What a drag it is getting old. Hanson, for instance, is celebrating their 21st birthday at Irving Plaza this month, which means the band is older than most of our interns, which explains why all my Magnum, P.I. references are going right over their heads. It's even worse for writer Fred A. Bernstein, who has always relied on his trusty "gaydar" to navigate a wide variety of challenging social environments. But now his so-called "sixth sense" is failing him in middle age! In a column for the Times today, he explains:
When I was single, gaydar was what enabled me to enter a room and decide if there was someone there I might want to share my life with. Now that I’m married (11 years), it’s what enables me to enter a room and decide if there’s someone there I might want to share a joke with (if the joke is one that I think only another gay man would appreciate).
Gaydar was what enabled me to figure out who in the world was on “my team.” ... But my gaydar, like my eyesight and my hearing, has declined with age. And there are, so far as I know, no devices (akin to glasses or hearing aids) to help me.
You can read the whole sad story here at the Times, but make sure you scroll all the way to the end before you launch a Kickstarter to buy Bernstein costly Gaydar Enhancement Surgery. It seems there's a very simple explanation for his malfunctioning gaydar, and it's not something that medical science can cure.
Bernstein believes his gaydar is failing him for the simple reason that he's fallen off the greater gaydar of the world—in other words he's "become invisible" to the other gay men in the room, so it's harder for him to pick up signals that reveal their "team." For straight men, this is like when you show up at a party with a thick mustache wearing a Detroit Tigers cap and an Aloha shirt but none of the ladies compare you to Tom Selleck. Time and tide wait for no man, regardless of orientation. At least, that's what that little voice keeps telling me.
