Why Do Gay Men Sound Gay?

Im gay and have plenty of gay friends (Danes and Swedes), and ive never heard anyone who sounds like that, except in american TV shows and movies, mostly as parodies or caricatures.Even the 1 dragqueen and 2 crossdressers i know doesnt sound anything like that.Maybe its an american thing?

I have half a dozen gay friends in the UK, one of whom is fairly camp, and another more so. The others aren't at all camp.I've sometimes thought of the camp persona/accent, which some (I believe a minority) of gay men here adopt, as perhaps a reflection of identity or belonging to a group. Perhaps something of a parallel is the Socal teen-speak (eg "toodles", "bff", "totes" etc) - an identifier.I'm just theorising from my own experience of gay guys though, so who knows.(And yes, I have known a camp straight guy, but the other camp guys I've seen and heard have all self-identified as gay. As Dr A indicates, I think that a camp persona is far more prevalent in the gay community than not - certainly in my experience in this country).Edited by vimesey, : Grammar

I agree. I am seriously reconsidering my position re: PC in that other thread.

The last sentence does not imply the presumption in the first sentence is false. Are you sure? Nor does speaking in a camp fashion. Your bigotry is apparently showing. 10 says I know more. And we should all base our conclusions on your experience. That would make sense.Hey, how about some science? I'm sure you know how the distribution of traits actually works. I know a woman who is 6 foot 3 inches. I know a man who is 5 foot 2 inches. It would still be true to say that men are mostly taller than women. So whatever your opinion of the hypothesis is, this kind of reasoning is meaningless.

From wikipedia article on Gay lisp affectation.

quote:

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Henry Rogers and Ron Smyth, professors at the University of Toronto, investigated this.

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According to Rogers, people can usually differentiate gay- and straight-sounding voices based on certain phonetic patterns. "We have identified a number of phonetic characteristics that seem to make a man’s voice sound gay," says Rogers. "We want to know how men acquire this way of speaking."

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A study at Stanford University involving a small sample group investigated claims that people can identify gay males by their speech and that these listeners use pitch range and fluctuation in deciding.[8] Results were inconclusive:

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Although he found that listeners could distinguish gay from straight men, he failed to find any convincing empirical differences in pitch between these two groups. [...] This study is representative of others that have failed to find concrete differences in the speech of gay and straight men.[9]

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In a similar study of female speakers, it was found that listeners could not tell lesbian speakers from heterosexual speakers. Other studies of lesbian identity do make references to voice use by lesbians typically using lower pitch and more direct communication styles.

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Perhaps there was some in artful phrasing in the OP, but maybe the phrasing used by the researchers above might be more acceptable?

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.
Faith has a history of posting, bigoted, racist and homophobic comments. Most people treat Faith with kid gloves. I refuse to.So you would all be ok if Faith had a post that said Why do black people like chicken so much? or Why are Mexican's so lazy? Why are Native American's drunks? Are all of you willing to say those are legitimate curiosities? It is no different, it is reinforcing stereotypes, which is in itself discriminatory and prejudicial.You are right about the feminine words I used, I should have used camp. I am just used to people saying it is effeminate sounding.If people here want to support prejudice and discrimination that is their decision. As a person that comes from a family that has put up with prejudice and discrimination for generations and has suffered personally due to stereotypes, I refuse to allow it to happen without calling it out.This is not a PC statement, unless you feel calling out prejudice and stereotypes is being PC, When did not being offensive to a class of people become being PC?

Hello Hyroglyphx, If you haven't seen the Film "Do I Sound Gay?" This is all explored in detail. One individual in the film who was not gay but had what speech experts called effeminate speech inflections did so because he was raised by his mother and had only sisters and he admitted he use to listen to his mother talk on the phone to her girl friends. He picked it up. Camp in many individuals can be turned on or off depending on the company. One of the directors friends showing that when he is at his day job he speaks in a perfectly normal tone, but when with his partner and friends can "camp it up" with the best of them. So I think that it is more along the lines of something men do to show they are indeed unafraid to express themselves. Perhaps a way of showing that I belong and I identify with this. The director David Thorpe simply could not stop himself from this speech style once he developed it though. He made progress but would relapse. Heres a link to the film.Do I Sound Gay? (2014) - IMDbEdited by 1.61803, : italic added to normal to indicate the non-camp speech and not that I somehow feel campy speech is abnormal. As in Seinfeld's: "not that theres anything wrong with that."

