Can you tell if someone is gay from their voice? Scientists have been searching for the ‘gay voice’ for decades. One particular sound has caught their attention more than any other
You may be familiar with this situation. Someone starts talking, and even before they’ve said anything about their private life, an automatic assumption pops into your head: ‘He’s probably gay.’ Sometimes we’re right, other times we’re completely off the mark. And it is precisely this seemingly trivial experience that has been occupying linguists, psychologists and speech experts for several decades.
Researchers have volunteers listen to short recordings, measure voice frequency, the length of consonants, the position of the tongue when pronouncing them, or intonation, and then observe what listeners use to estimate sexual orientation. The results are far more interesting than the simple notion that gay men simply have a ‘higher-pitched voice’.
There is no single ‘gay voice’
Right at the outset, it is necessary to distinguish between two things that are often conflated in everyday debate. One question is: are there certain ways of speaking that people perceive as ‘gay’? Yes, there are. The second, however, is: do gay men generally speak like that? And here, the answer is considerably less convincing.
This was demonstrated very clearly, for example, by a German study published in 2018. Researchers recorded 25 gay men and 26 heterosexual men, analysed their speech in detail from an acoustic perspective, and then had the recordings assessed by other people. The listeners had a fairly clear idea of what a ‘gay voice’ sounded like – they associated it, amongst other things, with a higher pitch, nasality or certain pronunciation characteristics. However, when the researchers compared this stereotype with the speakers’ actual sexual orientation, most of the presumed differences disappeared.
The authors ultimately reached an important conclusion: the differences between individual gay men are greater than the systematic differences between the gay and heterosexual groups.
No, it’s not simply a higher-pitched voice
The most widespread belief is that gay men speak in a higher-pitched voice. Yet it is precisely pitch that is one of the factors which, as a simple explanation, has repeatedly failed to be confirmed.
Earlier experiments had already shown that people can perceive some male voices as more or less ‘gay’ without this corresponding to their fundamental frequency. Research by Canadian linguists Ron Smyth, Greg Jacobs and Henry Rogers, for example, used male voices which listeners rated as ranging from sounding very heterosexual to sounding very gay. However, pitch alone did not reliably explain their judgements.
Furthermore, the notion that ‘gay equals a high-pitched male voice’ is strongly linked to another stereotype – that gay men simply speak in a similar way to women. According to a review by linguists Benjamin Munson and Molly Babel, this too does not correspond to what the research shows. Ways of speaking that may sound ‘gay’ are not merely an imitation of a woman’s voice.
So what is it that our ears actually hear?
The ordinary ‘s’ sound may be surprisingly important
One of the most frequently studied candidates is the sibilant ‘s’. This isn’t necessarily the classic lisp one might imagine when visiting a speech therapist. The differences can be extremely subtle – for example, in exactly how the consonant is articulated, how long it lasts, or which frequencies predominate when it is pronounced.
Even a small study from the late 1990s found that the perception of a voice as gay was more closely linked to certain characteristics of the ‘s’ sound than to pitch. Its sample size was very small – just five openly gay and four heterosexual men – so the result certainly cannot be taken as a universal rule. Nevertheless, it helped to guide further research.
A later experiment went even further. Researchers artificially altered the quality of the ‘s’ sound in male voice recordings and found that the way it was pronounced alone could change how listeners estimated the speaker’s sexual orientation. Some variations caused the same voice to sound ‘more gay’.
This does not, however, mean that there is a ‘gay S’ by which a person can be identified as if from a laboratory sample. Above all, it says something about the listener – our brains have associated certain acoustic characteristics with the notion of homosexuality.
The way we speak is not just about anatomy
The voice, of course, originates in the body. The length of the vocal cords, the shape of the vocal tract or hormones have a major influence on, for example, its fundamental frequency. But speech is not merely sound produced by the larynx. It is also a form of social behaviour.
Throughout our lives, we unconsciously acquire an accent, vocabulary, the melody of our sentences and the way we pronounce individual sounds. That is why, based on just a few sentences, we can sometimes guess whether someone is from the Ostrava region, Brno or Prague, or perhaps whether they grew up in Britain, the United States or Australia. Moreover, the way we speak can change depending on who we are with at the time.
It is precisely this aspect of the story that is illustrated very well by the work of sociolinguist Robert Podesva. He observed a gay man in various social situations and found that his vocal delivery was not consistent. When he was at a barbecue with friends, he used falsetto significantly more often, and for longer and across a wider pitch range than in other situations. Podesva therefore points out that we should not view vocal characteristics as a fixed label for a person, but as one component of the style through which we construct our own social identity.
This does not mean that a gay man would one day say to himself: ‘From today, I’ll speak like a gay man.’ Such adjustments to speech usually take place entirely unconsciously. Just as a person might realise, after living in another city for several years, that they have picked up part of the local accent, we can also adopt subtle speech habits from people with whom we identify. And because there is no single ‘gay community’, there cannot be a single ‘gay accent’ either.
Unfortunately, the way a person sounds can matter more than it should
The whole topic might remain an interesting linguistic curiosity were it not for the fact that the way we categorise people based on their voices has consequences beyond the laboratory.
Experiments by psychologist Fabio Fasoli and his colleagues have shown that a short voice sample can trigger a whole host of other stereotypes. When heterosexual participants heard voices perceived as gay or lesbian, they attributed different characteristics and interests to their owners than to people with ‘heterosexual-sounding’ voices. In some experiments, men who sounded gay were also rated as less suitable for leadership roles.
A person therefore does not need to disclose their sexual orientation for someone else – rightly or wrongly – to assume it. And subsequently to behave in accordance with that assumption.
This is precisely why the scientific debate surrounding the ‘gay voice’ is ultimately more interesting than the mere attempt to identify a few specific vocal traits. It reveals something more general about how quickly we categorise people. From just a few seconds of speech, we are able to construct a whole narrative about a person we have never even seen.
Sometimes that person will actually be gay. Other times, it will be a heterosexual man whose ‘s’ sounds or intonation simply do not match the idea of how a ‘proper’ man is supposed to sound.
And perhaps this is precisely what science, after decades of research, demonstrates most convincingly: the ‘gayvoice’ exists primarily as a socially recognisable style, not as a vocal marker of sexual orientation. Our ears may pick up certain signals. But what our brain subsequently infers from them is a mixture of language, experience, culture and stereotypes.
