According to a recent experiment published in the PLoS ONE journal, yes, gaydar is real. Through briefly showing faces of people for 50 milliseconds the data produced statistically significant results. Participants were able to judge sexual orientation through facial features alone (minus hair, ears and colour) with around 60% accuracy. Random guessing would yield results of around 50%, so this experiment shows that sexual orientation categorization through the use of faces only is accurate to more than just random chance.
Gaydar is the combination of ‘gay’ and ‘radar’, and refers to the ability to glean a persons sexual preference simply through appearance and behaviour.
The results not only indicated that gaydar is real, but also that some of the accuracy of snap sexual orientation judgement lies in individual facial features and the spacing between them. To get all of the details of the methodology and results, read the research here.
However, I think this type of research is in its infancy. Prominent theory asserts that sexuality is a continuum and is not as black and white as gay / straight. So how can ‘gaydar’ be as simple as subconscious facial processing, if sexuality itself is much more complex?
Additionally, there wasn’t much previous research for comparison. The sample size was pretty small (n=24) and 19 of them were women. Results indicated that gay women were more accurately predicted than gay men. This could be due to the majority of the sample being women (and thus more familiar with feminine features). Conversely, it could also indicate that straight men with feminine facial features suffer from ‘gayface’.
Gayface can hold pretty dire consequences. If society pre-determines a persons sexual orientation inarticulately by trusting their biological gaydars, those suffering from gayface may have trouble finding a partner.
While the results are pretty novel, it does indicate that there could be more to this phenomena than individual facial features and spacing. Perhaps gaydar accuracy can be increased by adding further subconscious cues.