Fast. Really fast. A recent study conducted by psychologists shows most of us should be able to know if a person is gay or not in about 100 milliseconds. Imagine, in just 1/10 of a second, people on average can detect the sexuality of a person with up to 70% accuracy. Talk about first impressions.

It all started in 1994, when curious psychologists Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal did a ground-breaking research. They showed 2-second video clips of professors teaching to several people, and asked them to write their opinions about the professors’ teaching abilities. Remarkably, what they wrote were quite similar to evaluations written by actual students at the end of a semester. The results led psychologists to begin questioning what else people might detect in a glance.

Ambady and colleague Nicholas Rule, both at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, wondered about sexual orientation (hmmm, and I wonder why they wondered). An issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology reported that they showed men and women photos of 90 faces belonging to homosexual men and heterosexual men for intervals ranging from 33 milliseconds to 10 seconds. They found that people only needed 100 milliseconds to make an accurate guess. Shorter exposure times led to lesser accuracy (<70%). “What is most interesting is that increased exposure time did not improve the results,” says Ambady.

This does lead me to wonder what kind of photographs were used. We know that NOT all gays and lesbians manifest their sexuality physically with their hair or clothing. I know a gay man who looks like a grunge rock star - long unkempt hair, a slight beard, denims, and a tough walk. It’s hard to convince people that he’s gay, even if he’s telling them point blank and showing pictures of himself and his boyfriend in his phone. I’d like to know how he would be sized up in these experiments. There are even pageant queens who are, in fact, closet lesbians. You’d never know they swing your way until they hit on you (or your over-zealous friend, who runs to tell you about it).

Some people say “it takes one to know one.” I used to believe that until I stumbled a few times (well, once, but it was deadly), and met a number of lesbians who really didn’t have a clue (”lesbi-dar”, anyone?). What I found common to all of them was that they did not observe as much as they should. Or if they do, they don’t actually know what signs to look for. I honestly don’t think anybody was born with a gaydar (I could be wrong), and it’s fortunate/unfortunate that you can’t buy one to save yourself from future heartaches. But like some things in life, maybe you’ll just have to figure it out as you go along.