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There’s many reasons for being physically unable to talk clear! I personally am one of those people. As a kid I couldn’t roll my rs ( something really important as a russian speaker ), had a slight lisp and generally spoke unclear. I went to speech therapist in kindergarten and later in second grade, both times it barely helped because my speech impediments came from wrong placement of teeth/ jaw size. After a decade of working with an orthodontist I can speak clearly, have no lisp and can even roll my rs !
Same here with the rolled rs (Finnish speaker here), though for me the reason is due to my short tongue. Happy for you to be able to pronounce them now though! Makes me want to look into my issue more in case it can be fixed in adulthood (at least in Finnish, I can manage even without a rolled r, but of course I'd prefer it if I could do it and can tell people how to properly pronounce my name).
I'm bi as well I think (raised mormon so I never put much thought into it since I was attracted to women) and while I don't think I have a gay voice, I think I do sound feminine sometimes, especially when I'm excited about a topic.
As a child I had a.speech therapist for my extremely nasal voice. It was due to a congenital defect. She assigned me physical exercises to strengthen the epiglottis and better train me to close the nasal passages while speaking. This wasn't behavioural or psychological, it was a physical defect that was remedied by paying attention to the biological mechanisms and retraining the muscles. Not all speech therapy is psychological.
I remember in primary school whenever we had to do a presentation I'd automatically put on an American accent because I guess my brain associated performing with movies and most movies that I watched were american. I didn't even notice i was doing it until someone pointed it out and it was very hard for me to turn it off 😭
My little brother would sound like an America cartoon character when he was very young when he was acting or playing with his toys and giving them voices
I wrote my BA thesis about accents, not code switching, but about recognising accents. I thought it was really interesting that most people were able to immediately place an accent in the region it was supposed to go. A "gay voice" is basically an accent. Not a regional one, but a social group one. So it's not strange that people have the stereotype firmly in their heads. While yes, many people change the way they speak unconsciously, lots of people do it quite deliberately too. Code switching can be a very conscious choice too. It doesn't have to be, but it can be. The way you speak kind of hovers in between doing it deliberately and doing it without thinking about it. :)
Fru Anneke, technically you can recognize and place accents if you have been trained thru repeated exposure and this applies to the entire planet. i do believe a gay accent exist as does a lesbian accent. i have a white dad and a black mother and i have observed that on both sides of the family i have cousins that do have gay accents and they live in completely different parts of the world. Like all my cousin would speak Zulu and he'd have his own version of a gay accent in it the exact same way my white cousin very much has a gay accent in germany. In regards to code switching , the black experience with code switching is NOTHING like the harmless fun play code switching of white people. for a lot of Black people at times it makes a difference between even getting a room booked at hotel , because if someone can pin point your ethnicity ( that is if your name doesn't reveal ) you could hear "oh its taken" . and it makes a difference between life and actual death in many many cases. I have seen it. i have felt it and it is entirely bizarre to me that someone would be racially profiled for something they have little control over ( when they are not hitting the neutral range of accents ).
I’m half way through just an extra theory unless it’s mentioned later on but I also think that given so many lgbtq+ people are neurodiverse we can be more likely to imitate other people’s voices so a specific voice could spread quicker
Yeah! And being neurodiverse can lead to speech impediments as well. I'm autistic myself, and had to go through speech therapy to speak clearer and avoid slurring. I still have a lisp if I'm not careful, my S's are fine but my R's and L's turn into W's, if I don't think about it or I get stressed out I basically have the "hewp me mw. obama" voice lmao
On code switching: as a woman, I've discovered that if I go into an auto shop and deliberately use a deep voice (from the diaphragm, not the face), I seem to be treated more seriously. About the gay-male voice in general, though, I've always assumed that a large part of it was identifying themselves -- to other gay men -- as gay.
The gay 'voice' is more about inflection, cadence, or accent rather than pitch or timbre/tone. Jeffree Star and Lil Nas X (who are very gay) have a much deeper and more resonant voice than David Beckham or Mike Tyson, who have a higher and airy voice. When people with a typical gay speaking voice sing, you can't hear a gay voice in their singing. I think gay voice is more like a gay accent, which is people can manipulate if they wish. Whereas someone's vocal timbre/natural tone can't really be manipulated.
I found this episode so interesting! So I'm a cis bi woman & in my teens I was often told by my friends (mainly cis straight women) I sounded like a gay guy... It was very confusing! I've definitely got a lower voice at times which I think mixed with my queerness maybe produced a similar effect. The code switching is something I've studied a little at uni but I've been super aware of it since I was a kid, I'm also Scottish and like Corry I had to change my voice when I visited my dad who lived in London then even further South. I went to Sunderland for university and I even found I had a weird medium as some of my friends were from Northumberland and therefore more familiar with my Scottish accent. I've also had a lot of people not believe I'm from my hometown because of my more neutral accent 😅 Voices are weird and cool so thanks for making such a fun episode about this! x
I'm gay and have a gay voice. Something I've noticed is that my customer service voice is slightly higher than my usual speaking voice and in general my voice is higher when talking to people I don't know well. I still have a high voice naturally but around people I know and trust, my voice tends to drop a little.
