Do you want to find a date, or determine whether the person you’re talking to is queer?
If the former, use the internet, a university club, or an interest group where membership is correlated with alternative lifestyle (e.g. social activist or vegetarian societies work well).
If the latter, well...I always tell people there’s a really simply rule-based system that gives you 95% accurate gaydar in most situations: unless you’re reliably informed otherwise, assume they’re straight.
Generally I find that once I ask the question, “I wonder whether this person is queer?”, I can’t weight the low prior against the subtle signals I’m receiving properly. Once I’ve asked the question, I feel like I’m weighing evidence for two equally likely scenarios, and I end up with a lot of false positives.
So I’ve found my overall prediction accuracy is higher if I just assume people are straight.
The frustrating thing about the former is that even the members of the local gay-straight alliance are close-lipped on the matter. (I only know of one closeted transsexual and two closeted bisexuals among their membership despite general alternative lifestyle and fashion signalling mechanisms common among the group.) There’s really no reliable signalling going on at all—I am in fact aware of a young woman who dressed up as a fairy for homecoming week and has been seen multiple times wearing a T-shirt stating that “All the cool girls are lesbians”, but was evasive when I questioned her sexuality, claiming that she merely bought the shirt because it was on sale at a store.
I am in fact aware of a young woman who dressed up as a fairy for homecoming week and has been seen multiple times wearing a T-shirt stating that “All the cool girls are lesbians”, but was evasive when I questioned her sexuality, claiming that she merely bought the shirt because it was on sale at a store.
She was evasive when you question her sexuality? I suggest questioning her on her weight and age too, by way of a control. :)
Argh. Yeah, that sucks. In my university queer society people were generally a lot clearer, although some people did “reject the gender binary (or ternary)”, as they put it. I get that sexuality is complicated and individual, but I did occasionally wish people could communicate more clearly.
I guess this is part of the point of gay pride. It’s a lot better for everyone with an alternative sexuality if people wear their heart on their sleeves in this respect.
If you are interested in a date, questioning people’s sexuality is kind of irrelevant.
Ask them out. If they turn you down, you don’t know their sexuality, but you don’t care. If they accept, you still don’t know their sexuality (though you can exclude more possibilities) but you still don’t care.
No, I meant the former. The fact is that in many environments, including my own, there is a huge difference between the amount of individuals who experience same-sex attraction and the individuals who publicly acknowledge that they do. I have previously tried just asking out girls that I like, but am inevitably rebuffed because, as was inevitable, they are straight. This has a greater cost than simply not getting to be in a relationship with them; there is actually often a negative effect on our (potential or already existent) friendship, as well as the disappointment I feel having already expended significant energy on sentimentalizing the concept of being in a relationship with them. Hence I would prefer to identify potential girlfriends before the sentimentalization and disappointment.
Yeah, when the costs of being rebuffed are high, the two questions get entangled.
Often, the most effective fix is to disentangle them, but admittedly sometimes that isn’t an option for whatever reason.
The best recommendation I can think of given that constraint is to establish friendships with people who are culturally affiliated with the queer community, and try to use that network of friendships to identify potential relationships. That is, get your friends to set you up with girls they know.
If they accept, you still don’t know their sexuality (though you can exclude more possibilities) but you still don’t care.
There are legitimate reasons to care about their sexuality. Particularly if you have, shall we say, distinctive preferences about the possibility of certain kinds of sexual encounters.
The best way to handle that is to simply discuss it later in the process. If that’s really a high priority find an excuse to mention the Kinsey scale and see what they say. I’ve dated females in a broad range on that scale, and generally most people who are much higher than 1 on that scale will generally say so with minimal prompting.
The best way to handle that is to simply discuss it later in the process.
Others take a more direct approach, making the assumption of bisexuality clear from the outset. Using “So what kind of women do you like?” as an early topic of small talk can set a strong frame and, if nothing else, help to get to rejection quickly—a good thing!
I don’t think that’s a good strategy. A fair number of moderately bi individuals or even people who are a 3 on the Kinsey scale will find that to be a signal of creepiness or will see it as signaling an interest in them only for sexual purposes. Those are signals that are probably pretty robust. I strongly disrecommend this tactic.
will find that to be a signal of creepiness or will see it as signaling an interest in them only for sexual purposes.
With most things to do with dating and with the label ‘creepy’ in particular how you do things matters far more than what you do. Just as critical is who you are, where you are and who you are interacting with. In this example the ‘who’ is a high status attractive guy who has spent altogether too much time specialising for a specific kind of night game and the target audience is particularly high status and sexually open women of the type that make up the upper echelons of that type of social scene.
This is presented to demonstrate just how much the relevance of techniques can vary.
Those are signals that are probably pretty robust.
In as much as you were giving advice to the less wrong audience I of course agree. But your claim of general robustness is wrong.
Note: I don’t think it matters either way and some reader has voted down all of the comments here by both of us as well as others in the surrounding context. This is not something people are comfortable discussing even in the abstract.
Ehh...You usually don’t want to “ask someone out” in a way that’s unambiguously romantic, because that makes any rejection explicit. People usually prefer to maintain some level of polite fiction about what’s being proposed or rejected.
