Lisa FOS writes:
You are discounting ‘false negatives’ ad ‘false positives’.
The first is where you don’t pick they are GLBTI at all. You have no way of knowing how many there are.
The second is where you pick them as GLBTI but they are not. Again you have no idea how many there are.
Here is a very simple right off the top of my head probability calculation (1st order approximation). Say 95% of males are straight. Your false positive rate is 10%, that is 10% of the time you pick a male as gay and they are not. That means you incorrectly pick 10% of straight males as gay, that is 9.5% of all males.. Which is nearly double the actual number of real gay males.
Combine that with a reasonable false negative error rate and you might as well toss a coin.
Many, many GLBTI are very adept at disguise and ‘fitting in’. They may drop their guard when they are in ‘safe areas’, but the rest of the time?
I could take you to just one GLBTI pub in Melbourne. Look at all the people there, then meet them in their ‘normal’ life. The vast majority look totally ordinary and act ‘normal’. You’d be lucky to pick 10% and that is only because they have all or mostly ‘come out’. You’d pick virtually zero ‘part time’ transgendered people.
Gay males come in all shapes and sizes and ages. Some dress well, others as daggy as straight males (particularly in normal life).
So called ‘tells’, such as appearing uninterested in females are very unreliable. Some males are shy around women, some don’t want to be rude, some are in committed relationships Some, though they are sexually straight simply don’t like women, they don’t like to talk to them or spend time with them, in their mind females only exist for sex.
I haven’t been wrong yet since I got good at this around age 24. I have never yet picked out a man who was straight as gay. I have never yet picked out a gay man as straight.
I can’t necessarily figure them out right away, but I can tell after 3 weeks-2 months of close contact, say at work.
The only time I have been wrong is pegging guys as gay who also had a gf, but this guy was very gay, quite effeminate, and was very into me.
My mother said,
“Look, if you have a room full of men and a beautiful woman walks in, every single male in there from nine to ninety is going to look at her and they will look at her in a certain way. The gay man won’t even look.”
I believe she is correct. If you want to know the truth about anything, just ask an old lady.
There is a real problem with effeminate heterosexual men. There are millions of these men in the US alone. But I only give effeminate men a ? Question Mark until I can figure them out better. I have met many effeminate heterosexual men in my life. They all got the ? Question Mark right off the bat, but after a while, I was able to figure out that they were not even 1% gay. One married one of my female relatives. He had this mode he would go into where he was faggoty as all get out. I have no idea why he did that. Maybe he was relaxing.
But after a while, I can usually sort it all out, and I label him as effeminate straight guy.
Mostly straight occasional bisexual men (incredibly common especially in men in their 20’s) are very hard to figure out as they only do gay things once in a while. It is really impossible to get them until the time they openly hit on or proposition you, which I guarantee they will do at some point if you know them long enough, though sometimes it might take 2-3 years until they proposition you.
I have worked in workplaces with closeted gay men. At any rate, they were not openly out. None of them were fooling anyone, certainly not me. One had a beautiful gf, but I think he was completely gay, as other than her, he had no interest in women.
The problem with closeted gay men is they are not celibate. Their sex drive is quite active, and many are actively having sex with guys. So they often give off a very strong sexual vibe when they are around you to say the least.
There was one guy at one workplace who was hiding pretty well, but he got phone calls at work all the time. 100% of the time, it was a man calling him up. No woman ever called him. We pegged him as gay.
Another one was my boss at a school paper. He was very good-looking, and he was hiding very well. I got to be pretty good friends with him, and he left me alone the whole time I worked there. However, a lot of us were wondering if he was a closeted gay.
One time at work, I think the drawer on his desk popped open and he leaped backwards in his chair and screamed EEEEEK like a woman seeing a mouse. He yelled like a girl! Basically that was his inner gay breaking through, and after that, we thought he was gay. A while later, I was graduating from college, and I was walking away from the ceremony with my parents, and he was following us in the background, looking at me with the expression of a starving timber wolf on his face. He would not quit following us, and it was scaring the crap out of me. I was almost having a panic attack until we got to the car. Also after that, I knew he was gay for sure.
One group that is very hard to figure are young gay males who have not even come out to themselves yet . I have known two of them. These guys are usually around ages 16-21. One thing you will notice is that they have no interest in females at all. They never talk about females ever. But you can also make friends with them pretty well, and even hang around with them and it will all be ok because generally they don’t give off gay vibes of attraction or seduction towards you. So they are not sending out sexual energy towards either males or females.
Apparently these guys are not sending out any sexual energy towards anyone. The older guy at one point came out, and I met him where he was living in an apartment with an older man. He looked happy for once, but now he was giving off strong gay vibes towards me, apparently because he was out.
One thing about gays who have not even come out to themselves yet is that they might seem unhappy. The older guy always looked worried and frequently stared out into space. They were threatening to fire him at work for scaring off customers. He was also drinking quite a bit and using drugs, mostly pot, but he especially like cocaine. I did quite a few lines with the guy myself.
Another group that is hard to figure out are people who may well be asexual. My mother worked at a community college and one of the teachers was like that. He taught math. Everyone in the office was certain he was gay, but I was not so sure. He was extremely awkward, geeky, dory, and very nervous, anxious, and shy. He never looked you in the eye. He was in his 50’s and still lived with his mother. He never looked at women, but on the other hand, he never looked at men either. He was somewhat effeminate, but my mother said he was not so much faggy as just plain weird. I suggested that he might be an asexual with no sexual interest in males or females.
One time my mother had some extra concert tickets so we went to a fancy concert (tickets were $50/each). This guy was on stage there as part of the classical music orchestra. Of course it is well known that many male classical musicians are homosexual. At intermission, I suggested that we go up and talk to him to see if he was gay or not. We went up to the stage and called him over and had a very friendly conversation with him. He was really nice but also a rather nervous. Over ten minutes he did not give off the slightest gay sexual energy in my direction. We went back to our seats and I told my Mom, “Forget it. He’s not gay.”
