Gay men look

If true, it will be one more clue to our biological uniqueness. A small constellation of researchers is specifically analyzing the traits and characteristics that, though more pronounced in some than in others, not only make us gay but also make us appear gay.

On February 15, Muhsin Hendricks, an openly gay imam, Islamic scholar and LGBT rights activist was shot and killed in Gqeberha, South Africa as he was leaving to officiate an interfaith marriage. About 23 percent had counterclockwise hair whorls. The label fell into disrepute, but lately a number of well-known researchers in the field of sexual orientation have been reviving it based on an extensive new body of research showing that most of us, whether top or bottom, butch or femme, or somewhere in between, share a kind of physical otherness that locates us in our own quadrant of the gender matrix, more like one another than not.

But today, the pendulum has swung just about as far in the other direction as possible. Statistically, for instance, gay men and lesbians have about a 50 percent greater chance of being left-handed or ambidextrous than straight men or women. One study, involving tape-recordings of gay and straight men, found that 75 percent of gay men sounded gay to a general audience.

Transgender is an umbrella term used to describe people whose gender identity (sense of themselves as male or female) or gender expression differs from socially constructed norms associated with their birth sex. But most people immediately read me correctly as gay.

It takes only a glance to make my truth obvious. This report documents the range of abuses against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students in secondary school. Nor am I typically perceived as androgynous, not in my uniform of Diesels and boots, not even when I was younger and favored dangling earrings and bright Jack Purcells.

Gender identity is one’s self-identification as male, female, or an alternative gender. By the end of the two-day festival, Lippa had gathered survey data from more than 50 short-haired men and photographed their pates women were excluded because their hairstyles, even at the pride festival, were too long for simple determination; crewcuts are the ideal Rorschach, he explains.

This includes androgynous, bigendered and gender queer people, who tend to see traditional concepts of gender as restrictive. It details widespread bullying and harassment, discriminatory. At first read, their findings seem like a string of unlinked, esoteric observations.

Hungary deepened its repression of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people on March 18 as the parliament passed a draconian law that will outlaw Pride and similar events, thereby. As a presence in the world—a body hanging from a subway strap or pressed into an elevator, a figure crossing the street—I am neither markedly masculine nor notably effeminate.

I know this from strangers who find gay people offensive enough to elicit a remark—catcalls from cab windows, to use a recent example—as well as from countless casual social engagements in which people easily assume my orientation, no sensitive gaydar necessary. Sexual orientation is a component of identity that includes sexual and emotional attraction to another person and the behavior and/or social affiliation that may result from this attraction.

It will be months before that DNA testing is complete. The relative lengths of our fingers offer another hint: The index fingers of most straight men are shorter than their ring fingers, while for most women they are closer in length, or even reversed in ratio.

As he recruited experiment subjects, Lippa scanned the passing scalps, some shaved clean, some piled in colorful tresses. Most historians agree that there is evidence of homosexual activity and same-sex love, whether such relationships were accepted or persecuted, in every documented culture.

Whatever that otherness is seems to come from somewhere deep within us. It mostly defies our efforts to disguise it. Richard Lippa, a psychologist from California State University at Fullerton, is one of the leading cataloguers of the many ways in which gay people are different.

I caught up with him a few weeks ago at a booth at the Long Beach Pride Festival in Southern California, where he was researching another hypothesis—that the hair-whorl patterns on gay heads are more likely to go counterclockwise. Quesada, who is right-handed and seemed to have a typically masculinized finger-length ratio, was impressed.

I was surprised at how many people quickly agreed to lend five minutes of their pride celebration to science. So, as part of his study, he has swabbed the inside cheek of his subjects. Sexual orientation refers to an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions to men, women, or both sexes.

The same goes for the way we hear, the way we process spatial reasoning, and even the ring of our voices.