Gaydar

What is gaydar? It's actually made its way into the dictionary. Type it into Dictionary.com and you get four results. I like this one.

Main Entry:	gaydar
Part of Speech:	n
Definition:	an intuition about whether someone is homosexual; a homosexual person's ability to identify other homosexuals through intuition or interpretation of signals
Etymology:	1992; gay + radar
Usage:	slang

But according to the Washington Post today, gaydar isn't just for gays anymore.
An article by Rex W. Huppke entitled "Sorry, Ricky Martin. Flying under the gaydar is less frequent than ever." says that straight people too can often discern whether someone is gay. The article cites J. Michael Bailey, a psyche professor, who says that "gay and straight people who viewed the videos correctly identified straight people 87 percent of the time and correctly identified homosexual people 75 percent of the time" (though beware of statistics--notice he doesn't say which percentages gay people guess right and which percentages straight people guess right, but lumps them into one category. Neither does he mention bisexual and in-between people or how random the selection of either the guessers or those they were guessing about was).
I can easily believe that gaydar would work for straight people. I believe that gay people are more likely to look at someone and actually ask themselves whether the person is gay, whereas many straight people don't often even consider the possibility.
Bailey also says that gay stereotypes often (though he specifically says not always) do hold true. I'm not sure I believe this. But take from it what you may.
A different study posted on this blog gives nearly the same results. Cool stuff.
One thing that interests me is how exactly gaydar works. Does it require imagining that person is gay, or specifically wondering, as this study seems to imply? Or is it an automatic thing? I have never experienced it myself, but who knows. Maybe someday.