What makes Gaydar Great
I admit it, I’m obsessed with gaydar.
At first I thought it was just another way to score trade, like Pinkboard or Gay.com or Guystats. Then, after joining, I realised it was pretty cool - you can put up pics as usual, but they also prod you for a reasonable amount of profile information and they have a chat tool… so far not much different from gay.com. One thing is that while gay.com has tried very hard to be the web version of a global gay lifestyle channel (and actually only succeeded in reflecting gay life in North America), gaydar has stayed focussed on its main mission - connecting queers who want to meet each other.
After I’d used it for a while, the thing that I realised was truly great and which eventually convinced me to pay money for gaydar was their dinky little Quick Message feature. When you login to gaydar, a window pops up which reloads itself every few minutes and which in turn pops up a message window is anyone has sent you a quick message. When you browse people’s profiles they have a link that lets you send them a quick message which they get in the next few minutes if they’re logged in or if they aren’t then the next time they’re logged in.
Initially I thought it was a bit silly to create a cheesy alternative to ICQ (although I kind of admired the inventiveness of the technology), but when I noticed how much faster it made getting in touch, I was hooked.
Media have an effect on how we use them. There’s very little difference between e-mail and SMS and gaydar quick messages, and yet we use all of them very differently. Something about the ease of choosing to send, the way its attached to your gaydar persona, not your usual e-mail address and even the fact that the window you type your message in is very small tends to influence us to send short, pithy messages and send them on a whim.
And now, here is the thing I really like. Obviously an awful lot of those messages are just people asking you for sex, but what it opens up is a really easy, consequence free way to drop compliments on people. You find beautiful man, or even a profile you like, or someone who likes that obscure author you adore (it’s all there on the profile page, baby) and with a flick of the mouse, you can let that person know you think they’re awesome. And people do it!
Many guys I’ve spoken to have received unsolicited compliments, sometimes from people they’re interested in, often from people they’re not. In the latter case, you offer a polite reply and sometimes you can get into a very nice conversation about books or (believe it or not) meditation or whatever.
We’re told very often that gay men are bitchy and self-obsessed. By making it easy and non-embarrassing to give compliments, gaydar has done something to reassure us that we’re OK, that we can be sweet to each other even if only in this tiny way….
I love my gaydar 