Steve Kornacki is gay?  Damn!  I missed another one.

OK, if you’re not an MSNBC junkie like I am, you may not know that Steve is the bespectacled, regular guy pundit co-hosting “The Cycle.”  The important thing is that on the premiere episode, it was casually mentioned that he “likes boys.”  Or maybe it was “likes men.”  You get the picture.

Immediately, I had a little Scooby Doo confusion moment.  Hurh?  I’d been seeing Steve on a lot of shows over the past year and had him figured as a straight guy with a pretty wife and a toddler – probably named Tyler or Parker – living in Park Slope.  (No, this doesn’t mean I was obsessing.  That’s the standard bio I assume for New York-based thirtysomethings who do TV.)  I shouldn’t have been surprised at all.  This was just another sign that my gaydar, hitherto pretty dead on, was slipping.

If you’re straight, you’ve undoubtedly heard about gaydar, but chances are no matter how hip you are, you haven’t experienced that electric jolt that comes with realizing the stranger you’ve just met is “in the club.”  And you’ve probably seldom had the satisfaction of knowing the same about someone on television, in a movie, on stage or across a room, unless they’re an extreme stereotype – like Marcus Bachmann.  Too bad, because it’s really cool.  Like having a secret super power.  Not as cool as flying, but definitely better than super hearing.

Now imagine losing that power after years and years of near-infallibility.  That’s where I am.  I used to think that gaydar was chemical, something ingrained in me.  But it seems that it may also have a social component.  I hate to say it, but it could be – generational.  Like music.  It could be that same thing that makes Madonna speak to me more than Lady Gaga is providing a cloaking device over my fellow homos.

I’ll grant that Steve describes himself as a pretty atypical gay guy in his column “The Coming Out Story I Never Thought I’d Write” on Salon.com, which should make him harder to detect, but it’s hard for me to believe that in over a year I never even got a blip on my gaydar screen.

My friend David says there are different “tells” now than when we were coming out.  Of course he has no idea what those might be, which means he’s in the same boat that I am.  I knew there was trouble when the metrosexuals started invading.  At the same time, it looks like our peeps have been living the “we’re just like everyone else” meme and assimilating all over the place.

So are there tells anymore other than size-thirteen stilettos and flannel shirts?  I hope there are and that I only need to learn them.  Call me old-fashioned, but I’d hate for us to blend in so much that we lose our “fabulous.”  That’s probably a sentiment that will seem prehistoric in ten years, but I do worry about becoming invisible again.  And I’m not really interested in being just like everyone else.  I’m looking to live somewhere between Castro Street and Wisteria Lane.  Closer to Castro, of course.

For now I’m going to go out and study the ways of the young gays and see if I can update my systems.  They can’t be THAT mysterious.