Gay Lisp Investigation

Per Wikipedia: careful pronunciation, wide pitch range, high and rapidly changing pitch, breathy tone, lengthened fricative sounds, and pronunciation of /t/ as /ts/ and /d/ as /dz/

A lot of gay men speak with a lisp. And not just any lisp, it is a characteristic lisp very distinct to this subset of individuals. Growing up I knew a few little kids who grew up to be gay men. One of them had a lisp but given the small sample size, it wasn’t statistically significant. When I moved to Lakeview, AKA “Boystown”, my 3rd yr of med school this sample size increased greatly. And about 10-20% of these guys indeed did have a lisp. I don't know for sure if this number is truly higher than in the straight population, although I suspect that it is elevated.

So of the people I’ve met in my life, more gay guys have a lisp (and this lisp in particular) compared to straight guys. Still not a good sample size, but I’ll take what I can get. The vast majority of these guys are American, thus I’m not sure if this is an international phenomenon or purely limited to the US. Than the question becomes: Is this a learned, social behavior or an inherited trait?

I did a pubmed search on this topic and it came up pretty dry. If you believe the idea that being gay is an inherited quality, it could be that the lisp is related to this genetic quality. I do believe that being gay is very much genetic (with some social influence, albeit minor) so this is a real possible answer for me. But it also makes sense that this is a learned stereotype.

The one study I did find (of dubious quality, but I won’t get into that) was from Canada. It’s designers found that, “some gay men may be subconsciously imitating certain female speech patterns and if this is true, we want to know how men acquire this way of speaking”. So basically some gay guys are emulating female behaviors, consciously or not, as a means of attracting male attention. All you have to do is watch one episode of Project Runway and I could’ve told you that.