...but you were talking to Dr. Adequate.

Regardless of what word you use to describe it, are you implying there is something wrong with such speech pattern?

Yes I am just sincerely curious about what brings about the gay pattern of speech. I'm aware that some straight men can sound somewhat gay, and there are certainly gay men who don't have a gay voice. But there IS a gay voice, possibly more than one, and it's interesting to consider how it might have come about. Perhaps it's more an American thing too, since one poster here says it doesn't exist among his Danish and Swedish gay friends.I've watched some of the film "Do I Sound Gay" and may eventually watch the rest of it. [ABE: I watched some more but had to stop when the language got offensive and it actually included pornographic scenes.]I don't have much experience with the gay world but I haven't lived under a rock all my life either. As a Christian I'm maybe less likely than I was before to be in a position to know gays, but interestingly I've had a gay friend for about fifteen years now who I met on the internet at a conservative forum, while my experience before was more at a distance.My gay friend and I aren't always friends, we've had our knock-down-drag-outs but overall we stay in touch and share information about our lives. He's had two life partners, the first died thirty or forty years ago, and the other died about five years ago after a prolonged illness. Now he lives with his two cats. He's seventy-five, two years older than me. I've talked to him on the phone a few times. The first time I thought he had an identifiable but fairly slight gay sound to his voice. More recently that seems to be much less. Wondering why that might be I think it could be because over the last few years he's had a lot of straight people in his life and no contact with the gay community any more. He reconnected with old friends at his high school reunion a few years ago and some of them have become good friends he entertains for long visits at his home, and vice versa.I don’t think I understand what camp is yet, though I gather it has some connection with the theater. My friend is stereotypical in that he loves old movies and particularly the strong actress personalities of the early years of the movies. He met some of his rediscovered friends in high school theater productions.As a child he was closest to his mother and a particular aunt, and though he won’t say anything critical of his father I think he was at least a neglectful and possibly rejecting, maybe even in some sense abusive parent. I’m guessing though because my friend likes to maintain a sort of sentimental view of his parents and childhood that doesn’t completely add up. There seems to be a sort of void instead of a real relationship with his father, while he had a close and colorful relationship with the aunt. I know I’m playing armchair psychoanalyst here but it makes sense that there would have been much female influence and less positive male influence in male gay experience. I’m sure it isn’t always the case but doesn’t it make sense?Thinking of my own experience I think I have a relatively masculine identity for a woman. I know I identified with my father more than my mother because she was not a supportive figure in my life whereas I loved my quiet father unreservedly and he was always supportive and affectionate in his quiet way. I think my identification with my father is why I’m comfortable among all the males here at EvC talking about scientific and political things, and would not be as comfortable at a forum of women talking about domestic concerns. Not that I don’t share their concerns of course, but the relationships are awkward for me whereas EvC despite its antagonistic atmosphere is perhaps oddly more congenial. Yet I haven’t the slightest lesbian inclination at all. We’re all odd in some way or another perhaps.So these are the sorts of things I think about in relation to the psychology of gayness. I could of course discuss it from a theological perspective instead but I’ve already done that to some extent.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Because their parents spoke 'gay'?

