Why do some gay people seem to talk differently? | The Espist Foms

Contents:

• THE GAY VOICE
• WHY DO *SOME* GAY GUYS SPEAK DIFFERENTLY?
• WHY DO SOME GAY PEOPLE SEEM TO TALK DIFFERENTLY?
• WHY DO GAY MEN TALK SO FUNNY?
• WHY DO GAY PEOPLE TALK DIFFERENTLY?
• GAY STEREOTYP: ARE THEY TE?
• WHAT'S THE LK BETWEEN HOMOSEXUALY AND HAVG A 'GAY VOICE'
• GAY PEOPLE LOOK DIFFERENT, WALK DIFFERENT THAN STRAIGHT PEOPLE
• GAY OR STRAIGHT? HIS SPEECH MAY GIVE A HT
• WHAT MEANS TO ‘SOUND GAY’
• WHY DO GAY MEN WALK SO FAST?

THE GAY VOICE

After intifyg phoic characteristics that seem to make a man’s voice sound gay, their bt hunch is that some gay men may subnscly adopt certa female speech patterns. They want to know how men acquire this manner of speakg, and why – pecially when society so often stigmatiz those wh gay-soundg voic.

Rogers and Smyth are also explorg the stereotyp that gay men sound effemate and are regnized by the way they speak.

The straightt-soundg voice the study was fact a gay man, and the sixth gayt-soundg voice was a straight man. The way that male gays talk don't even really bother me unls 's overtly flamboyant, I fd myself sensive to loud talkg no matter who is.

WHY DO *SOME* GAY GUYS SPEAK DIFFERENTLY?

3) Gay men are no different than straight men, except that they want to have sex wh men stead of women. Some straight men behave very effemate ways, I had a iend my high school years who other people were always askg me, is he gay? So straight, gay, bi or purple, he will feel the prsur of our society breathg down his neck and expectg him to 'be a man', he will munite for the most part, like any other man and al wh thgs much the same way.

My pot is a man is a man, a woman is a woman, some are gay, some are bi and some are straight and beyond that all differenc are dividual, based on personal experience and emotnal history. Why do gays get so sensive easily and talk like a female or try to act as one terms of appearance and behavr? I hope this don't e off as offensive but I'm jt cur: Is jt me or do some gays, some guy men specifilly, seem to have a distct accent?

WHY DO SOME GAY PEOPLE SEEM TO TALK DIFFERENTLY?

In my time as an active member my school's GSA I've noticed that some of the gay mal talked differently.

This is what I was thkg sce was always the on that were the most "open" or "enthiastic" about beg homosexual that had . Frankly, I thk the reason certa people general, not jt homosexuals, speak like that is some sort of attempt to sound eher feme, dramatic, or they're jt actg slightly stupid, pretent, and "snooty". If I had said I was homosexual myself I'm 100% sure this would have turned out differently and I n guarantee you some homosexuals would agree that there is a difference accent amongst some members gay society.

One gay that i know kda talks like a girl, but thats 'e he hangs around wh a lot of girls and don't re about beg "gay", he only do this when talkg excedly other gays/bis i know talk normally.

WHY DO GAY MEN TALK SO FUNNY?

It's ually a lisp or jt an overtly feme tone, but 's still (ually) very easy for me to intify if someone's gay jt by listeng to them speak. Or uld be that feme gays gravate towards havg female iends which uld affect their accent slightly, the same way someone adopts an accent om livg a certa culture at a young age. Many gays embrace a more feme self-image, so they e their voice a more feme way, drs differently, etc.

There's a gay guy that my iend's ex-girliend was iends wh, he me to a uple of my parti I never really talked to him, so I gus he was an aquantance(sp? 15, 2006 — -- Gay activists often cricize media verage of gay pri paras, sayg, rrectly, that the media foc on the extreme, the more flamboyantly feme men and very mascule women.

WHY DO GAY PEOPLE TALK DIFFERENTLY?

Not all straight men are bad drsers, " he is rearch that suggts gay men do prefer certa profsns, like fashn, terr sign and hair lorg, and that lbians are more likely to prefer sports and the ary. Rearchers say 's bee lbians, on average, are attracted to more mascule occupatns, and gay men tend to prefer more feme is te that hostily toward gay people drove many away om some other profsns.

"Whether you work, you know, as an artist or a sger or a dancer, those are all really creative plac where gay people are embraced, " Krsley saidIncreasgly gay people are visible every profsn. And the wrers of the show "Will and Grace" ma their ma gay character, Will Tman, a high-powered the stereotyp do persist.

And probably has to do wh the of sexual orientatn and early effects of hormon on the bra, " Bailey did a survey of profsnal dancers and found half the men were gay.

GAY STEREOTYP: ARE THEY TE?

It's no big al, and as a matter of fact, 's almost celebrated if you're gay, " said dancer Meredh Raey. You n tell far better than chance who's a gay man om jt listeng to him say four sentenc, " Bailey Bailey's help, "20/20" ran a tt 2004 to see if people uld tell who was gay and who was straight. The man who most people thought was straight was actually people do thk that gay men are more promiscuo than straight men, and fact, Bailey said, gay men do have more sex partners.

