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Culturally, gay individuals are sometimes portrayed as having a distinctive manner of speech, with a higher pitch voice and slightly different accenting of sounds. Wikipedia refers to this as the Gay Lisp. The Wikipedia article claims that this stereotypical manner of speech is not universal to all gay individuals, but that studies have found that a 'subset' of gay men were found to have the gay lisp. However, it does not elaborate in much detail and the cited studies do not appear to be freely available for me to access online.

My question is two fold, does the gay lisp exist at all, and if so what is it's correlation with homosexuality.

Thus I'm interested in both the odds of gay lisp being present in an individual who identifies as homosexual as well as how effective the presence of the gay lisp is at identifying if an individual is homosexual (thus also considering how many non-homosexuals may speak in a manner consistent with the gay lisp). I am looking for an answer that addresses both correlations if at all possible.

As added bonuses, not required for an answer but which would be nice if provided, I would prefer to see studies that did not just look at 'gay lisp' as a Boolean operator of existing or not existing, but instead considered the prominence of lisp (how noticeable it was to a third party), and rather increased prominence of lisp was further correlated with odds of individual identifying as homosexual. I'd also be curious in knowing if any studies looked into rather the lisp was shared across gay individuals in all cultures, or is unique to 'western' cultures like the United States.

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  • Your question leans toward asking general bio-sciences questions rather than a single skeptical question. You may want to focus on a particular instance of the claim, and why you disbelieve it. Or you may want to split the question into whether it exists and whether there's a correlation. – Mark Rogers Feb 02 '16 at 20:41
  • Maybe if you look into how many homosexuals are closeted (i.e. not assuming their homosexuality), you'd be closer to what you want to know? – Rodrigo Feb 02 '16 at 21:06
  • Did you look at the studies cited in Wikipedia? Also I'm not sure that there is actually a claim to test here, other than "it's a gay stereotype" (which is pretty trivial and unrelated to its actual relationship with homosexuality) and the scientific studies (which we are not in a position to fact-check). – DJClayworth Feb 02 '16 at 21:57
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    You might be interested in the documentary, "Do I sound gay?" There is a trailer on the website. http://www.doisoundgay.com/ The film maker goes into understanding his own "gay voice" and even tries to change his voice. – user70848 Feb 02 '16 at 22:46
  • Let's see if we can clarify the above comments before we attract misguided answers. I don't think the question 'does it exist?' is useful. The question of correlation doesn't seem to address a claim. – Oddthinking Feb 02 '16 at 23:19

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