“Gay” speech patterns and homosexuality.

This evening, I read a great study that my mother pointed me to: Peter Renn’s “Speech, male sexual orientation, and childhood gender nonconformity.” Renn wrote it as his senior thesis at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003, and it’s so good that it won a George H. Mitchell Undergraduate Award for Academic Excellence, which is awarded “each year to students who have made an uncommon contribution to their fields of study by way of research project, literary work, musical composition, humanitarian project or similar undertaking.” As can be determined from the name, Renn’s study exams the correlation and potential causation between “gay” speech patterns, sexual orientation, and perceptions of sexual orientation, a topic that I have been interested in of late.

I should mention, too, that I’m a big language geek. I study etymology as a hobby, and have been known to read dictionaries and thesauruses recreationally; having a mother trained as a linguist probably has something to do with this.

Renn starts by looking at existing studies and knowledge about the topic, coming to an early conclusion that “it is unlikely that many gay men consciously choose to sound gay, given the attendant costs of such a speech pattern in the romantic marketplace.” Gay speech is something to be avoided. Turns out that it’s not easy to do, though.

Because this speech pattern persists into adulthood for a sizable number of men (against countervailing social forces), it appears relatively difficult to change, in much the same way that an accent is difficult to change once the critical period for language acquisition and development has passed.

It must be noted that the author is careful to point out that not all gay men have gay speech patterns, and that not all people with gay speech patterns are gay. But it is clear that there is a strong correlation between the two, as he sets out to test.

So, how does this distinctive speech pattern arise?

“[G]ay sounding men may have been more likely during childhood to mimic and adopt the speech patterns more typical of females. Such a method of acquisition would be similar to that of a learned dialect. This female-shifted speech pattern, superimposed onto a male voice, produces what we perceive as gay sounding speech.”

Renn conducted a study to see how much truth that there was to this gay-men-talk-different thing. He recruited 30 gay, 4 bisexual, and 24 heterosexual men from the Austin area. He had them rank their sexual orientation by self-report and the Kinsey scale, and filtered out anybody who wasn’t sufficiently straight or sufficiently gay, the 4 bisexuals aside. Then, one by one, he had each of them sit down with a microphone headset and read an excerpt of dialog from a play, with every person reading the exact same sample. Then he took a 30-second sample from the middle of each monologue, and recruited 4 people to listen to all 58 voices and rank them in gayness on a 7-point scale. The results?

On average, gay men sounded significantly more “gay” than heterosexual men. This difference was highly significant and large in effect size. As such, listeners were able to judge sexual orientation from voice samples with moderate accuracy (68.5%).

Fascinating!

So, what does this say for gay people hoping to pass as straight?

This difference is plainly evident to most listeners and can be discerned from very short samples of speech. Thus, the belief that homosexuality can be concealed may not hold true for all gay men.

[…]

Although some gay men may learn to “defeminize” their behavior over time (which may also explain the imperfect correlation between gay sounding speech and childhood gender nonconformity), it appears that the majority do not.

Very interesting stuff. I recommend a full read of the study for those who have an interest in the topic of language, sexuality, or both.