Why Do Gay Men Sound Gay?

Sorry for the miswording but the article, and I, assumes people have acknowledge studies, presented already, have shown that there is no "gay voice" thing. That is why the article is worded as it is.Now would anyone like to provide any type of study that confirms a "gay voice" thing or the scientific existence of "gaydar".I was challenged to provide some science. I have presented a few studies and have been constantly attacked, but no one seems to have any science to back up the other side. Addressed more than adequately in previous posts. If you have any data showing else wise please present it.I have never presented any of these studies as the definitive end all be all. Rarely, if ever does science work that way. I have presented studies that show what they are studying, does not support the premise that there is a "gay voice" or gaydar.So you got anything to show there is? Other than stereotype, anecdote or bigotry of course.

In Message 74 you presented research that verifies the existence of a gay voice, as I pointed out in Message 76. You then posted Message 141 which suggests that since straight men can have a 'gay voice' so to can gay men have a 'straight voice' this means there is no 'gay voice'.You mention Gaydar, and although I have mentioned this previously, you still may be under the impression that saying that there is a gay voice is the same as saying 'people with a 'gay voice' are mostly gay' when instead what is being defended is that there is a voice which is used by a disproportionate number of gay men.To demonstrate how a gay voice does not provide gaydar imagine there are 10 million gay men in a group. There are 100 million straight men.
10% of gay men have the 'gay voice', so 1 million gay men.
1% of straight men have the 'gay voice', so 1 million straight men.If you hear a gay voice, it's 50/50 that the person is gay. Therefore you can't really have confidence in that person's sexuality and it would be wrong to always assume they were gay. There would be no 'gaydar' as such. OF course, it would still be better than guessing in any representative sample, even though you are still wrong half the time.Rogers suggested 'maybe less' than 50% of gays have 'the voice'. Seems high, but anything in that order of magnitude would verify what I've been suggesting. Here is a speech therapist, she separates the lisp from the gay, but does confirm the existence of a gay voice which she says is predominantly code-switching. Which is in line with what I've been saying. The article you raised also talked of code switching.Basically everything in this thread seems to be verifying this thing.Given that code-switching is involved, regional differences will inevitably exist. Some people will code-switch consciously, others can't help it and it can even become the primary method of speaking. It's very existence can feedback to reinforce itself, or not in one context or another. As I indicated previously, it makes the subject incredibly difficult to study and its not exactly a 'sexy' fund-raising type of research: Socio-linguistic analyses of phoneme placement in declarative sentences of homosexual males....*snore* On the one hand, its ontology is accepted, on the other the nature of the thing itself is shifting, varied and inconsistent. I have the opinions of a professor of linguistics, Henry Rogers and a speech pathologist, and David Thorpe who did 'Do I sound Gay?'.You have what appears to be an freshly graduated intern writer making a logical error as part of his intro flavour text leading to an interview with a professor at his university about a paper that had nothing to do with the gay voice. You are either denying the existence of a homosexual culture, or you are suggesting that acknowledging the existence of a gay culture is bigoted.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Have you watched this? What were its conclusions? Evidence? Can you provide some sort of study? No anecdotes please. Wow!! That has to be the biggest strawman I have ever seen.All I am saying is that this thing people call a "gay voice" is not restricted to gays. Evidence shows that this speech pattern is not a result of being gay but rather learned behaviour from upbringing. Yes there are exceptions to this

Hi, Caffeine. You got my 'cheer' because of this phrase alone.

Beyond just a "gay voice", why do regional dialects and other such groupings develop? Why did the Maryland Eastern Shore voice sound different than the Charleston Drawl or the Savannah slow step versus the Brooklyn 100 yard dash? What factors tend to push a subset of a language into recognizable characteristics?

No. Your deceptive tactics fail on me on the grounds that I have memory and am not stupid.However, since you have employed the 'quote mine' tactic to give the impression that I was making an empirical claim rather than a mathematical one I am obligated to point out your dishonest tactic and publicly shame you for your deception.

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You mention Gaydar, and although I have mentioned this previously, you still may be under the impression that saying that there is a gay voice is the same as saying 'people with a 'gay voice' are mostly gay' when instead what is being defended is that there is a voice which is used by a disproportionate number of gay men.

