Do you get accused of being gay?

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Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say

But seriously...for those of us who aren't, including myself (and I've been married for a while to an NT woman), have you in your past been subject to accusations, teasing & harassment etc that you were gay? It happened to me several times during the 90s in my youth, but once I reached about the age of 25, it stopped. I was even attacked and threatened for it, which mystified me b/c I had no homosexual urgings, yearnings or curiosity whatsoever. At 21, while at a party, one guy even engaged in sarcastic bullying and pretended that he was gay and started putting his hands on me in a mocking way in front of his audience of minions/friends; it freaked me out and I turned away from the scene.

It didn't make sense to me at the time, but once I got my diagnosis in 2001, it started to make sense why people would make such accusations (as sarcastic as they may have been), based on:

1) awkward non-verbal and motor coordination
2) tendency to overcompensate for lack of eye contact by staring others in the eye
3) lack of interest in sports
4) inability to find a girlfriend
5) might dress in an odd way (I didn't have this in my youth, so this aspect of AS escaped me; the few friends that I had complimented me on my style).

However, what may be somewhat contradictory is the AS stereotypical preoccupation with computers and engineering, which are typically male-dominated areas. Maybe we're not into Formula-1 racing or football or into handyman hobbies, but there's the other traditionally male stuff. Heck I can't ever say I had a preoccupation with womens magazines, or quilting or interior design.

Best response to a gay accusation? "I guess you can't tell the difference between somebody with autism and somebody who's gay." well, technically, there is no best response, the person saying it is an idiot and you know what they say about trying to win an argument with an idiot.

Like one of the previous posters, very often whenever someone can't explain something, or feels intimated, they assume a person is gay. I once brought a girl back to my place; While there she told me that two guys that were talking to her the night I met her suggested that I might be gay; just based on looking at me. I once went out and a girl called me gay and her boyfriend shot her down (she was being cynical; I am an Aspie, I couldn't realize this until she burst-ed out in laughter; she realized that I couldn't read cues and exploited it). I went out to a club one night; a guy wanted me to be his wing-man; I declined; he began suggesting that I like men; clearly I must be gay because I didn't want to wing with a middle aged man wearing a fur coat (note sarcasm). A few years ago metro-sexual's were the new gay, now they are the new hetero standard. I think we are simply more receptive to the gay thing because we are Aspie's; I think NT's shrug things like that off (just my opinion).

I'm actually gay and have never been accused of being gay. People, especially the ladies, just assume I'm straight. In fact, I've been told I appear very masculine with a masculine walk, masculine posture and masculine mannerisms.

I think the real problem is that people think masculine equals straight and anything short of it is gay. Even though homosexuality has gained a lot of ground civil rights wise, many heterosexuals are still stuck with this fictional idea of what homosexuals look like.

Afew times because I do not date or want a girlfrend.

Everyone thinks I'm gay.

It might be because I listen to girly dance music all the time. I also figure skate.

OR...

I have so much testosterone it aromatizes to estrogen and I have high estrogen and testosterone.

I don't know. But pretty much everything I do is accused as being gay in some fashion, I apparently even "walk like a gay person." Whatever.

Maybe I should listen to like Slayer and Pantera all day or something.

Often, I don't think it's always a bad thing, though. Women are much more likely to think this than men. It makes women more comfortable around my weirdness than they might otherwise be. Better the gay box than the creep box.

I'm not really feminine, nor androgynous. I'm mostly masculine in dress and behavior. Certainly not a model of trendy fashion by any means.

When a girl who is a new acquaintance starts asking you if the khaki pants she wore the day before were too tight to be appropriate for the office, or asking your opinion regarding another girl's behavior, it's probably pretty clear what she thinks about your sexual orientation.

With women, it's more about vibe than the following things. With men, the following things might be more important, but I still think vibe is most important:

Most people think I'm gay, even though I'm not.

I am also small, skinny and feminine. That coupled with the aspie traits you describe does make me suspect to accusation.

I imagine if someone was big and manly, with the same aspie traits, they wouldn't be accused as much.

I'm a long-time lurker, but started an account to answer this post.

