BTW
people can beat the odds when picking who’s gay from a stack of
photos. now a Prague University study has tried to nail down
what physical traits make gaydar possible, and, through minute
measurement of facial attributes (nose length, eye width, etc.),
they’ve actually identified a few. (okay, it’s a little creepy à la
phrenology.) They also asked subjects to rate the “masculinity” or
“femininity” of subjects’ faces. What they found, counter-intu-
itively enough, was that the gay men’s faces were consistently
rated as more
masculine
than the hetero men’s. The difference
was in the jaw line, that symbol of virility, and gay men had more
prominent ones. it is in puberty that the mandible juts forth in
human males, among the most prominent of the secondary male
traits, behind only the primary trait itself as a marker. as luck
would have it, many studies have found that gay men have some-
what larger penises on average than do straight men. coinci-
dence? check out that jawbone!
Class Project
a nineteen-year-old male student in the Uk, clay-
ton Pettet, has announced that he’s planning to lose his anal vir-
ginity in a performance piece to be enacted before 100 people in
January (as reported by
The daily Mirror
). The piece already has
a title: “art school stole My Virginity”—oddly stated in the past
tense even though the event has
yet to take place. and in what
sense is it remotely true? no
matter, he’s nineteen. Pettet’s
story has been grist for the press
in Britain: we know that he’s
studying at central saint Mar-
tins art school and that he’s been
planning this performance since
he was sixteen. But reports have
only referred in passing to “a
friend” as the designated driver, so to say, whose role in this is not
inconsequential, especially when you consider the number of
things that could go wrong. That this is being done for an art course
raises the intriguing question of how the project will be graded.
Will there be a mandatory deduction if clayton cries out in pain?
extra points for endurance? Watch this space.
Upsize This
Demographers can peg the percentage of asians or
lefties down to a decimal point, while estimates for the GlBT pop-
ulation have ranged from one percent (in an infamous 1993 study)
to ten percent (kinsey’s oft-quoted figure). Because some people
are reluctant to come out as gay in a survey, the true number tends
to be suppressed. a recent ohio state study employed an advanced
protocol that guarantees anonymity and compared the results to
conventional survey methods. like kinsey, the ohio team asked
subjects about past sexual behavior rather than sexual identity.
What they found was a dramatic jump in those reporting same-sex
activity when anonymity was assured, up by 65 percent (and dou-
bling for self-identified christians). Men went from twelve to sev-
enteen percent, while women leapt from 24 to 43 percent. The team
cautioned that their sample was not representative but believe that
the 1.65 multiplier can be applied to other population studies to
compensate for the “veiled” gay percentage. They also found, by
the way, that rates of homophobia likewise jump significantly when
anonymity is assured, suggesting that, just as some people hide
their gayness, others conceal their homophobia. conclusion: we’ve
reached a point where it’s still not totally cool to be seen as gay, but
it’s not cool to be seen as anti-gay either.
Rainbow Over Sochi
russia’s growing hostility to gay rights
has come to the world’s attention as we anticipate the Winter
olympics in sochi. When the German team introduced its uni-
forms this fall, it was
clear that the design
referred to the famil-
iar “gay flag” with its
six rainbow stripes.
and while fashion
critics applauded the
attempt to show soli-
darity with GlBT
russians, they were
fairly unanimous in panning the design. “extremely hideous,” de-
clared one. “Butt-ugly,” jeered another. “a cross between a pot-
bellied pig and a parrot,” squawked a third. The simple fact is,
there’s really no way to bring all the colors of the rainbow into
one ensemble without looking like Joseph’s tacky “coat of many
colors.” so if the price of showing solidarity with gay russians
is the creation of a fashion disaster—well, how ironic is
that
?
“Rosebud”
Gore Vidal surprised the world one last time when his
will was read and he’d bequeathed his entire fortune of $37 million
to—wait for it—harvard University. The shocker was that Vidal
had always seemed to be at war with harvard, sneering at its elit-
ism and its ties to the ruling class. Vidal’s nephew, Burr steers, is
mounting a lawsuit for his expected legacy, claiming that his uncle
was not of sound mind when he changed his will. and indeed the
writer’s last years were reportedly marked by heavy drinking and
bouts of dementia. still, it’s not as though he willed everything to
his pet gerbil. indeed it just may be that the ever calculating Vidal
was thinking quite clearly about his legacy. Maybe he figured that
his nephew would just blow the money, while who knows what
harvard might do with it—a Gore Vidal building or wing, anyone?
But why harvard? That is the question! Well, for starters, Yale was
taken—by Vidal’s archenemy, William F. Buckley, Jr., whose very
first book was titled
God and Man at Yale
—and who called Vidal
“queer” on national TV at the 1968 Democratic convention, which
the two were covering for aBc news. (Granted, this came only
after Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-nazi.”) Truth is, Vidal had
been building ties with harvard for many years, delivering lectures
from time to time and, in 2003, donating his papers to houghton
library. To be sure, he used those visits to denounce the university
itself (among much else), even while lamenting that he was meant
to attend harvard but for unforeseen events. so he decided to send
his tangible remains there instead.
Keep Your Chin Up
Physical differences between straight and
gay men and women have turned up in enough studies that per-
haps there’s something to it. First it was found that finger-length
ratios—the second and fourth fingers in particular—differed be-
tween gay and straight men and between lesbians and straight
women. other studies have found that body type—the masculine
“tubular” versus feminine “hourglass” shapes—can be a marker
of sexual orientation. still others have found that “gaydar” is real:
January–February 2014
11
Clayton Pettet