If you go ahead and ask someone out this way, and they’re a bit oblivious or you’re a little too subtle, and they are the wrong sexuality, you can end up in a really awkward situation.
Do you want to find a date, or determine whether the person you’re talking to is queer?
If the former, use the internet, a university club, or an interest group where membership is correlated with alternative lifestyle (e.g. social activist or vegetarian societies work well).
If the latter, well...I always tell people there’s a really simply rule-based system that gives you 95% accurate gaydar in most situations: unless you’re reliably informed otherwise, assume they’re straight.
Generally I find that once I ask the question, “I wonder whether this person is queer?”, I can’t weight the low prior against the subtle signals I’m receiving properly. Once I’ve asked the question, I feel like I’m weighing evidence for two equally likely scenarios, and I end up with a lot of false positives.
So I’ve found my overall prediction accuracy is higher if I just assume people are straight.
The frustrating thing about the former is that even the members of the local gay-straight alliance are close-lipped on the matter. (I only know of one closeted transsexual and two closeted bisexuals among their membership despite general alternative lifestyle and fashion signalling mechanisms common among the group.) There’s really no reliable signalling going on at all—I am in fact aware of a young woman who dressed up as a fairy for homecoming week and has been seen multiple times wearing a T-shirt stating that “All the cool girls are lesbians”, but was evasive when I questioned her sexuality, claiming that she merely bought the shirt because it was on sale at a store.
She was evasive when you question her sexuality? I suggest questioning her on her weight and age too, by way of a control. :)
Argh. Yeah, that sucks. In my university queer society people were generally a lot clearer, although some people did “reject the gender binary (or ternary)”, as they put it. I get that sexuality is complicated and individual, but I did occasionally wish people could communicate more clearly.
I guess this is part of the point of gay pride. It’s a lot better for everyone with an alternative sexuality if people wear their heart on their sleeves in this respect.
Now I’m confused. Did you mean to say “latter”?
If you are interested in a date, questioning people’s sexuality is kind of irrelevant.
Ask them out. If they turn you down, you don’t know their sexuality, but you don’t care. If they accept, you still don’t know their sexuality (though you can exclude more possibilities) but you still don’t care.
No, I meant the former. The fact is that in many environments, including my own, there is a huge difference between the amount of individuals who experience same-sex attraction and the individuals who publicly acknowledge that they do. I have previously tried just asking out girls that I like, but am inevitably rebuffed because, as was inevitable, they are straight. This has a greater cost than simply not getting to be in a relationship with them; there is actually often a negative effect on our (potential or already existent) friendship, as well as the disappointment I feel having already expended significant energy on sentimentalizing the concept of being in a relationship with them. Hence I would prefer to identify potential girlfriends before the sentimentalization and disappointment.
Ah, I see.
Yeah, when the costs of being rebuffed are high, the two questions get entangled.
Often, the most effective fix is to disentangle them, but admittedly sometimes that isn’t an option for whatever reason.
The best recommendation I can think of given that constraint is to establish friendships with people who are culturally affiliated with the queer community, and try to use that network of friendships to identify potential relationships. That is, get your friends to set you up with girls they know.
There are legitimate reasons to care about their sexuality. Particularly if you have, shall we say, distinctive preferences about the possibility of certain kinds of sexual encounters.
The best way to handle that is to simply discuss it later in the process. If that’s really a high priority find an excuse to mention the Kinsey scale and see what they say. I’ve dated females in a broad range on that scale, and generally most people who are much higher than 1 on that scale will generally say so with minimal prompting.
Others take a more direct approach, making the assumption of bisexuality clear from the outset. Using “So what kind of women do you like?” as an early topic of small talk can set a strong frame and, if nothing else, help to get to rejection quickly—a good thing!
I don’t think that’s a good strategy. A fair number of moderately bi individuals or even people who are a 3 on the Kinsey scale will find that to be a signal of creepiness or will see it as signaling an interest in them only for sexual purposes. Those are signals that are probably pretty robust. I strongly disrecommend this tactic.
With most things to do with dating and with the label ‘creepy’ in particular how you do things matters far more than what you do. Just as critical is who you are, where you are and who you are interacting with. In this example the ‘who’ is a high status attractive guy who has spent altogether too much time specialising for a specific kind of night game and the target audience is particularly high status and sexually open women of the type that make up the upper echelons of that type of social scene.
This is presented to demonstrate just how much the relevance of techniques can vary.
In as much as you were giving advice to the less wrong audience I of course agree. But your claim of general robustness is wrong.
Note: I don’t think it matters either way and some reader has voted down all of the comments here by both of us as well as others in the surrounding context. This is not something people are comfortable discussing even in the abstract.
Ehh...You usually don’t want to “ask someone out” in a way that’s unambiguously romantic, because that makes any rejection explicit. People usually prefer to maintain some level of polite fiction about what’s being proposed or rejected.
If you go ahead and ask someone out this way, and they’re a bit oblivious or you’re a little too subtle, and they are the wrong sexuality, you can end up in a really awkward situation.
Agreed that making ambiguous requests prevents rejection from being explicit and allows for really awkward situations.
This is true even if everyone involved is “the right sexuality.”
That strikes me as a reason to endorse unambiguous (though polite) requests and rejections. That said, I agree that some people prefer to avoid them.