If I were you, I'd ignore all the politically correct regressive liberals on here regarding this topic.I wouldn't call it "gay" accent. There's really no name for it (yet). But to deny that it exists is like to deny that Asian American accent or ebonics exist.I have an Asian American accent. There's no denying it. I came to the states a little late in my life to not have one. My ex was a black guy that spoke ebonics. It used to drive us nuts to run into these regressive liberals that tried really hard to deny that either one of us spoke differently than them. By trying as hard as they did to deny that my ex spoke ebonics and I spoke with an Asian American accent, they pretty much told us without saying it that they thought there was something wrong with either one of our speech pattern.Memo to regressive liberals: there's nothing wrong with Asian American accent or ebonics or "gay" accent or theater speak or whathaveyous.Stop trying to not offend us. It's ok to recognize that we have different speech pattern than you do. It's ok for you to stop lying to others and yourself about this topic.Anyway, back to Faith's question.Like I said before, the speech pattern you are recognizing is (in my opinion) a result of men not sounding so masculine and being creative with their inflections. Some go overboard with it to be entertaining or whatever other reason, and it's perfectly alright.One of my ex's spoke exactly like that video in the humor thread I posted. He was also a (what we in the gay community call) fem. At the time we were dating, I was attending grad school for engineering and he was in law school. When we departed and went our own ways, he found a job at a law firm on track to becoming a lawyer. I always laughed to myself trying to imagine him talking like that in court. LOLMy (current) boyfriend... probably life partner... is the most typical white guy you can imagine. We're both pretty boring and do not fit in at all with the stereotypical gay scene. Meh, we've both outgrown all of that.Added by edit.To further clarify, the reason you (and probably most other people) recognize this "gay" accent is because of the few that speak this way. Trust me, there are more gay people around than you realize. We are pretty much everywhere. The overwhelming vast majority of us don't speak or look like how we are portrayed by the media, so we're less visible. Most people we run into have trouble believing my partner and I are romantically involved with each other. We're just a couple of guys. If we ever meet in real life, you'd never give us a second thought.Edited by Lammy, : No reason given.

Nice to share your view of the PC on this thread.But I end up thinking there really is a gay voice even if it isn't exclusively gay and even if there are lots of gays who don't have it. One thing I got out of that film "Do I Sound Gay" is that the speech pattern seems to come mostly from imitating female speech. While nongay men can pick it up just from being more around women than men as children, gay men have a psychological reason besides that for picking it up, and I think it must have something to do with alienation from father and other men for various reasons, and getting your main support coming from mother or other female figures in the family. Creates a love hunger toward the male sex or something like that, which gets sexualized in adolescence. I'm sure there are many variations on how sexual identity develops but that seems like one that stands out in this context.I think even you are into denying the gayness of the pattern in the end too, preferring to describe it as being creative with your voice etc. I think there's a psychological dynamic involved instead.At least that's my current position.

You might have noticed I worded it as a general reply.

Nice attempt at building a strawman. I did not say any such thing. Why would you think that I think there is something wrong with the speech pattern?Is there something wrong with liking fried chicken? I guess the subtlety was lost on you, and others, but I carefully chose my examples and went from a seemingly innocuous stereotype and made them progressively offensive. How about these OP's?Why are Jews so good with money?Why are Asian youth so good at Math?Are you ok with these discussions to satisfy someone's "curiosity"?Why did no one ask thewriter of the OP if they thought there was a problem with that way of speaking?Faith uses the term gay as a pejorative in the title of the OP.
Why Do Gay Men Sound Gay?
Read that again and tell me how you can rationalize it in that "Sound Gay" is not an attempt to say there is a problem with how they sound.The purpose of the stereotypes I listed was to show how harmful stereotypes of any sort are. Yes, stereotypes have some basis in observation and reality. Fried chicken is a known dish in southern/soul cooking. The image of the lazy Mexican probably comes from the cultural artifact that in some places in the tropics people take time off, siesta, in the middle of the day. Alcoholism is a terrible and persistent problem in the Native American communities, though a recent study seems to show that there is no more a problem than in the dominant white culture.
U of A study debunks alcohol abuse stereotypes in Native Americans
Stereotypes of any type are dehumanizing. The purpose of them is so that people do not have to look at a person as an individual, but as the stereotypical representation they want them to be.