Reprinted from Out, February 2006 (www.out.com).

So What’s Wrong with a Little Lisp?

Erik Piepenburg investigates what happens when some hot butch guys turn out to sound like little girls—and takes on the notion of “gay speech.”

All I can say is he looked butch to me.

Standing on a street corner in Chelsea one summer day was a 6-foot-3, ridiculously hairy hulk of a man wearing The Uniform: a wife beater, cargo pants, the latest sneakers (in a size well into the high teens), and sunglasses that made him look like a marine made over by Tom Ford.

Then he opened his mouth. “Gu-u-url, you shoulda s-s-s-e-e-en what I s-s-saw las-s-s’ night,” he purred deeply into his cell phone, with enough sibilance to make Paul Lynde sound like Vin Diesel by comparison.

The spell had been broken. Call it the “See Tarzan, Hear Jane” dilemma: A man judged by sight is judged quite differently by sound. As an old-school queen once told me regarding an allegedly butch number he’d picked up the night before: “Honey, he looked like rough trade at first. But then he opened his mouth, and I’ll be damned if a purse didn’t fall out.”

If clothes make the man, voice makes his manhood. As evidenced by my street encounter with Mr. Deceptively Masculine, how manly a man sounds when he speaks (or has sex) often determines how attractive he is to other men.

But why? If they’re hot on the outside, why would sibilance be a deal breaker? Or, if you’re a gay man with an unmasculine voice, what can you do about it? Are gay men who worry that they sound “gay” struggling with internalized homophobia?

For answers to this and other questions about the “gay voice,” I turned to Evan Bartlett Page, a gay man, speech pathologist, and spokesman for L’GASP (Lesbian and Gay Audiologists and Speech Pathologists), a professional, social, and advocacy organization affiliated with the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

In an e-mail Page said the very notion of “gay speech”—a stereotypical mix of sibilance and speed that makes some gay men sound like 13-year-old girls—is the stuff of gay myth. However, he says there are speech patterns that many gay men engage in that make them “sound” gay: elevated pitch, breathiness in quality, variable pitch contours, and the adoption of “feminine characteristics” such as “tag questioning,” in which statements are ended with a question (“The party’s at 10, isn’t it?”).

He also pointed out that while a lisp may be stereotyped as “the quintessential speech characteristic in gay men,” it’s not a gay thing. Most swishy queens technically engage not in lisping (in which a th sound is substituted for an s sound) but in sibilancy: a strong s sound. A lisp, on the other hand, is something many children do early in the process of acquiring the English sound system, Page said, and it can be treated with speech therapy. Interestingly, he said persistence of a lisp in a boy “possibly but not definitively” could mean the child will be gay later in life.

And really, what’s so wrong with sounding gay anyway? Many so-called gay speech qualities are perfectly benign; interpreting them is where homophobia comes in. “To the extent that ‘gay speech’ is a manner of individual style and expression, just as clothing, social affiliation, or other ways in which humans differ from each other, it is wrong to refer to it as a disorder,” Page commented.

Maybe the infamous “Lyle the Effeminate Heterosexual” sketch on Saturday Night Live (in which Dana Carvey played a swishy-sounding family man) was on to something. Page pointed to a recent study in which people identified speakers as gay or straight based on audio recordings. More than half the gay men were correctly given the gay label by their speech characteristics. “But in that study,” Page said, “one of the straightest-sounding men was in fact a gay man, and one of the straight men had the sixth gayest-sounding speech.”

To read more about “gay speech,” pick up a copy of the February issue of Out.

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