What is up with the gay lisp?

As an Asian female, I’m real sorry to say that I have never heard any of my friends speak with a gay lisp. Even the real gays.

Personally I find it insulting to the real LGBT population out there who really would not try very hard to be different from us (thus no putting on whatchama’-call-it-gay-lisp). In fact, most gays I know try really hard to be treated like normal people. :)

In my opinion the idea of the gay lisp is another one of the media’s fault in stereotypical labelling.

It’s faaabulous!

Good question. I don’t know what’s up with that either, but once on Answerbag, I asked the same thing and people were treating me like I was a homophobe or something. I’ve noticed that too though, so man gay guys love to talk with a lisp.

@clarice

Well, it’s definitely a stereotype, but it’s not like the media started it. They just perpetuate the stereotype, but stereotypes are based on fact. Indeed I have met gay guys who speak with a slight lisp; I’m not talking a huge over-the-top exaggeration here. Most interesting is when in other respects, they’re not stereotypical at all, like the guy I met and referred to in the question.

@Self_Consuming_Cannibal

I mean, I don’t fake anything. But I feel good inside when my friends tells me that I “don’t talk straight” in response to a question if I have a “gay voice”. I like that. Some people wouldn’t, but I do. And I’ve done nothing to try to sound like that, it’s just the way I sound. But again, I don’t have a gay lisp, just a less-masculine sounding voice.

Edit to the Question: It was pre-11th grade. I remember. I came to school after that summer and people wouldn’t shut up about how my voice was noticeably deeper or in the case of my friend David “finally Dominic’s becoming a man!”. :P

The question was asked here before also, you can see what others had to say then.

@DominicX ”...Stereotypes are based on fact.”

Not true. Stereotypes are based on popular misconceptions held by people who understand little about the people they are stereotyping.

@holden

Okay, well, I don’t want to turn this into a big debate about the nature of stereotypes. I’m just telling you what I have experienced and my experience says that when I encounter someone who has a voice like that, they are gay. That doesn’t mean all or even most gay people talk like that, not at all. That doesn’t mean that all people who talk like that are gay. But I have seen it enough to know that it is a fact that some gay guys do talk like that.

They tend to be the more flamboyant ones. Since the more flamboyant ones are the ones people notice more often and the lisp goes along with that, the lisp becomes part of what they see most often and thus becomes part of the stereotype.

@DominicX I have met homosexual people with high-pitched voices; I have also met heterosexual people with high-pitched voices. To answer your question, I don’t think the “gay lisp” is unique to gay people. Everyone’s manner of speech is different. Until you can show me evidence of a causal relationship between sexuality and vocal pitch I’m inclined to believe it’s all coincidence.

@holden

I’m also inclined to believe it’s coincidence. But there’s a part of me that is curious about an alternative explanation. That’s why I asked this question. :) I know there isn’t much hard evidence; even Wikipedia doesn’t have much to say. But I figured I’d give it a shot.

What lithp?
Okay, seriously, straight people lisp also. Gays who happen to have a lisp just make it sound more fun!

@DominicX like you, I think some gay people (consciously or not) exaggerate their lisp. Maybe because they’ve subconsciously connected the stereotype to their own ideas about their sexuality and hence their identity as a person.

I want to point out that I’m not talking at all about pitch here, because for the most part I think pitch has little if no correlation (never mind a causal relationship) to sexuality. The lisp, on the other hand, while obviously not causal, seems to correlate pretty consistently with gay dudez at least insofar as my own experience, etc.

Also: prepare to read what is surely nonsense.

Anyway, I’m gay and my voice is somewhat deep and raspy. There’s a very, very slight lisp that only emerges when I’m speaking real lazily, and as often as I’m aware of it I attempt to suppress it. If I let it slip out I’m embarrassed; I hate it.

The reason is that to me the stereotypically homosexual male voice is actually pretty unattractive, so I try to do what I find attractive and speak the way I think a typical straight guy probably would. If that makes any sense.

Also I’m always trying to engineer others’ conception(s) of me, and since I’m not exactly out of the proverbial closet it’s become a no-brainer that the less gay I sound, the less likely my friends and family are to suspect I’m gay.

As to why the lisp develops apparently more frequently in gay men: I wish I knew. To some extent I feel it’s become sort of biologically mimetic (as opposed to genetic, obv). But in any event, to me it is the biggest indicator of homosexuality in closeted people, i.e. it usually produces the clearest/loudest blips on my ‘gaydar’ or whatever. (I’m not talking about a plain old lisp, here. There’s a noticeable difference between a regular lisp and a gay lisp.)

Now, I hate to make generalizations because I’m probably wrong, but I think most straight guys would feel pretty insecure if they had the exaggerated and flamboyant and lisping voice that’s attributed to openly gay men. So when I run into guys who both claim to be straight and speak like Richard Simmons, I confess I begin to get a little suspicious and curious. In their cases, they’re definitely not making concerted efforts to effect the gay lisp, and yet there it is. So if it’s mimetic there, then it’s un/subconsciously so. Like @holden said, I guess, except he said it way more clearly….

