“The View” co-host claims that gay people can recognize one another through scent

Sunny Hostin, co-host of the female-led daytime talk show The View, claimed that gay people can recognize one another by scent alone.

She made her comment during the “Hot Topics” segment of Monday’s show while discussing Naked Attraction, a new full-frontal nudity dating reality series on the Max streaming platform. In the series, potential mates are gradually revealed completely naked, from their feet up, as a contestant decides which person they feel most attracted to.

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After months of dating her girlfriend, she said that she “could see the future for once.”

Hostin said that she and her husband binge-watched the show and “learned things that I never heard in my life,” including what a Prince Albert is. A Prince Albert is a piercing that goes through the underside of the head of a person’s penis.

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She then said that “research” has “found that gay men have different scent attraction” and that “homosexual people have a nose for each other,” adding, “[Gay people] can actually smell under their arms and, in a blindfold test, can tell which person is gay and which person isn’t,” Entertainment Weekly reported.

She may have been referring to a 2005 Swedish research study that found that homosexual and heterosexual men respond differently to odors involved in sexual arousal. In the study, researchers “isolated a testosterone derivative produced in men’s sweat and an estrogen-like compound in women’s urine,” The New York Times reported. Both were suspected of being pheromones that affect other people’s behavior.

Researchers examined which parts of the human brain responded most to both scents. The estrogen-like compound activated the hypothalamus of straight men, and the testosterone derivative did the same in straight women. The hypothalamus governs sexual behavior and bodily hormones.

Researchers then found that gay men’s brains responded like straight women’s. The finding suggested that the hypothalamus’s response was “determined not by biological sex but by the owner’s sexual orientation,” the aforementioned publication noted.

However, this research didn’t suggest that gay men can determine whether other men are gay through scent alone. In fact, the study exposed participants to much higher concentrations of both odors than humans are ever exposed to in real life. Additionally, some evolutionary biologists and sexologists question the degree that scent plays in human attraction compared to other animals, as human sexuality seems to rely more on sight than on scent.

Other studies have suggested that some queer people may be able to detect fellow LGBTQ+ folks based on other subtle clues, such as vocal cues, gender presentation, and biometric facial features. But these forms of “gaydar” aren’t quite the same as gay people being able to smell one another.