Ricky Martin Can’t Escape People’s Gaydar for Too Long

Ricky Martin couldn’t elude ‘gaydar’
By Rex W. Huppke | Tribune staff reporter

-Read the entire article here.

I always knew Ricky Martin was fortunate. (He’s a famous pop star with scads of money and abdominal muscles that are more defined than mine.)

And I always suspected Martin was a homosexual man. (Didn’t everybody?)

So you can imagine how good I felt Monday when Martin formally announced that he’s “a fortunate homosexual man.” I wasn’t just right, I was double-right!

After giving myself the obligatory “you nailed it” high-five, I started pondering humanity’s long-standing fascination with the sexuality of others. It seems there’s always a celebrity — or a friend or a co-worker, or an aunt or an uncle — whom we just know is gay or lesbian. But they refuse to acknowledge it, fueling our curiosity with a stubbornness grounded in the fear of being discriminated against or damaging a career.

Our supposed ability to determine a person’s sexuality without asking is widely known as “gaydar.” And there is, of course, someone who has studied it.

J. Michael Bailey, a Northwestern University psychology professor, has published research on gaydar and found that we humans have a staggeringly good ability to judge which way a person swings.

“We’ve found that ‘gaydar’ has quite a bit, if not perfect, accuracy,” Bailey said. “We’ve done studies where we’ve brought people into the lab, videotaped them describing the weather in Chicago, and then brought in other people to watch the video and judge them. And they’re almost always right.”

In a 2008 study, Bailey found that gay and straight people who viewed the videos correctly identified straight people 87 percent of the time and correctly identified homosexual people 75 percent of the time.

So those of you who think you’re hiding something, it’s likely you’ve already been found out. (Time for a news conference, Richard Simmons?) They say that people who are gay and deny it even though most people suspect the truth are living in “the glass closet.” Fausto Fernos, who co-hosts a popular Chicago-based podcast — Feast of Fun — that focuses on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues, said Martin’s leap from that glass closet was unexpected.

“I was surprised that he did it at all, to be honest,” Fernos said. “I talk to a lot of celebrities who are still in the closet, and I respect that. I say to them, ‘You have to do what’s right for you.’ At the same time, you want to build a world that’s accepting and embraces a diversity of sexualities.”

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