesy of ScienceDaily.com:
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.
Gay Or Straight? Body Type And Motion Reveals Sexual Orientation, Study Suggests
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