Gaydar: friend or foe?

…and the reason you’ll never sign out for good

by Florentine

You know the score.  Getting measured for your first bra by the alarmingly clammy-handed ladies at M&S, asking mum for permission to boldly put razor to barely hairy teenage leg, and sitting petrified on a toilet for the best part of an hour, desperately clawing enough courage to declare the red-painted beginnings of womanhood to your mum/dad/second cousin/mentally imbalanced home economics teacher (delete as appropriate).  Rites of passage: traumatising girls across the land since 1864 – or thereabouts.

For the average homo girl about town, there is one near unavoidable rite of passage that will come to define her very experience as a practising population-controller.  Ladies and tomboys, please welcome into the arena of mass opinion-division, your friend and/or foe… Gaydar Girls.  For those of you who are a). not gay (how nice of you to join us), b). accessing the internet from beneath your rock in the Outer Hebrides or c). slower on the uptake than an empty-handed sofa enthusiast during an indiscriminate Bank Holiday of your choosing, please allow me to explain.  Gaydar Girls is the lesbian arm of a market-leading dating website that, in its own words, provides “what you want, when you want it”.  Presumably then, for those in the know, what girls want are other girls who want girls wanting them (there’s a Blur song in there somewhere)… and they mostly want it at any time outside of office hours, when the super subtle G-A-Y-D-A-R brand won’t be emblazoned across their screen in 6ft tall letters for sniggering colleagues to gawp at.

I first made my foray into the booby-trapped world of Gaydar a couple of months after becoming a real lesbian.  For me, the crossover to genuine homo was defined by a new and long-awaited willingness to tell anyone who would listen (new acquaintance, nosey colleague, part-time petrol pump assistant…) of my newly acquired status, without wanting to curl up into a shame riddled ball and self-implode.  And in those early days of relative fragility and wonderment, Gaydar provided a bouncy, cushion-soft entry into a world I had little idea how to begin navigating.  Like wandering into a restaurant to find that all of your favourite foods are on the menu, I had suddenly found myself scrolling through page upon page of real, live girls who might actually agree to touch me a little bit if I asked them really nicely.  This was in stark contrast to my offline life in which I had, by that point, met only one other bonafide lesbian during the entirety of my time on the planet.  Bad times.

Of course as with any new toy or gadgetry (ice cream maker anyone?) the initial excitement tends to wear off pretty quickly, leaving reality to make itself firmly at home in the lounge of your subconscious… and then start taking food from your fridge.  The first disappointment, for those operating outside of the lucrative porn industry at least, was the expansive ocean of disrobed genitals staring proudly out from their little squares of cyberspace.  Call me a traditionalist, but I personally prefer my gifts wrapped – else where is the fun in ripping off the paper to see what joys lie within?  Also rather bemusing, are the selection of ‘keywords’ available to let potential partners know what kind of things you’re into.  Mountaineering?  Sun-worshipping?  Cross-stitch perhaps?  Oh, actually no… perhaps we’ll go for hoods & masks, watersports and S&M instead.  The mind boggles.  For those of you putting together your ‘Don’t judge our fetishes!’ placards and matching t-shirts as we speak, I have no qualms with any of the above-mentioned (leisure?) activities – rather, they just don’t happen to be the initial qualities that spring to mind when I’m on the look-out for a potential girlfriend.  And, while we’re on it, can you imagine any of these categories casually lurking on street corners at Match.com?  Alas, the gay world will probably always be a little overtly-sexualised for my humble tastes, so it’s little wonder that this recurring theme is reflected in lezville’s cyber counterpart.

That said, I have also met a wide and varied selection of sweet, bold, confident, whimsical, creative, lovely, endlessly interesting, unashamedly witty, inspiringly adventurous and ambitious women (phew!) via its generous mass of listings, who would all probably agree that despite its flaws, there is no better place to meet like-minded lesbians online.  And for the cynical among you who think internet-borne dating is reserved exclusively for reclusive, unconfident inverts with no social life – think again!  If used correctly, Gaydar can be a veritable Yellow Pages of future best friends, girlfriends and introducers that you may otherwise never have the opportunity to find on account of the dark, loud and alcohol-saturated nature of most gay hang-outs.  So on that note, I’m going to leave you with a list of ten stand-out features, foibles and faux-pas that characterise the website we love to hate and, equally, hate to admit we love.  Delete your account into the fiery depths of hell never to return again?  I bet my very own granny you’ll come crawling back with your tail between your legs…

Reasons we love Gaydar

- Unlike real life, Gaydar is the one room you can always walk in to that can guarantee you won’t accidentally chat up any straight women.

- Whilst usually when you locate a hot, gay and available woman you have generally consumed six vodka & cokes, a selection of ill-advised shots, a precursory glass of lager and can no longer remember your name, Gaydar provides the opportunity to dream up witty one-liners and much-edited conversation starters for a vastly superior first impression.

- Gaydar blissfully facilitates casual perving in the privacy and comfort of your own home.

- Gaydar doesn’t judge you for forgetting to shave your legs and walking around with three-day old, greasy hair eating your fifth cheese toasty of the afternoon.

- Gaydar reminds you that there actually are lots of single and lovely lesbians in your locality, despite your occasional rants to the contrary.

Reasons we want to send Gaydar to the fiery depths of hell

- Saggy, middle-aged genitals on apparently unabashed display – you’re old enough to know better.

- Offers of threesomes from otherwise straight girls and their ever-so-lovely long term boyfriends.  I’m afraid you required the next stop at Swingers-town, move along please.

- Stalkers.  We can see each and every time that you visit our page (paying members only of course) and are just as unlikely to respond to your fifteenth successive message as we were to your third.  Sorry.

- Ever got really into a conversation with someone all exciting and funny and sparkly new then promptly ‘run out’ of messages?  Rage.

- The conversationally-able among us will go to our graves continuing to be filled with bile-saturated despondence at the introductory line, “Hey, add me on MSN – hornyguurl5@hotmail.com” (or something similarly lame).  Remind me why I’m here again?