Trans guy here. Going on testosterone I got a significant voice drop. Well into baritone and I had a moderately high voice pre-T. Day to day I sound very masc. *Except* when I'm on the phone. Did sales for years with lots of phone work and I just can't break the high pitched, feminine voice on the phone, especially if it's someone I don't know. Which does come in handy as I haven't changed my name legally, so when the bank calls and asks for [birthname] it at least sounds like the person they expect. In person I get some very confused looks. The beard probably doesn't help. lol
I'm amab genderfluid but rather feminine leaning in clothing and voice. however I struggle to do the same voice around my best friend and family because my voice gets completely relaxed and I would need to put a lot of effort and concentration to do it.
Ironically am gay, and I have a little gay voice going on, but while my friends can tell, my parents don’t know. It may be due to my voice naturally being super deep, so even the gayest of voices only sound THAT gay to me, but everyone says “wow your voice is so deep”. And then I throw a “omg slay queen yassss” (not with my parents, heck nah)
As a 6ft tall AFAB enby with loads of piercings, I will use what my dad calls my “little girl voice” if I don’t want to seem threatening/I need help/I want to play to someone’s masculinity. So… if I need to return an order in a restaurant, or I’m trying to help someone who’s drunk a bit too much, or if I’m trying to go “I’m not a threat, I’m just a little girl and you wouldn’t want to hit a girl would you? 😉”. I totally don’t notice that I’m doing it at the time.
I find it interesting that lisp is considered gay in UK, because in Russia it isn’t a thing. Gay voice here is just hight pitch more expressive, slightly nasal with elongated vowel. Btw, in Russia the most noticable speech impediment is called “kartavost’”, it’s when a person is unable to roll their rs. A lisp is also a thing but in, but it’s when a person pronounces “sh” sound instead of “s”
I relate to the voice manipulation aspect a lot as a neurodivergent person. I feel that I relate to a lot of the topics which also relate to how trans people present themselves, i just relate in a different sense. I love your videos, they are so well researched!
Most men when they see themselves on film usually think they come across as more effeminate than they expected. It's not just the voice, traditional masculine heroes are not bodily expressive and tend to talk in a monotone. It is less so these days but the golden age of Hollywood has numerous examples.
I'm gay, and I don't think I sound gay? Since I'm autistic, my voice is very monotone anyway, but I do put on a slightly more gay voice I think, when I'm around women, in an effort to make them feel safer, or when around exclusively queer people. But generally, no
I'm a straight woman, and nobody has ever told me I sound gay - but I always thought that one reason some men might "sound gay" aka more feminine was from spending more time socializing with women growing up than the average man. Like my younger brother grew up with two sisters and my Mom as his primary conversation partners until he was 13 because we were homeschooled and continued to have more close female friends than male friends throughout school. He had a noticeably more feminine way of talking in general, but he could do the "man voice" when he wanted to. I often observed that other men with more feminine or "gay" sounding voices also seemed to spend more time with women whether by choice or not. Even the idea of the "gay voice" sounding a bit like a Valley Girl I think has a lot to do with media - Clueless had a big impact on the way teenagers in the 90's wanted to talk. I remember it being cool to do imitations of Valley Girl accents with other little girls my age when I was in elementary school and middle school, and occasionally boys who were with us would also participate. People do comment on my voice and accent a lot. I code switch a ton for a lot of reasons. For example I speak Chinese as a second language and my Chinese voice is much deeper and gruff sounding than I ever sound in English. My Mom always thought I sounded like I was having arguments when she would overhear me speaking Chinese, when actually most conversations I have in Chinese tend to be super friendly and positive. In Chinese I was always pretty aware of wanting to sound confident, knowledgeable and strong so I naturally emulated Chinese speakers that gave off that energy to me. High pitch voices in Chinese tended to come across as weak and confused so I avoided this for the obvious reason of being a single woman living in a huge city overseas and wanting to be taken seriously. I did on a few occasions notice my voice would sound "softer" if I was talking to children, elderly people or trusted friends. I even adapted to using Chinese baby talk with toddlers without consciously trying! I started studying Chinese in Singapore but when I moved to Beijing I quickly adapted my accent to the "Beijing er-hua" and now I distinctly sound like a Beijinger unless I put effort into using a more neutral Chinese accent. My English accent varies a lot depending on who I am talking to. People either guess I'm from California or Atlanta depending on who I'm talking to and in what context. I have a few different work voices I've noticed, though I don't intentionally switch them. As a woman I'm tech I often need to avoid sounding feminine in order to be taken seriously so people won't interrupt me in meetings and will listen to me. I even have two customer service voices depending on the context of the conversation I'm having.
