Gay Speak

Hayes (1976) suggests gay speech is modulated by openness and gay type: secret, social and activist. Each gay type articulates lexicon and speech patterns differently. Secret gays or gay men that have yet to openly disclose their sexuality, articulate words and phrases differently than social or activist gays. This difference, Clark (1998) suggests is a ‘self-defense’ mechanism carefully designed to prevent social ostracism. Social gays and gay activists, less concerned by society consequences, are not compelled to hide their gay speech, openly and to some extent actively use gay speech similar to ‘your typical gay’ stereotype, flamboyant and flaming. Schwieter insists gay men feel “language uses them just as much as they use language” (p. 93). This ability to use language, alternating speech patterns and categorical lexicon, allows gay men to express a broad range of roles within and outside the gay community. Contrary to Burgess (1949) who claimed “the homosexual world has its own language incomprehensible to outsiders” research suggest gay language is a not a distinct dialect but socio-culturally acquired language characterized by atypical male speech variation and word pronunciation.

Listeners tend to rate a speaker sexual orientation as ‘sounding gay’ independent of pitch range or sibilant duration, suggesting the existence of multiple auditory cues. In an effort to better understand this phenomenon, segmental phonics or single words taken from read text, have been investigated for perceptual characteristics indicative of sexual orientation. Pierrehumbert (2004) asserts gay men hyper-articulate vowel space when compared to heterosexual men, indicting gay men might produce multiple stressed words within a sentence. Accor...

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