The real interesting thing to me is that apparently they don’t realize how like Richard Simmons they sound. I mean a lot of people seem to be unaware of what they sound like in reality/to others, and if they ever manage to hear themselves they’re kind of surprised and say ‘Do I really sound like that?’ and ‘I don’t like hearing my own voice’ and ‘I sound like a fag,’ and so on, because for the most part they can’t control their voices and those voices either a) betray a truth they’d rather not confront (e.g., they’re gay) or b) do not at all accurately represent who they feel they are. You know, internally and whatnot.

Sometimes I also feel like my voice doesn’t belong to me. We’ve all felt like that. So I guess I can imagine that there also exist some genuinely straight guys out there who struggle with lisps or otherwise gaytypical voices because those voices happen to be deceiving or misleading or totally not representative of the genuinely straight dudes they’re coming from.

So I obviously have not a fucking clue, but what was probably meant with all the above is that I think the correlation is attributable to biosocial mimicry but that it certainly isn’t causal and certainly doesn’t prove or disprove a thing re: sexuality, and that a lot of times our voices aren’t very good indicators of who we are but we nonetheless try to effect certain styles of speech that conform to social expectations or whatever, and it can kind of be like the clothes we wear. When my mom is around black people she adapts the way she speaks. When she’s around me she adapts. Around my father. Likewise I think if I were to finally begin hanging out with a bunch of flaming gayz I’d probably begin to sound more like they sound, too. Yeah.

If you read any of that I apologize but I will also blame Pepsi Throwback.

As you probably know the word “gay” refers to a huge variety of people, who may be gay for an equally huge variety of reasons. The “gay lisp” is probably hormone-related, but absalom’s last point may be true, too. I find that, if I spend enough time with a certain group of people (eg within a region using a particular dialect), I end up talking like them. It was weird when I studied and went back home for Christmas and people would tell me how my accent had changed.

I know a number of gay men -well over a dozen – and none of them speak with the “gay lisp”. Some are acquaintences and some are really dear friends, so our relationship doesn’t seem to play a role.

What I have noticed, it that the gay men I know tend to speak a bit more flamboyantly. Very upbeat and excitable. I always assumed this was because they a comfortable with their sexuallity and not concerned solely with “guy” behavior (being masculine).

If they think that something is “fabulous!!” they’ll say it, whereas the (often insecure) straight guy might think it’s “fabulous!!”, but would say, “Yeah…it’s nice.”

@Jack79 ”The “gay lisp” is probably hormone-related” That’s what I was wondering about, if it has any sort of biological background. Did you read that somewhere? I’d like to read about it, because living here in China I have discovered the “gay lisp” is a cross-cultural phenomenon: even gay Chinese men, when they speak Chinese, also seem to have an inordinately high number of “lispers,” which is highly interesting and to me suggested some sort of biological cause.

About ten years ago I talked to a friend of mine that is homosexual about this. He said he faked it to let potential partners know his orientation(anecdotal). When you think about it 50% are male and ten percent of them are gay. That is fishing in a small pond.

I would say women have a easier time. About half of my female friends have admitted to being with another woman.

When guys get it on it is gross and when women do, it should be videotaped.~

@tb1570 not really, no. But having worked as a teacher for a number of years I noticed the opposite: boys who had the lisp turned out to be gay later on in life. One of the cases was a self-fulfilled prophecy (the mother dressed the son as a girl because she’d always wanted a daughter), but in all the others you could just see the child developing that way, which made me think it’s all in the genes right from the start and has nothing to do with culture or the environment.

ps: as far as hormones go, testosterone has been linked to sexuality, both in men (ie lower testosterone may result in homosexuality) as well as women (higher testosterone in that case). There is also a theory, (which I personally disagree with), which states that there’s no such thing as “two genders”. And that all of us are within a spectrum of “grey” sexuality, ranging from pure heterosexuals or homosexuals at the ends to bisexuals somewhere in the middle. ie that all people are potentially attracted to both sexes (to a ranging extent), not just one or the other. This may also be hormonal.

There’s definitely a feminine quality in the voice of most gay men. But, I’ve only met one with a “lisp” as I know the definition. He’s got a soft southern accented voice and is really freaking adorable. A lisp, as in, pronouncing an “s” sound as more of a “th” sound, right? Unless I’m misunderstanding. In my experience, all the gays I’ve been close to actually put more emphasis on the “s” sound, leading to a more feminine sound.

It is most likely a sociolinguistic phenomenon. Labov’s work on Martha’s Vineyard, for example, showed that people, quite unconsciously, adopt phonetic variations to distinguish themselves from other groups, especially when they are in a hostile environment. It provides a means both of association and identification.

I’ve got no theories to contribute but it’s a question I’ve wondered about, so I’m glad to read the discussion.

You know it’s odd. I actually called into loveline with this question years ago. Dr. Drew ended up hanging up on me… I normally cuss like a sailor, and I was censoring myself. I think I thought I was going to say something bad or something. I am going to try to find a way to upload this somewhere so you can hear it. I saved the MP3.