@@millyvinevinny6031 Right, but I don't think the lisp is a universal feature of "the gay voice" and other cultures have "gay voices" that don't include it. Lisps can be genetic, but I think the gay voice is a very layered, nuanced thing.
@@millyvinevinny6031 umm, what? I thought they did have a pretty nuanced conversation and it definitely seems like they would know a good deal about actual gay people since most of their friends are in the LGBTQ+ community. Also it is just not true that all gay people have a lisp or else they're hiding it. I'm confused about your comment because they cited actual studies on this that collected real data, and also almost anyone with gay friends would know someone who is gay and doesn't have "the gay voice" at all. Kal Penn is a celebrity example that comes to mind.
kind of the perfect timing to get an episode that talks about voices in general, as if i've recently started voice training much more actively, so this is well within my field of interest at the moment lol. great episode as always!! always love hearing about codeswitching and the ways culture impacts our language and the ways we express ourselves
Such an interesting topic! I recently heard a lot about voice training and how it was and maybe still is common for gay men and other queer people to undergo if they want a career in acting or even in a high position in a company. I think there was also training for mannerisms associated. And the other thing it got me thinking about is voice actors because every one off gay or bi man character in a US show felt like they were voiced by the same guy in Germany doing a very stereotypical voice (I was surprised they found two for Scott and Mitch from Pentatonix when they were on Bones). Otherwise, this is a topic I know nothing about, especially not separately from gay slang or Polari. So I'm very curious what you have to share!
I've heard that the gay voice was early on adopted so that gay men could spot each other out in the wild without it being obvious to the generally homophobic public. Like queer coding during the Hays Code era in Hollywood. Although that queer coding seems ridiculously obvious now, back then it mostly went unnoticed by the viewers. But gays knew. And so they started doing that stereotypical voice themselves, even very toned down, as a kind of bat signal, "Hey, I'm down with men." And I'm trans and bi. So queer squared.
This is fascinating. My son is trans and for a while he lamented his too-high-for-a-dude voice. Then he realized he's also gay so he says his voice is now perfectly appropriate. :)
That's cool! Trans guy here who came out at 45. I acquired a pretty deep voice through testosterone and I have really masculine intonation. Zero gay voice even though I'm bi leaning heavily towards men. Somehow 45 years living as a woman (and never sounding masculine then) really quickly transitioned to super masc guy. Without any real effort on my part. I'm glad he's happy with his voice. I think voice dysphoria is one of the more challenging dysphorias to deal with.
@@kellharris2491 Or maybe a parent who knows their child is the better judge of their kid's stated identity than a random person reacting to a one paragraph comment. Just saying.
being a trans guy who started t in august, i've really learned how much of my true character i've been suppressing. now that my voice has dropped, i find myself speaking in a much more natural way for myself. especially considering a lot of my peers are cis gay men. i went from trying to sound like a bro, to speaking in my natural voice(which is quite higher) using more "gay" lingo, even a bit nasally, etc. so yes, i suppose i do have a gay voice.
"I'm not sure as to whether there are people who literally have physical reasons that means they are incapable of producing sounds clearly." yes, there are! I'm one of those people. I'm unable to pronounce a rolled r due to my short tongue, which is clear when I speak my native tongue Finnish, as the Finnish r is always a rolled one. We call it having a "ärrävika" ("faulty r") and I was made fun of it a lot growing up. There's a lot of kids who have trouble figuring out how to pronounce it, which is why there is speech therapy for it, but for me it is purely physical. My dad and brother were the same, though unlike me, they took a surgery as kids to cut the thing that holds your tongue to the bottom of your mouth (I was too much of a scaredy-cat to do it and my parents didn't force me) to make them longer. After that and some speech therapy, they are perfectly capable of pronouncing a rolled r. I've considered doing the surgery as I've gotten older (though I don't know if they do it for adults), but from what I've understood it seems like even if I did it I would be unable to learn how to do the proper pronounciation, so I don't see much of a point in that. I also have a bit of a lisp with my s sounds (they tend to sound "sharp", have kind of a "sh" sound, and stick out to me when I listen to recordings of my voice), though I'm not sure if that is related or if voice training/coaching could help me get rid of it.
