In terms of perception, the "gay sound" in North American English is popularly presumed to involve the pronunciation of sibilants ( /s/, /z/, /ʃ/) with noticeable assibilation, sibilation, hissing, or stridency. Research shows that gay speech characteristics include many of the same characteristics other speakers use when attempting to speak with special carefulness or clarity, including over-articulating and expanding the vowel spaces in the mouth. Some other speech features are also stereotyped as markers of gay or bisexual males: carefully enunciated pronunciation, wide pitch range (high and rapidly changing pitch), breathy voice, lengthened fricative sounds, pronunciation of /t/ as /ts/ and /d/ as /dz/ ( affrication), etc. Results suggest that a California regional sound can be employed by gay men for stylistic effect, including to evoke a "fun" or "partier" persona. This linguistic phenomenon is normally associated with the California vowel shift and also reported in a study of a gay speaker of California English itself, who strengthened these same features and also fronted the GOOSE and GOAT vowels when speaking with friends more than in other speaking situations. Gay men tend to lower the TRAP vowel (except before a nasal consonant) and the DRESS vowel this was specifically confirmed in a study of North-Central American English speakers.
However, not all gay American men speak with this hyper-articulated /s/ (perhaps fewer than half), and some carefully speaking men who identify as heterosexual also produce this feature. Specifically, gay men are documented as pronouncing /s/ with higher-frequency spectral peaks, an extremely negatively skewed spectrum, and a longer duration than heterosexual men. Speech scientist Benjamin Munson and his colleagues have argued that this is not a mis-articulated /s/ (and therefore, not technically a lisp) as much as a hyper-articulated /s/. It involves a marked pronunciation of sibilant consonants (particularly / s/ and / z/).
What is sometimes incorrectly described as a gay "lisp" is one manner of speech stereotypically associated with gay speakers of North American English, and perhaps other dialects or languages. Since the gay community consists of many smaller subcultures, it is unlikely that all gay male speech falls under a single homogeneous category. Recent efforts by scientists in the community, rather than by an outside party, support the idea that it is a valid form of English. In older work, speech pathologists often focused on high pitch among men, in its resemblance to women, as a defect. Linguists have attempted to isolate exactly what makes gay men's English distinct from that of other demographics since the early 20th century, typically by contrasting it with straight male speech or comparing it to female speech. Like with other marginalized communities, speech codes can be deeply tied to local, intimate communities to not deny the widespread influence of media depicting gay and trans personas in the vein of RuPaul's Drag Race. Drag queen speech is also a topic of research and, while some drag queens may also identify as gay men, a description of their speech styles may not be so binary. There are similarities between gay male speech and the speech of other members within the LGBTQ+ community. Gay speech characteristics appear to be learned ways of speaking, like many aspects of language, although their origins and process of adoption by men remain unclear. Research does not support the notion that gay speech entirely adopts feminine speech characteristics – rather, that it selectively adopts some of those features.
One feature of the speech is sometimes known as the " gay lisp", though researchers acknowledge that it is not technically a lisp. Scientific research has uncovered phonetically significant features produced by many gay men and demonstrated that listeners accurately guess speakers' sexual orientation at rates greater than chance. Historically it was a stigmatized variety and its usage, even among its speakers, may be coded to a limited number of settings outside of the workplace and many public spaces. Particularly within North American English, gay male speech has been the focus of numerous modern stereotypes, as well as sociolinguistic studies. Every night around the same time this girl usta call me over for sex….I never thought anything of it in till I realized that her man would always called when I was there….Speech characteristics common among gay men