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To demonstrate how a gay voice does not provide gaydar imagine there are 10 million gay men in a group. There are 100 million straight men.
10% of gay men have the 'gay voice', so 1 million gay men.
1% of straight men have the 'gay voice', so 1 million straight men.

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If you hear a gay voice, it's 50/50 that the person is gay. Therefore you can't really have confidence in that person's sexuality and it would be wrong to always assume they were gay. There would be no 'gaydar' as such. OF course, it would still be better than guessing in any representative sample, even though you are still wrong half the time.

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Since it is beyond the scope of this thread to prove Set Theory, Probability Theory and Arithmetic your demand for evidence is absurd EVEN if you want to act innocent about the attempt at deception.Before you accuse of me being deceptive, I made this very same point earlier using evidence + mathematics in Message 76:

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I'd say a little under 50% of a group {from Rogers} 'sounding gay' is pretty significant, it seems higher than I would have thought. Since 'gay men' is a relatively small group - it wouldn't take very much prevalence of 'gay sounding' voices in straight men to make it impossible to predict from voice to sexuality.

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You'll note that my hypothetical numbers used the figure of 10% which given the evidence presented in this thread so far, is surely a conservative value vis--vis the real world. Would you therefore agree with the statement:

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some straight men can sound somewhat gay, and there are certainly gay men who don't have a gay voice.

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?Because this is the sentiment everybody else has expressed in this thread. Since you seem to be arguing about something I would have thought it was because you disagreed with something. Are you sure that this is ALL you are saying? Nobody has claimed otherwise as far as I am aware. What are you arguing about?Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

That has to be the biggest exaggeration I've ever seen.

Maybe you should because it does not support your position, so maybe you should not present it as support. You were the one that originally called for evidence. What is good for the goose... How could this even make sense? You are making numerous assumptions here. YOu are pulling #'s out of the air and expecting them to be some how evidence for your argument. How could being wrong 50% of the time be better than random guessing? You are the one jumping all over me. You seem to have some idea that I am denigrating some sort of gay culture.The point I have been trying to point out is that "gay voice" is a stereotype. Do you agree?
Stereotypes, even seemingly innocuous ones, are harmful and degrading. Do you agree?
If you do then get off my back. That is all I have argued on this thread. You seem to want make it into some sort of attack on gays or that you are some sort of "gay" expert.
If you feel the need to perpetuate stereotypes that is your choice but I am going to call them out.The most masculine seeming man I know is gay. I know seeming effeminate gay and straight men. I know extremely feminine lesbians and masculine lesbians. I know a whole mixture of straight and gay people that have different tastes and perceptions of feminine and masculine. I know a gay man that is completely and totally disgusted with the idea of anal sex. I know a straight guy that enjoys quite a bit of anal pleasure. Different people are different.There is no overarching gay type or straight type. As there is no overarching type of hispanic or black person or albanian. People are individuals and stereotyping them is to dehumanize them and make them a caricature.

Maybe a little exaggeration but at any time have I come close to...

For that to be the biggest strawman you've ever seen, you'd have to define "close" as "two universes over".

I'd love to clam credit, but it's quite a common saying in the UK.

Hi, Theodoric. This is the question Modulous and I both just answered. The made-up numbers were specifically used to illustrate of how 50-50 can be better than random guessing.You're assuming that, because there are two choices, the odds of guessing right are 50-50. But, that's only right when the two choices are qual. It's usually estimated that less than 10% of people are gay. So, the odds for random guessing are really 9-to-1. That means, if you randomly guess that a given person is gay, you'll be wrong 90% of the time.Compared to that, being wrong 50% of the time doesn't seem all that bad, does it?We don't know what the numbers actually are, because none of the studies we've discussed really tried to determine those numbers; but you can't just assume that a binary choice gives you 50-50 odds.Edited by Blue Jay, : No reason given.

Hi, Caffeine. Well fine, then. See if I ever try to 'cheer' you again.

Which raises the question. What is my biggest barrier here? Your illiteracy or your innumeracy?I never presented the documentary as support. You had to quote mine me last time in order to make your point.Now you are quote mining me to the point of clipping off parts of my sentence in order to try and drive the perception that I was making an empirical argument rather than a mathematical one. The very sentence you sliced and diced to make this quote mine makes this quite clear.I can only assume it is mendacity on your part. Stupid people wouldn't have been capable of this.You are a lying, deceiving piece of human detritus. Please don't quote mine me again. Thank you.