I find it so unfair that these speech impediments always have a name with the troublesome lettet in it.. LiSP is called SliSSen in my native language Dutch, ÄRRävika fits right in there.. 🙄
Considering that people around my found out I was Gay before I even knew I was Gay, and the main reason according them is my voice and the way I speak... Yeah, I have a Gay voice
No one tells me i have gay voice bc of my tiddies, but as a bi trans man raised by very flamboyant gen x gays ive absolutely inherited some inflection that people just see as part of why they think im a woman
Fun fact: in Italian lisp is not consider gay at all just a minor defect, while the thrill on the r is, but it may sound french, effeminate, gay, noble, depending on the listener. Also I have the thrill but only when I am talking with Italian, Spanish or German people the other billions of human don't realize this. 😂
GT, but with acting and public speaking my whole life, I think everything was trained out of me… my vocabulary and body language can be more of a give away I think 😅
Lisping has its origins in dental problems, which has a genetic component to it and will therefore have geographical cohorts. And there is the other factor that we all unconsciously copy the speech patterns of those to whom we are speaking, especially if we want to be friendly, be liked, or impress.
as someone with a thick accent i can vouch for the second half of your comment! i can always tell someone likes me because after a while of talking to me theyll randomly say certain words like me. and i know its not on purpose because they look confused as hell every single time, and are shocked when i tell them it happens all the time lmao. another example- im hearing and dont really know any sign, but after spending the weekend with my deaf cousin, id come home with a slight deaf accent and would occasionally accidentally use ASL grammar (for example, "mom go where?" instead of "where did mom go?"). i always felt so embarrassed when my family called me out!
to answer the question: yes, and without effort, also yes. but i do find myself switching to a more masc/ “straight” voice depending on the circumstance
I think your assertion that the fact that speech therapists/pathologists exist means there's a large number of people whose speech impediments are behavioral rather than structural could very well be wrong. I think it's perfectly possible that some people have a physical reason why they struggle with a given sound and the speech therapist helps that person either reduce or overcome that problem
Yeah, I agree with you. I have a cousin who had to have multiple surgeries as a child to correct a cleft pallet and this caused her to go through multiple cycles of re-learning how to talk with the change in shape of her mouth. She is still working with her speech therapist now because she still struggles with some sounds now. I have another cousin whose kids both had to use a speech therapist because their stay at home parent basically just doesn't talk very much at all and so during COVID shut down they really weren't getting enough language exposure and this really impacted their language development. They just overall hadn't been exposed to sounds enough or done enough trial and error with sounds to other people and gotten positive/negative feedback the way other children normally would at their stage in development. There are really just tons of reasons speech therapists might be needed.
The question wasn’t structural vs physical, so much as it was about it being physically *impossible* for people to make said sound. In this dichotomy you’ve presented, if the physical reason can be overcome, then it’s “behavioural”.
@@SciGuys I think this is assuming that just because it's technically possible for you to produce a sound that you should be able to figure it out on your own as everyone else does, which I think is minimizing some of the potential issues. Also, as someone with a bit of a speech impediment myself and who has seen a speech therapist at a young age, I think it's even more complicated than that. I've recently discovered that speech therapy for me only really made me replace one impediment for another less obvious one because it's physically very difficult for me to do the correct sound (though strictly speaking, not impossible)
Not at all - there's no implication that one should be able to figure it out alone. The question was about whether speech impediments were caused by a physical inability to make a sound, not just a physical limitation. I think you're adding in more than was present in the conversation, based on what you assume my stance is. The point of the exchange was very simply: Are speech impediments caused by a physical impossibility in producing a specific sound? No, given that people can overcome speech impediments without surgical alteration, they're evidently not due to a sound being physically impossible. That doesn't mean that a physical limitation can't be a root cause.
There are three of us in this episode. Two of us are in a relationship. Curious how you landed on us not knowing anything about gays... We didn't even talk about speech therapists "correcting" a gay voice? However, what you've described is pretty much exactly what was said in the episode... There is a physical difference leading to the most natural way of speaking producing an incorrect sound, speech therapy trains you to say the sound correctly by reinforcing the "unnatural" pronunciation. Did you actually watch the episode before commenting?