"I thk that the typil straight man would have as many sex partners as the typil gay man if he uld, " Bailey, we asked Bailey, isn't stereotypg harmful? Stay ahead of the trend fashn and beyond wh our ee weekly Liftyle Ed newsletterStay ahead of the trend fashn and beyond wh our ee weekly Liftyle Ed newsletter After a particularly bad break-up, David Thorpe, a journalist who’s his forti, cid to take his md off thgs by leavg his ts his Manhattan apartment and drowng his sorrows at a gay beach town on Fire Island. “I knew then that I had to get to the bottom of that feelg and to the importance of the voice as part of gay inty.

”It was the start of a four-year journey of self-disvery durg which Thorpe tried to figure out his so-lled “gay voice”: when did he start talkg that way, what ed , how exactly did sound, and, fally, what was so wrong wh anyway? The rults n be seen his new documentary, Do I Sound Gay?, which featur terviews wh lguists, amics, fay and iends, as well as a number of high-profile personali, cludg David Sedaris and Dan Savage.

WHAT'S THE LK BETWEEN HOMOSEXUALY AND HAVG A 'GAY VOICE'

Another expert that he terviews for the film is a Canadian lguist who studi vol microvariatns between gay and straight men and speculat that many gay men more readily pick up speech s om women. Intertgly, a straight iend of Thorpe’s has what is nsired to be an archetypal “gay voice” and turns that out he was raised entirely by women at an ashram.

When he was younger, Thorpe not, the only “gay voic” on televisn were those belongg to figur such as Liberace and Charl Nelson Reilly, the host of The Match Game. He also wonrs if Disney villas such as Aladd’s Jafar and The Ln Kg’s Sr, wh their soft, threateng voic, have ma young people associate soundg gay wh beg evil.

It pleas him to hear so many more “gay voic” reprented today, pecially young vloggers such as Lohanthony and Tyler Oakley. “Growg up, I was always told that what was wrong wh me was that I was gay, so ’s not hard to unrstand that a moment of vulnerabily I might also feel secure about my sexualy. As Dan Savage, the activist who found the It Gets Better mpaign, says the film: “What’s wrong wh soundg like you are who you are – a gay man?

GAY PEOPLE LOOK DIFFERENT, WALK DIFFERENT THAN STRAIGHT PEOPLE

But you don't even have to be a scientist to pass such judgments:We've found that sual observers n e ga and body shape to judge whether a stranger is gay or straight wh a small but perceptible amount of of ‘Once Upon a One More Time’ Tt Their Brney Spears Knowledge OffEnglish Intertgly, 's easier to read such cu gay men than lbians.

GAY OR STRAIGHT? HIS SPEECH MAY GIVE A HT

As for body typ, gay people tend to posss "genr-ngent" shap—hourglass for gay dus and "tubular" for lezzi.

When people hear a man talk and gus he’s gay, they’re really listeng to how he says his vowels, suggts new past studi, rearchers have rerd homosexual and heterosexual men speakg long passag om texts of plays, and tt subjects were pretty accurate pickg out the gay voic among Eric Tracy, a psychologist at Oh State Universy, wanted to see jt how ltle rmatn people need before they ma up their md about if a speaker was gay.

He rerd a group of 36 gay and straight men speakg sgle syllable words, like “mass” and “soap, ” and played back to a tt group of men and tt subjects − volunteer llege stunts — ranked each speaker on a sle om 1 to 7, to reprent their gus about the speaker’s sexual orientatn: gay (7 pots) or not (1 pot). Tracy found that his tt subjects tend to perceive gay speech differently based on short words, he cid to look closer, to zero  on which part of the word was the trigger for the cisn.

WHAT MEANS TO ‘SOUND GAY’

“When the vowel h, people were pretty sure, ” said Nicholas Sentar, a -thor on the Tracy's scriptn, vowels spoken by gay men sound longer, and one sound that threw the listeners for a loop was the letter "s. " When the subjects they heard the "s" sound, whose lispg is part of the stereotyped portrayal of gay speech, they seemed more likely to rank the person as gay.

WHY DO GAY MEN WALK SO FAST?

So, while they picked out the gay speakers rrectly, they also tend to rrectly pick the straight Rendall, a psychologist at the Universy of Lethbridge Alberta, Canada, warns that the study mak the assumptn that there is such a thg as “gay speech, ” and that the tt subjects were rpondg to trac of the flamboyant dialogue that has bee the generalizatn and stereotype for how gay men is one of the issu that Tracy plans to addrs possible future studi. Even if do reprent a small subsectn of gay people, Tracy says his study might fd applitn plac like tomated voice regnn software, which uld e a few tweaks when to regnizg flavors and accents of male and Sentar prented their study on Monday at the nference of the Atil Society of Ameri Seattle. ” It’s a fascatg and nuanced film, which the filmmaker, David Thorpe,  his feelgs about his voice to look at attus toward homosexualy.

It rais a plited discsn about gay pri, lgerg homophobia, disguised misogyny, and the extent to which we all alter the image that we prent to the the film begs, Thorpe is disturbed bee he realiz he don’t like his voice any more. He rri out thoughtful nversatns wh his iends and proment gay and lbian figur – cludg Gee Takei, David Sedaris, Dan Savage, Margaret Cho and Don Lemon – about what means to “sound gay.