Ok here you go. I posted it on youtube. This took me a lot longer to do than it should have, so please point and laugh at me.
Without further ado… The youtube link

That is me, on loveline asking this very question on air. (8–12-07)

@johnpowell – Lesbians are in the same boat. 50% of the population is female, roughly 10% are gay, and I don’t know the statistics on how that 10% is broken down gender-wise, so we’ll just take a guess and say half. So, while straight people have a really good chance of landing on someone they’re attracted to that plays for the right team, gay folks have a much harder time, especially if you don’t fit into a particular stereotype.

So, with this in mind, I totally understand why some gay men affect a lisp, particularly as was mentioned before, it’s an outward sign of one’s orientation. As a tomboyish lesbian, I know first-hand how difficult things can be if there are no really obvious outward signs. The one time that I had very short hair and looked gay, I had way more girls showing interest than at any other time in my life.

Anyway, I think some people don’t affect the lisp. It could very well be picking up on speech patterns of one’s friends/companions, but there are times when it’s obvious someone is trying hard to be straight-acting, but they can’t mask this kind of speech which majorly sets off my gaydar.

Conversely, I can often pick up when a woman is a lesbian just by hearing her voice and the way she talks.

I’m with @holden and @dpworkin on this one
I don’t believe the lisp is inherent to gay males – that’s ridiculous.
I think they ‘develop’ it through mimicry of a portion of a community that they want to belong to – it’s a symbol, a signal to others..even if a subconscious one.

A lot of us fake it? O.o that’s news to me.
I talk how I always talk…but i guess i do have a lisp DX I hate it though, I dont even know how it started. But why is it that we have one? ....

incidentally, another example I remember that has to do with speaking:

I have a close group of friends which includes one homosexual and 4 heterosexuals. The 5 of us get together regularly (2–3 times a week), for many hours, and talk a lot. We’ve been hanging out like that since 2003. I did notice that after a couple of years of that one of the heterosexuals started picking up the way the homosexual talks (not sure if you’d call it a “gay lisp”). And then a second one slowly started talking a bit like that too. Overall, we probably sound less macho after 5 years of hanging out with that guy that we would have if our 5th friend was a heavyweight boxer for example. So it could just be that people just pick up each other’s way of talking (as with my previous example of regional accent), though the original lispers must have had biological rather than social reasons for it.

I don’t think people consciously “fake” it. It’s more that they unconsciously adopt it, as a form of identity. Think of the different ways in which you speak depending on circumstances – giving a speech, playing with your kids, chatting with friends, out with the “boys”, at a Tupperware party: all different, none of it fake, but depending upon the group.

Then how do you “adopt it” if you live in a society where English speaking media is not the norm and open discussions about homosexuality are almost non-existent? How do you “adopt it” if you have no frame of reference and have never heard it before?

my friend has a gay lisp and he’s straight..has an asian girlfriend i want to **** badly

If your friend is not gay, then how can he have a “gay lisp”. Wouldn’t that make it a “straight lisp” ? Or to put it in plain English—a lisp.

A lisp is a poor speech habit. When I encountered grade school children with a lisp, I referred them to a speech therapist. I didn’t automatically assume it was because they were gay.

Most children go through various phases of mispronunciation as part of the normal process of learning to talk. This includes lisping and they usually transition out of it by the time they reach school age.

If they don’t, it’s a relatively simple process of speech therapy to focus on the problem and is easily correctable in a very short amount of time.

The assumption I make when encountering an adult with a lisp is that there was no one in their grade school years who knew enough about how easily correctable it is and referred them for speech therapy.

There are far more characteristics of MANY (but certainly not ALL) gay men which are particular to them and are more accurately correlated than lisping.

Out of all the many gay friends and acquaintances I have encountered over the years, there was only one who spoke with a lisp.

Voice pitch and tone is a totally separate issue from lisping and I don’t understand why they are being connected. Separate issues entirely.

@Buttonstc

Maybe I should’ve clarified that the “gay lisp” isn’t actually a lisp.

It isn’t pronouncing the “s” like a “th”, it’s pronouncing “s” with a “high peak frequency”. It’s not easy to describe, but it’s not a true lisp. It’s more akin to an accent than it is to a lisp.

sure its easy to describe….llisten to a snake hiss =)

It’s arrested development.

I’ve always suspected it but I really do have the gay lisp!!!!!!!

@DominicX help me out, is it worse for straight guys that have the lisp?

I have always wondered why a lot of gay guys speak with an effeminate lisp. Is it biological or learned? I know it may be a stereotype, but it seems to be quite common among gay males.

come on folks lets be honest with ourselves here its definetly put on.a friend of mine perfectly normal before the next time i saw him he had the whole deal,high screeching voice complete with the gay lisp lol i coudn’t believe it

Sorry. But the “fake gay lisp” is annoying as HELL.
And the fact that people sometimes fake it for attention isn’t helping their case. Gee, what else could they be faking for attention..?

I do know a gay man that has a terrible, real lisp for as long as I’ve known him (middle school). And before he “knew” that he was gay. But it isn’t high pitched.

I dont have one… thank god.