I had speech therapy as a child for a lisp that was blamed on the placement of my front teeth (they do not meet cleanly, it was blamed on thumb sucking). I am also pansexual, and transmasc. Not too sure if I lisp nowadays much, but I do tend to have confusing vocal cues apparently, I've had my voice called... A little campy, but also a little like an older woman, but I also am reliably identified as a man by others everywhere except over the phone. I think it's a bit complicated because my exaggeration of expression is strongly affected by my autism, I can be quite flat or veer into deep overcompensating and end up lingering in sounds that feel particularly good. It seems to be reminiscent of "gay" and "girly" in some ways but from people's hesitant, thoughtful confusion when I've asked them to describe it, it doesn't come off enough like either of those things to actually put me in that box most of the time even when I do sound very different. As far as code switching goes, I've seen a couple of bilingual folks who are extremely fluent in both their languages and can switch accents call it code switching, but I'm not sure if that has a distinct terminology. But one really good example was a comedian complaining about people giving him shit for pronouncing an English word with Japanese flow and syllables when speaking Japanese, and then giving a very striking example of how actually pronouncing those words in pure American English in the middle of the sentence completely buggered the flow. I agonise a lot over whether I should pronounce certain loan words like "Mexico" with the English x or my best approximation of a more genuine version, it feels like there is not a non-annoying to someone way to pronounce that word 😭
it's so wild when people make comments on "that's not your real voice" for people who sound differently like take LilyPichu or Corpse Husband I remember people trying to use the fact that Lily saw a vocal coach (for voice acting) as a reason why her voice is "fake", or because she can talk in a lower voice it means that higher one is "fake" when people can talk comfortably at a lot of different vocal states, and even IF these people had trained their voice so it was more natural for them to talk at those pitches it doesn't mean it's any faker
Yeah! It's weird seeing those types of comments because it's _really_ hard to keep up a voice for long when it doesn't feel natural or comfortable. And even if it isn't their natural voice (which... I really doubt it isn't, their voices are unique but not actually that weird, Idk why some people can't believe it), that doesn't mean it's fake, in the same way code switching doesn't mean you're fake
I'm a biromantic asexual NB, and I've been told that I sound a lot like Patrick Stump from fall out boy, especially when I sing (which I do a lot, because I'm obnoxious)
im trans and sometimes when im with people i trust i let loose and i have a slightly more flamboyant speaking tone. its not necesarily the pitch, its just the speech paterns are pretty much what youd expect, just without a bunch of "slay" and "yassss" tho i also do death metal vocals so the positioning of the tongue relative to the teeth, spaces of resonance, and mouth shape are really important to all of that. i like applying what i learn here to the metal screaming so i dont damage my voice.
Pansexual genderqueer AFAB, got told by multiple people I talk like a stoner and I noticed my AMAB friends lower their voice when they imitate or do an impression of me 🤷🏽♀ but it might be my vibe rather than the timbre although my voice is contra-alto when I sing, which is basically soprano male lmao. Also with ADHD, when Im stressed or tired I’ll not enunciate as well and voice will drop even lower because it feels more comfortable.
Corrys scary man voice sounds hot so you know, when you said you wanna sound less intimidating around white women, just remember some of us might like it 😂 Also was literally thinking about Abigail Thorne and then you mentioned her!
I think a very stereotypical gay voice, like what Corry did when he was putting on a gay voice in this episode, seems to me to be mostly characterised by elongated vowels, especially at the ends of words. That's not something you talked about, but I think that's the most noticeable thing.
I'm straight but I had severe speech impediments growing up, as a result I over-annunciate my words and still have a bit of a lisp. My voice is very high. As a result a lot of gay men I have met throughout my life have told me they instantly picked me up on their "gaydar".
Also, what Corey said about his accent changing as he moved to England. My accent changed when I moved to Yorkshire, and I didn't even move that far. Where I moved from was only just outside Yorkshire, but my "natural" accent (the autistic accent, which I got from my dad) was within the range of normal there but within Yorkshire it sounds "posh" or "southern" so over time I developed something that was close enough to Yorkshire that I wasn't immediately singled out as different. I still get called "posh" sometimes but life is a lot easier.
the way i see is that we subconsciously try to emulate who's around us to feel in, and, when you stop caring, we start getting our "true" voice out, being more expressive and melodic, but, in general, we're social monkeys that want to feel a part of a group, but if we stop caring and show our true selves, we'll find someone similar and we'll still emulate them and change voices in contexts, but it's less important than being yourself. but, as said in the video, we have more than one way to communicate, words, tones, gestures, so, we try to change no matter how we feel, to get the emotion across, to get the right meaning out.
It's mostly based on wanting your identity to be related to publicly known concepts of what gay is, because for most young/ old teens who figure out their sexuality, are still at an age of figuring out their identity, and for most gay people who grew up, they tend to grow up in an environment where others are not fully accepting of homosexuality; obviously we have come a long way now compared to 20 years ago compared to 50 years ago and compared to 100 years ago etcetera etcetera. Now to watch the video and see how wrong I am on the answer i came up with when I was in my early 20's that I''ve been carrying ever since.
As a bi girl, I can confirm I have a fruity voice and mannerisms - my friends say I'm "literally the gayest presenting person I've met" so take that as you will lol
Im a bi ace guy, and I find it so funny that I go unnoticed on the gaydar so often, I'm into pretty "cis straight guy" things and I have a pretty nonchalant matter of fact voice so it's a double wammy
Pansexual, cis AMAB and I do not have the gay accent. I’ve known straight people who had the gay accent their entire lives too so I just have no idea how to explain it. Perhaps it comes from having been around more feminine people when growing uo
I know I did speech in school as a child during our reading out loud time. I would have to go out of the room and into the library with an older woman (there were a few and we called them the grandmas.) I didn't recognize it within myself at the time but apparently I had a lisp. As I got older I got too embarrassed getting pulled out of the class so I stopped going. I do notice from time to time that I have a bit of a lisp still with certain combinations of letters. For example even the word lisp sometimes comes out as listhhhhp it's like I get tongue tied feeling and I'm trying to correct it as it's happening. Another word is memorial. I end up stuttering a lot on the ms trying to get it to come out right. I didn't think about it until watching this episode but I do have a long tongue. Like I can touch my nose with it 🤷🏻 Edit: also for the question, I am afab (gnc, gq w/e u wanna call it. More masc presenting) and I like women 😄 there is also an idea in the lesbian community of a gay voice but the gay lady version. Which I think stems from not having to play up the femininity to attract men. So it'll come across as more "chill" which may come across to some as a masculine cadence or even sometimes pitch.
