How good is your gaydar? Students test others' abilities to recognize sexual orientation


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Kaitlin Thoresen/Staff Photographer Saginaw junior Marie Reimers waits as audience members clap to indicate their guess of her sexual orientation during the Gaydar event put on by Spectrum Thursday evening in the Bovee University Center Auditorium.

Students were tested on their ability to recognize others' sexual orientation Thursday night, with less than successful results.

About 100 students attended the event,"How Good Is Your Gaydar?" Thursday night. It challenged students to guess the orientation of 13 different panelists after asking the panelists a variety of questions.

The panelists included a wide variety of people, including President of Transcend and Royal Oak freshman Kai Niezgoda, Ortonville sophomore and President of Students Advocating Gender Equality Hannah Mollet and newly elected Student Government Association President Marie Reimers, a Saginaw junior.

Students were able to identify the participants with several different orientations, which included straight, bisexual, queer, asexual, straight and pansexual. Many were surprised when a person's sexual orientation was revealed.

Marissa Woodliff, a Dearborn freshman, said it was much more difficult to identify a person's orientation that he originally thought.

"(I'm) not very good," Toney said. "I didn't really know some of them. You can always put a label on people, but you don't truly know until you ask them."

Troy freshman Adam Toney said that he also took away a new understanding of sexual orientation after the event.

"I think that it was actually eye-opening," Toney said. "It's really hard to understand a person after only a few minutes and yet we label them anyway."

Contestant Julius Cantuba said he has experienced this problem first-hand. Openly gay, Cantuba said the majority of people instantly label him as straight, an occurrence that happened again Thursday night.

"I'm out; I don't care what people say or think I am," the Keego Harbor sophomore said. "After (I was identified as straight), a lot of people were surprised. Look, just because I like sports doesn't instantly mean I'm straight."

Nicholas Postelli, the former education advocacy chair for Spectrum, said Spectrum held this event to bring awareness to the student body.

"We held this event because of the stereotypes people might hold," Postelli said. "In a non-confrontational way, we wanted to say, 'This is what you do every day."

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