Three Dollar Bill

The book of lisps

Richard Burnett / threedollarbill@vueweekly.com

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I shall never forget the day a fab diesel dyke buddy of mine showed up at some party and told me she was “packing” (i.e., she had a dildo up her twat). She looked so butch she could’ve passed for a guy. And had she told me over the phone she was packing, her husky voice sounding so masculine, I would’ve believed another man was at the other end of the line.

While some dykes cultivate that butch accent, many more men—gay and straight—have a “gay accent.” To be blunt, they sound like sissies.

So it comes as no surprise that linguistics researchers have been exploring the phenomenon in headline-grabbing studies the last few years, notably one published in last October’s issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, in which researchers from the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University claim you can identify a person’s sexual orientation just by listening to how they pronounce their vowels. “It’s not news people believe homosexuality and certain speech styles are related,” psychologist and study co-author J. Michael Bailey told the Calgary Herald. “What is news is there seems to be some basis for the belief.”

Well, it isn’t quite breaking news. University of Toronto linguistics department professor Henry Rogers and his colleagues Gregg Jacobs and Ron Smyth published a remarkable study on gay accents back in 1997. Sixty-two per cent of participants in their 25-voice study correctly identified the gay voices. “The results weren’t terribly good, but the listeners did agree certain voices sound gay or straight,” Rogers told me this week, adding, “Some gay men sound straight. And some straight men sound gay.

“[My team] listened from a phonetic standpoint,” Rogers continues. “What do people listen to that makes them come to that judgment? We found several cues, and one we didn’t find is pitch. Everybody assumes if a man’s [vocal] pitch is high, he must be gay. We found [no such cues].”

Instead the cues were “slightly longer [pronunciation of the letters] S or Z, which we would qualify as a lisp. There is also a different quality to [the letter] L, and the puff of air is a bit longer with the gay voice. There is also something with vowels that isn’t clear-cut. Still, those cues are what make listeners make those distinctions.”

So, if we were to analyze Will and Jack from the sitcom Will & Grace, is Jack a classic flamer? “GLAAD in New York asked us to compare Will and Jack,” Rogers says, “and, while I think people on radio and TV talk faster, if you compare the two, they differ the same way we expected—Will sounds straight and Jack sounds gay. They’re stereotypes clearly set up [like] this. No one told [Sean Hayes, the actor who plays] Jack, ‘Make your s’s and z’s like this.’ It just came out that way. And Will sounds [like] the gay end of straight people.”

Gay accents are acquired like regional accents, Rogers says. “But if young boys branded sissies in small, isolated communities sound gay when there aren’t gay people around to listen to, where are they getting their cues? Are gay-sounding boys imitating women? We think so.”

To prove it, Rogers (who is gay but sounds neutral) and his colleagues are currently working on a bigger, more comprehensive study on both lesbian and gay accents. Initial findings will be released at the U of T’s Sociophonetics of Gay and Lesbian Speech conference this fall. Hopefully media coverage of the conference will dissuade men with gay accents from seeking help from speech pathologists. “There’s nothing wrong with sounding gay,” Rogers told one speech pathologist looking for advice. “Of course, people can change it consciously and unconsciously. No one, after all, sounds the same way all day long.”

Which brings me to the pre-op tranny I picked up at Toronto Gay Pride years ago. I thought she was male since she was dressed in guy gear and looked every inch a man. Let’s just say I got way more than I expected.

“I’m saving my money for laser surgery on my vocal cords,” she told me in her booming butch voice. “I want to sound like a woman.”

All I could think then was thank God she still had a cock. V

Three Dollar Bill

The book of lisps

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