I always assumed the lisp thing was from some famous Hollywood person who was known as gay and had a lisp. And then it just spread in the same way any accent does.
I'm a queer trans guy with a lisp but I don't think I sound gay. For my first 4 or 5 years of school I was forced to do speech therapy to correct my lisp but it didn't help that much. Maybe just cause I didn't really understand why I was there since I was so young. Either way, nowadays I barely hear my lisp unless I really mess up, though my friends tell me it's quite noticeable :')
I’m not gay, but trans and hetero (at least, technically). I don’t think I *sound* queer (I’ve been on T for a hot minute), but I have had a number of people think I’m gay based purely on vibe before they know I’m trans 😅
I can speak normally when I hope my nose at first I can't but then somehow there is something that I can like change and it switches back to my normal voice I can do the same when humming and singing notes and make them sound the exact same and I don't know why
It's interesting what you say about your "on camera" voice. It mirrors what I call my "customer service voice". Significantly higher, more sing-song. I don't even know why I do it.
This topic is oddly relevant to me. So when I was a teen I had crossed my abusive father and his favorite way to attack my self esteem was to insist I was was gay on a regular basis. I do have a mild speech impediment due to being tongue tied and a voice range that is kind of in the middle of two different octaves (which can really be funny when singing certain songs because I will have to switch octaves in odd places to hit the right notes). Anyway I wouldn't say I am overly feminine but definitely not hyper masculine either. Occasionally I will have people who don't know me really ask me if I am gay, most often not out of interest but because of how I grew up I used to very much dislike the question from straight people and would respond somewhat hostilely to it. At one point in my early 20s I got sick of it to the point where I decided fuck it, I want to find out for sure so that I would have one less reason to be bothered by it. Nope, not attracted to men even if I get piss drunk at a gay bar lol. I don't know where I was going with this it just surprised me how relevant this one was to me. I'm surprised you guys never mentioned Snagglepuss when talking about gay voice stereotypes =P
Your dad was low key a bully. i almost want to whoop his ass on your behalf rn. he must have picked up on the fact that you are sensitive about it and decided to weaponize it. i find it so strange that people stop and ask if you are gay but really nothing surprises me. but depending on who you meet this could spell danger. i am an albino , adults that would tell me to my face that i remind them of those lab rats with red eyes , or a tape worms. and my favourite is the albino crocodile . People have been trampling over my self esteem for so long that i feel at times as if there ain't none of it left. the witchcraft jokes no longer scare me .
As a trans guy who doesn't really pass all the time, I have to code switch often in public depending on how someone perceives my appearance. If someone recognizes me as a guy, I'll lower my voice, but if they don't, I'll adopt my pre-transition feminine way of speaking, and it's not intentional at all. I wish I didn't do it, but at the same time, I live in a fairly conservative area, so I don't make an effort to stop it because it protects me. I also use a more feminine voice in any confrontation in order to sound more appeasing and, well, non-confrontational.
so im pretransition ftm and i didnt realize i do the same thing Corey (is that how u spell ya name) does until it came up and it feels so validating somehow?? even though im actually not that tall and probably would lose an actual fight i dont even care in that moment when some stranger is being an arse to my friends at a party or smthn im like do not mess with me, leave, or else... and it works?? but i also do the "oh im so silly i dont know this or that please smart person help me" A LOT and i dont know how to feel about that one. its actually kinda sweet how helpful people get when i do that, regardless of gender but i didnt realize its because they see me as a child makes a ton of sense tho
Trans gay guy, i don't know if i sound gay, though my voice is still a bit high. Anyway, our voice differs also depending on which language we speak. For example, english has a lower frequency than french. So my voice is naturally a little lower when i speak english.
I don't know if I missed it, but mirror neurons and mimicking as fundamentals of social interaction seem like they would be a central concept on accent adoption/development (and are very interesting topics, in and outside of language, in general, I think :) Also, the underlying information behind different ways of speaking throughout social interactions, plus what we individually pick up and mimic, and why, does seem like a very interesting topic to cover. I think it would be great to maybe bring a linguist in to discuss and inform a related convo (possibly bringing up internet comments/written interactions, and how it can relate to creator-audience relationships/online communities too?)