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Your deceptive tactics fail on me on the grounds that I have memory and am not stupid.

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However, since you have employed the 'quote mine' tactic to give the impression that I was making an empirical claim rather than a mathematical one I am obligated to point out your dishonest tactic and publicly shame you for your deception.

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{quote to prove I was talking about a thought experiment / hypothetical for the purposes of demonstrating how numbers work}

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Since it is beyond the scope of this thread to prove Set Theory, Probability Theory and Arithmetic your demand for evidence is absurd EVEN if you want to act innocent about the attempt at deception.

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Before you accuse of me being deceptive, I made this very same point earlier using evidence + mathematics in Message 76:

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{further supporting quote that this is a point about Maths and Logic, not an empirical claim}

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I mean to take my sentence out of it and try to insinuate I was saying the exact opposite of what I was explicitly saying must be dishonesty borne from a realisation that tackling my actual points is hard.Mendacious indeed, Theodoric. Set Theory, probability theory, arithmetic. Yes, I was even awful enough to be explicit about my doing so. Terrible, neh? So you don't think there is any combination of numbers wherein a smaller group could have a disproportionate representation while having the same absolute numbers as the larger group? You think we should burn maths or something?0.01N = 0.1X = n
0.01N + 0.1X = 2n
n / 2n = 1/2This set of equations is somehow impossible? Do you know how to math? A small percent of a large group can be equal in size to a larger percent of a smaller group. This therefore meansa) The smaller group has a larger proportionality of members belonging to the subgroup in question (its ten times more prevalent in this example since 0.1 is ten times higher than 0.01).
b) But it would not be possible to actually reliably infer which supergroup someone was from simply by them belonging to the subgroup as the absolute numbers are close.And that therefore speaking of a 'gay voice' doesn't therefore imply arguing in favour of gaydar.If you still don't get this, sociology and linguistics should be considered out of bounds for you. It's starting to dawn on me that you think being wrong 90% of the time is identical to being right 50% of the time. I don't suppose you like poker do you? I have a hankering to play with you. I am criticizing your arguments: that's what we do here, remember? We've already covered this ground, feel free to respond to my previous answers on this. Yeah, it's me that's jumping all over you for pointing out that personal experience is insufficient to make universally applicable empirical statements of such a large group. A wise man once said: 'Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts' 1) You only know one gay guy that hates anal and one straight guy that enjoys receiving anal? You either don't know many people, or they don't talk to you about sex much.2) So frickin' what? Nobody is arguing that the gay voice is exclusive to gays.3) I've already called you out on equating campness with effeminacy. But that's not what is happening.What is happening is that we are discussing an element of gay culture. White people can like Gospel and Rap but I think we can all agree that they are basically part of black culture. Not all black people like Gospel or Rap music.You are either denying its existence or claiming that pointing it out is bigoted. The evidence you presented in this thread seems to confirm its existence so where does this leave us?Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

What if no one has attempted to conduct a comprehensive study? Does that mean that it doesn't follow a pattern or does it mean that no one has yet to prove that it does? Just because something hasn't been empirically proven, especially in the case of lacking the attempt to do so, does not negate its existence necessarily. All scientific inquiry first starts with a basic hypothesis, and that hypothesis is often first based on some observation that acts as the antecedent. Everyone here, including EvC's resident homosexuals, all understand what is colloquially framed as the "gay voice," and no one seems offended by it. Although a comprehensive study is yet to be performed, I think I can safely speak for most of us here by saying that we are a little mystified why you're so miffed about it. Sure, it's not exclusive to gays, but I'm sure they are the exception versus the rule. I'm sure you could find a non-Asian who speaks with an Asian accent somewhere on the planet. We wouldn't conclude that they must therefore be Asian, rather we would instead simply conclude that they speak with an Asian accent. And we certainly wouldn't pretend that there's no such thing as an Asian accent just because somewhere on planet earth a non-Asian also has the accent.Strangely, the latter is what you seem to be doing... Pretending that there's no such thing as an Asian accent.... err, gay voice.I know this is not your intent, but it sounds as if you're saying that having a "gay voice" is somehow a bad thing and it's wrong to assume someone is gay because they speak with it. It's one of those things where even though you are defending gay people, you still sound a little condescending to gay people in the process! Again, I know that is not your intent, but...