The "Gaydar" Myth: Does it actually exist, and is yours currently broken?

[martin526]

We’ve all been there: you see someone across the street, the 'signals' are firing, and you’re 100% sure... until you see them walk away with their wife and four kids. Or worse, you totally miss the guy who was practically hitting you over the head with a rainbow mallet.
I feel like my gaydar used to be top-tier, but lately, it’s like I’m receiving static. Between the rise of 'straight-passing' aesthetics and everyone just being more fluid, is 'gaydar' even a thing anymore? Or is it just us projecting our own hopes onto cute strangers?
How’s your internal radar holding up? Is it a precision instrument or do you need to send it in for repairs?

[ianfontinell]

@martin526 the problem with the so called gaydar is that sometimes you just can't tell if it's genuinely triggered or if you're just projecting like you said. Walking around with a wife and kids have never been a strong indicative, that has always been precisely the point of the term gaydar ever becoming a thing... Everybody had a wife and kids until not long ago. So 'straight-passing' haven't been rising at all, if anything it's decreasing.

Things really have taken a big turn in the last decades, gay men have always relied on performing a masculinity to go unnoticed, but now even straight men aren't as masculine.

Looking at someone's archetype and inferring their sexuality is not having a gaydar, that is simply conforming to the social norm and allowing yourself to be tricked. At least that's how I've always perceived it, to me gaydar has always been the ability to spot the cues in how men interact with each other, from the stare to the hand gestures and whatnot, it's never really been a matter of looking and "just knowing", I think that's either just conforming to the social norms or straight out projecting.