I used to have lisp (also: can we can up with a less mean word... liSp, rlly?) I eventually traine myself out of it w shear willpower before going to highschool. Speachtherapy brought me nothing; my tongue wasnt lazy and weak. Yrs later my vocal coach remarked my tongue is big for my mouth so i learned a different technique to make certain sounds. There is soooo much stigma on lisping. That probably makes it harder because you start self muting and even cramp up before talking. Like stottering it is emotion related. Every aspect that withholds you from impulsively speaking, that forces you to think about how it might sounds is debilitating. And really impactfull on all your social interactions and therefor (self) image. So yeah, less confronting word for lisp, pleazz
I find it fascinating you guys call the “flags” camp But I believe the understanding of some of who you surround yourself with definitely affects your voice. I’m young (31) but I very much experienced bullying when I was a teenager. It was that strange transition time here in America before things were more commonly accepted. I definitely surrounded myself with females, I couldn’t even help maybe talking like them sometimes. I’m older now, surrounded by many fewer females, and also maybe just aging of my voice but I believe it’s much much harder for someone to tell if I’m gay.
I'm a woman and I have a fairly monotone voice, people think I'm rude or a bitch if I don't exaggerate my tone and expression to add more dynamics to it. It's tiring and annoying to have to do because of sexism. It's okay for a dude to speak without a lot of expression but not for me.
Ftm and bi, I absolutely have one and I love it haha. I mean all my friends all my life have been lgbt so it's all environmental lmao. I spoke this way before transition but more subdued just because I didn't feel free. I'm a nursing student and coming off the way I do really seems to ease my patient's anxiety because I'm a man. I become wayyy more 'gay' with patients. I've never said I'm lgbt but even women who don't like to have men care for them are happy to have me stay. I tend to prefer female spaces in general, I code switch massively between women, straight men and even gay men. I tend to be neutral towards non binary folks but it depends, im drawn to more feminine people generally.
@millyvinevinny6031 they literally explained in the video how that's a stereotype and that many other ls have the same way of speaking. I'm a bi male btw, not sure what you meant by that comment but if I'm getting your tone wrong let me know
im a trans guy and i try so hard to talk in a low smooth voice but everyone tells me i have a gay voice, my voice is usually in the e range but when i try to make it deeper its a d3 . my voice gives me so much dysphoria.
the trick is to be less expressive, and talk monotone if you have to. Talk like you don't really care about the conversation you're having, or have no interest in whats being said. Might seem weird, but this is how guys talk. You can begin to re-add emotion back into your speech over time once you've found a good baseline.
My question going into this was: Why do gay guys talk the way they often do? I don't really feel like my question was answered but it was an interesting listen regardless! Thanks
it seems like a kind of cycle, where people consider certain ways of speaking to be gay, so gay people are more likely to speak like that to signal to others that they're gay, then that re-enforces the idea that that's what gay people sound like. it's the same as how men and women speak how they do because that's how they were taught men and women speak, it being way more cultural than biological since apart from the adam's apple, none of how men/women speak is biologically determined
I’m lesbian so yk I don’t have a “gay voice“ since that’s more or a gay guy thing… but I very much do have a very different and much higher “customer service voice“…
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Are you gay? Do you have a gay voice?
I am a homo and have very homo voice
I'm bi but I've never been told I sound gay
Yes and yes
Im a trans gay man.... l sound like a squawking wench but hey.... still early in transition and mate, lm going to be as camp af.
I'm gay, I don't sound gay but I look really gay
There’s many reasons for being physically unable to talk clear!
I personally am one of those people. As a kid I couldn’t roll my rs ( something really important as a russian speaker ), had a slight lisp and generally spoke unclear. I went to speech therapist in kindergarten and later in second grade, both times it barely helped because my speech impediments came from wrong placement of teeth/ jaw size.
After a decade of working with an orthodontist I can speak clearly, have no lisp and can even roll my rs !
Same here with the rolled rs (Finnish speaker here), though for me the reason is due to my short tongue. Happy for you to be able to pronounce them now though! Makes me want to look into my issue more in case it can be fixed in adulthood (at least in Finnish, I can manage even without a rolled r, but of course I'd prefer it if I could do it and can tell people how to properly pronounce my name).
I love how Corry‘s “crying“ started out sounding like a baby and then transitioned into an angry cat 🤣
He sounded JUST like my cat when she’s crying for food lmao
I’m bisexual and one of my friends told me I sound “majestic and fruity”
I wish i was called majestic and fruity. I'm just shrill
Sounds like a good perfume lmao
my english teacher said I sound like a cartoon witch in front of the whole class after I did public speaking 😭
@@zolasninja lmao. Did you curse her after?
I have the gayest voice anyone will ever hear. I get called ma’am over the phone all the time
Im bisexual with a pretty 'straight' sounding voice so it causes people a visceral reaction hearing a straight guy voice saying 'slayyyyy'
omg i wanna hear it
Sameeee. When I do “gay culture” things while straight passing, people get confused and it’s fun
I'm bi as well I think (raised mormon so I never put much thought into it since I was attracted to women) and while I don't think I have a gay voice, I think I do sound feminine sometimes, especially when I'm excited about a topic.