I'm 30. When I was 18 and a senior in high school I had a weird experience. This was in the spring of 2001 about a month from graduation...12 years ago now. I had no real friends and couldn't get a girlfriend. I didn't know about Asperger's then. There was this one guy in my English class. He may have been an Aspie too, though I don't like diagnosing others. But he was very geeky and strange.

Anyway, we were in the library doing research for a paper. He we sitting next to me at a desk and we started chatting. We talked about where we were going to college in the fall. All of a sudden, he said he wished that another boy in our grade was going to the same college as him. I asked, "why?" As soon as I did, it dawned on me what he was trying to tell me. He said something like, "because I, you know...like him, that way."

I tried to be polite and said, "oh, ok, you can tell me," but inside I was panicking. I didn't see this coming and had no idea how to react. He said something like, "I know I can tell you, but I don't want them to know," meaning everyone else.

For the last few weeks I tried my damnedest to avoid him. The next day, he tried to get me alone and tell me how he couldn't get the boy he liked out of his head.

Now, I am not and have never been homophobic. But being a loser, not being able to get a girlfriend, watching the girl I liked go the the Prom with some other jackass...all I wanted to do was graduate and get out of there. And yet, before I could do that, I had some gay guy I didn't even know come out to me.

If he'd flat out hit on me, I wouldn't have cared. If we'd been life-long friends, I wouldn't have cared. But he came out to me, and I didn't even know him all that well.

Looking back, I think he may have been a gay aspie. Maybe he saw similarities between us based on our Asperger's, but he incorrectly assumed the similarities were due to homosexuality, so he thought I was gay too, even though I'm not. Of course, his weirdness may have been due to repressed homosexuality.

Regardless, it was a very weird and daunting experience.

On a side note, I identify with the whole not liking sports thing. Personally, I never got the appeal and to this day they bore the hell out of me.

I was considered gay in university, ironically it was NT girls who were the most homophobic toward me (so much for the myth that being gay means you can make friends with girls). My only friend was gay so that probably didn't help

In the past, yes.

People assume asperger guys might be gay because of the lack of "alpha-male" attitude. That is, too caring, and not egoistic enough.

The more egoistic and brutal, the more non-gay, in general.

Asperger people are typically also more shy, which is thought of as a feminine trait. That is why people think "gay".

In elementary school and middle school, definitely. I never really understood what I did that seemed so obviously gay to everyone. I know the word "gay" is thrown about pretty easily among kids that age, but for me it was consistently applied, as if they knew for a fact.

Incidentally, I am gay, so there's that. Ironically, after I accepted and came to terms with my sexuality, the accusations stopped. I came out to my parents just last year, but up to that point only family and close friends suspected I was gay -- and that's more because I've never had a girlfriend than anything else.

I find it interesting and a bit amusing that people tend to assume that homosexuality is the reason for my lack of girlfriend rather than my social awkwardness and a-sociality.

In any case, I never really thought I gave off an obviously gay vibe, but I could be wrong. I am not a paragon of masculinity, either, but I hardly see how that should matter. I agree with an above poster who noted that what society's expectations of how gay people are "supposed to be" is very narrow and ignorant.

I have before. Not by my appearance or actions, but more so by my special interests. I get obsessed with people, and sometimes it can be a woman, but not at all in a sexual way. But sometimes people have said, ''you sound like you're lesbian, talking excessively about her!'' And I'm like, ''no, you don't understand! I do not have those kind of feelings for her at all. I'm just obsessed!''

It's very complicated to explain. Some people can be obsessed with animals, does that mean they fancy the animals? No.

My cousin said something about me being gay once. She was embarrassed when I corrected her.

Also, a man threatened to rape me (I'm a man) after I gave him a ride home from a Tim Reynolds concert in Vail and refused to have sex with him. He said I couldn't be sure I wasn't gay until I tried gay sex, and that I must be gay because of the way I was dancing. Then he asked me to help him rape a woman who worked at 7-Eleven. I just threw a few cigarettes on the table (He'd been bumming them off me all night) and walked out the door.

I've often been called gay and people have often said they thought that I was gay when I showed interest in a girl, but im not gay.