Why do i sound gay

However, as seen in figure 1, queer women used slightly more vocal fry (3.5 usage per minute) than straight women (2.82 usage per minute). After three years of research, linguistics professors Henry Rogers and Ron Smyth may be on the verge of answering that question. This might bring to mind the stereotype of a “gay lisp,” but it’s important to clarify that a lisp involves misarticulating the ‘s’ sound, while gay men often overarticulate it.

There are unique characteristics of gay male speech that are distinct from female speech.

As for lesbian voices and other queer identities, there is less research available, but studies have identified unique characteristics in lesbian speech, though they are less socially recognized than those of gay men.

Ultimately, how someone is perceived can also relate to their mannerisms and appearance, which all contribute to the complexity of speech in relation to sexual identity.

If you’re curious about whether someone’s sexual orientation can be discerned just by looking at their face, we have a podcast episode dedicated to that topic.

In 62 per cent of the cases the listeners identified the sexual orientation of the speakers correctly. Studies have shown that gay men who are conscious of sounding “gay” can adjust their speech to sound more straight when they choose to.

A fascinating study on gay YouTubers revealed that after making a public coming-out video, their subsequent videos were perceived as sounding more “gay,” while straight YouTubers tended to sound more straight over time.

If we remove any visual or behavioral clues, could you still tell?

Surprisingly, science has a lot to say about it. The documentary Do I Sound Gay? questions where the “gay voice” comes from and some possible explanations of this phenomena (Thorpe 2014). Friends were interviewed which could have affected the speech samples, but keep in mind that the experiment was comparing casual speak, so in fact this could have been beneficial.

Some of my clients, for example, will refer to themselves, in an almost disdainful way, as sounding “gay,” as if a part of themselves is inherently wrong. Masculinity itself is not bad or wrong. In a study of 382 participants (187 LGB, 195 heterosexual), 58.3 percent of the LGB participants reported dissatisfaction with their voice, highlighting how common these concerns are.

Learning to accept and embrace ourselves fully, without judgment, is key.

One of my favorite teachers, Louise Hay, often said that the first step in learning to love ourselves is stopping all criticism. Are these categories distinct enough to draw phonetic conclusions? The challenge comes when we use it as a marker for whether we are acceptable, worthy, or desirable.

Many of us, like Jackson, notice early on ways we modify how we speak or present ourselves to fit what we believe others expect.

Participants could still have modified their speech since it was an interview. Stereotypes even in language are constantly shaping the way people see us (Waksler 2001), so how can we use language to align ourselves with our identities instead of projected ones other people place on us?

We perform gender, sexuality, and identity constantly, so how is language used to perform these things?

This could be funny and dramatized or serious, whatever they wanted, in hopes to get them to speak casually, how they would outside the space of an interview.

We compared how many times each group used vocal fry, the creakiness found in speech, typically in vowels (for example in this video clip from 0:00-0:31), and upspeak, the rising in voice at the end of sentences (as demonstrated in this video from 0:00-1:03), and rated overall pitch, the highness or lowness of voice, from 1-5 (you can learn about high and low pitch in this video).

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Butler, J. (2006).