this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2025
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there’s a lot more to what it means to be perceived as gay in this society than just that person, personally hating gay people.
i had someone say that to me and i’m just extremely self conscious so i was just trying to figure out why….
was it my tone of voice? mannerisms?
all these penises in my mouth?
Is that why women are seldom romantically interested in me? Do they all think i’m gay? is that the key to my loneliness? (probably just the ugly part).
if you tell someone, “oh i figured you like country music” and they don’t, they’re going to wonder why.
and i don’t know if they stopped, but kids used to be pretty mean calling people gay… it can be kind of a “touching on childhood trauma” thing.
my advice: don’t “trick” people with clever “tests” and try to be genuine with your friends. If you’re gay and you have straight friends, those friends probably aren’t the problem even if they have a problem with being misidentified as gay.
That's was my reaction to reading this, it's like shittestting in a relationship. YOU are the asshole if you do that. You're also an asshole if you think your straight friends would react like that. You're also terrible at picking your friends.
This post is basically saying "your straight friends aren't actually your friends, this is how you can prove it"
Agree. Let's approach this from the rational angle. "If they don't react how I think they should react, then they must be..." But that's clearly not a rational process. Its not even a decent heuristic.
there's contexts where it could be fine I think, like if you know your friend will take it lightly, and you're not taking it seriously either. but actually trying to test someone with that is stupid
I feel the need to emphasize that there is no difference between a straight person and a gay person outside of where they fall on the kinsey scale, just as there's no difference between a trans person and a cis person, outside of the difference between their physical traits and preferred gender.
People are made up of tens of billions of neurons firing in a complicated puzzle, every one of us is unique and different. We should use caution and discretion in defining and perceiving the labels we use to categorize people using any trait that is not directly influenced by that trait.
i don’t believe in labeling people as such either, but for the sake of being able to communicate i’ve used the vernacular terms aforementioned, here within.
Also the kinsey scale is yet another human attempt to collapse the broad, multidimensional aspects of sexuality into a one dimensional “scale”. Like the “political spectrum” plane, it’s overly reductive and attempts to understand and explain the elephant by feeling its tail.
That simple spectrum is how we get paradoxes like "there will always be yin in yang" and "horseshoe theory". One dimension is not enough to describe the complex universe.
I think that's more of a tell on your own insecurities if the notion makes you uncomfortable. You can't tell if someone is gay, even if there are some trends/social queues.
But the trends and social queues are important for how people view you, and how people view you has a big impact on your life. e.g. imagine you were trying to flirt with people but everyone you talk to assumes that you're not into their gender.
Just because you can guess doesn't mean you can definitively tell.
This thread has been great for reminding me that nobody on the fucking planet can read.
Right back atcha.
you should look up “gaydar”
I feel that was covered by saying "trends/social queues"
"Gaydar" is just making a guess based on social queues. Maybe it's an educated guess but it is a guess.
I completely agree with you.
I hate to be this person, but I have to ask: did you mean “cues?” A queue is a line or an order.
Yes
no, that’s how someone straight would guess….
gaydar is more of an intuition
Intuition - "quick and ready insight; the power of knowing things without conscious reasoning."
Iunno, I think that's covered by "social cueues and tendencies". Your intuition is still fueled by the things you perceive and isn't magic, or necessarily accurate.
👍 sure
🧊 cool
💩
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