Name: Why do gay people look like that?
Uploaded: 2025-06-19T17:53:42.000Z
Duration: 5 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Do you ever look at someone's face like mine and think, gay?

Adverbs of manner

Obviously having a gaydar is a thing that people talk about, but can you tell just from looking at somebody's face?

Adverbs of degree

Like if you take away the voice, clothing and other context clues and literally just focus on the face, would you know, is gay face a real thing?

Early research in 2011 found that self-identified homosexual men had more symmetrical faces than straight men.

But these studies were small and didn't take into consideration grooming techniques.

I mean us gay guys, we like to pluck our eyebrows, keep our beards nice and trim.

Researchers started using morphometric software.

Which is basically a quantitative analysis of form or physical features, you know, like actually measuring distances and angles and then using math.

And they found that gay men had shorter noses and larger foreheads compared to their straight counterparts.

Research on lesbian faces found that on average, the lesbians in the study had more upturned noses and smaller foreheads than their straight counterparts.

Interestingly, having a gay male face wasn't just a matter of being more feminine when judged by independent raters.

So a gay man could still have a very masculine looking face.

They basically took a bunch of pictures of people's faces, stripped them of any accessories, makeup, and even hair, and then exaggerated their features to differing degrees.

In order to make them look more or less quintessentially gay based on the previous findings.

And no word of a lie, the rating scores almost perfectly fit a linear regression model.

Meaning the more exaggerated the gay features were, the more likely the volunteers were to think that that person was gay based on their face alone.

So it's not that you either have one or you don't, but that there's a scale from slight gay face to full blown gay face.

But even without using modified photos, it turns out that some people are better at identifying gay faces than others.

One study found that women are better than men.

At identifying the sexuality of a man or woman based solely on their face, in fact, women were actually particularly good at guessing if a man was gay based on their face alone, they did it with 75% accuracy.

This is consistent with some earlier research about how women are better than men at facial processing.

The research also found that the less prejudice someone was towards gay people, the more accurate they were at identifying gay faces, and not so surprisingly, gay and lesbian individuals often had higher rates of accuracy than heterosexual individuals at guessing gay faces.

Then in 2021 with the help of AI processing systems, things started to get wild in the world of gay face studies.

Researchers fed an AI system 35,000 images from dating sites of both gay and straight faces, and the AI was able to accurately guess if a person was gay or straight based solely on their face shape with 81% accuracy for men and 74% accuracy for women.

This study also found that gay men's faces had larger foreheads and narrower jaws, gay female faces had smaller foreheads and larger jaws compared to straight women.

But why would gay people have different facial structures in the first place?

The truth is, we don't know for sure, but scientists suggest that some biological factors, such as exposure to certain levels of sex hormones, could subtly influence the facial structure differently in men and women.

Of course, it's important to note that nearly all of this research uses binary concepts of both sexual orientation and gender, when we know lots of people fall into different places on the spectrum of life.

And of course, it's worth bringing up the genuine concern and critiques that this type of research can bring up, the risk of reinforcing harmful stereotypes, their issue with privacy and whether this is going to like be technology that's weaponized against us queer people.

But what about gay voice, can you tell someone's gay just from the way that they sound?

We actually have a whole episode breaking down the science of gay voice on our side note podcast channel, which I'll link to on screen here or in the description below, or if you prefer just the audio podcast, you can see it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen.

Just search side note podcast by ASAP science, you can hear more of our gay voices with our gay faces talking about more gay science.

This video, make sure you like and subscribe, okay, and we'll see you ASAP for some new science.