How Do You Tell?

I finally had to just tell a girl I had a major crush on that I was a) amazingly gay and b) amazingly hot for her. She turned me down in quite possibly the nicest way ever, and had just been being nice because she's really just that nice and not because she was trying to get into my undercarriage for some fine-tuning. We're now best-platonic-friends. Other times I've usually read cues successfully.

i think the first step is to make sure they know about your sexual orientation