YOU ARE JUSY LIKE ME
@@jlords24 I have found my people
As a child I had a.speech therapist for my extremely nasal voice. It was due to a congenital defect. She assigned me physical exercises to strengthen the epiglottis and better train me to close the nasal passages while speaking. This wasn't behavioural or psychological, it was a physical defect that was remedied by paying attention to the biological mechanisms and retraining the muscles. Not all speech therapy is psychological.
I remember in primary school whenever we had to do a presentation I'd automatically put on an American accent because I guess my brain associated performing with movies and most movies that I watched were american. I didn't even notice i was doing it until someone pointed it out and it was very hard for me to turn it off 😭
My little brother would sound like an America cartoon character when he was very young when he was acting or playing with his toys and giving them voices
I wrote my BA thesis about accents, not code switching, but about recognising accents. I thought it was really interesting that most people were able to immediately place an accent in the region it was supposed to go. A "gay voice" is basically an accent. Not a regional one, but a social group one. So it's not strange that people have the stereotype firmly in their heads.
While yes, many people change the way they speak unconsciously, lots of people do it quite deliberately too. Code switching can be a very conscious choice too. It doesn't have to be, but it can be. The way you speak kind of hovers in between doing it deliberately and doing it without thinking about it. :)
Fru Anneke, technically you can recognize and place accents if you have been trained thru repeated exposure and this applies to the entire planet.
i do believe a gay accent exist as does a lesbian accent. i have a white dad and a black mother and i have observed that on both sides of the family i have cousins that do have gay accents and they live in completely different parts of the world. Like all my cousin would speak Zulu and he'd have his own version of a gay accent in it the exact same way my white cousin very much has a gay accent in germany.
In regards to code switching , the black experience with code switching is NOTHING like the harmless fun play code switching of white people. for a lot of Black people at times it makes a difference between even getting a room booked at hotel , because if someone can pin point your ethnicity ( that is if your name doesn't reveal ) you could hear "oh its taken" . and it makes a difference between life and actual death in many many cases. I have seen it. i have felt it and it is entirely bizarre to me that someone would be racially profiled for something they have little control over ( when they are not hitting the neutral range of accents ).
I’m half way through just an extra theory unless it’s mentioned later on but I also think that given so many lgbtq+ people are neurodiverse we can be more likely to imitate other people’s voices so a specific voice could spread quicker
Yeah! And being neurodiverse can lead to speech impediments as well. I'm autistic myself, and had to go through speech therapy to speak clearer and avoid slurring. I still have a lisp if I'm not careful, my S's are fine but my R's and L's turn into W's, if I don't think about it or I get stressed out I basically have the "hewp me mw. obama" voice lmao
On code switching: as a woman, I've discovered that if I go into an auto shop and deliberately use a deep voice (from the diaphragm, not the face), I seem to be treated more seriously.
About the gay-male voice in general, though, I've always assumed that a large part of it was identifying themselves -- to other gay men -- as gay.
The gay 'voice' is more about inflection, cadence, or accent rather than pitch or timbre/tone. Jeffree Star and Lil Nas X (who are very gay) have a much deeper and more resonant voice than David Beckham or Mike Tyson, who have a higher and airy voice. When people with a typical gay speaking voice sing, you can't hear a gay voice in their singing. I think gay voice is more like a gay accent, which is people can manipulate if they wish. Whereas someone's vocal timbre/natural tone can't really be manipulated.
I found this episode so interesting! So I'm a cis bi woman & in my teens I was often told by my friends (mainly cis straight women) I sounded like a gay guy... It was very confusing! I've definitely got a lower voice at times which I think mixed with my queerness maybe produced a similar effect. The code switching is something I've studied a little at uni but I've been super aware of it since I was a kid, I'm also Scottish and like Corry I had to change my voice when I visited my dad who lived in London then even further South. I went to Sunderland for university and I even found I had a weird medium as some of my friends were from Northumberland and therefore more familiar with my Scottish accent. I've also had a lot of people not believe I'm from my hometown because of my more neutral accent 😅
Voices are weird and cool so thanks for making such a fun episode about this! x
I'm gay and have a gay voice. Something I've noticed is that my customer service voice is slightly higher than my usual speaking voice and in general my voice is higher when talking to people I don't know well. I still have a high voice naturally but around people I know and trust, my voice tends to drop a little.
Trans guy here. Going on testosterone I got a significant voice drop. Well into baritone and I had a moderately high voice pre-T. Day to day I sound very masc. *Except* when I'm on the phone. Did sales for years with lots of phone work and I just can't break the high pitched, feminine voice on the phone, especially if it's someone I don't know. Which does come in handy as I haven't changed my name legally, so when the bank calls and asks for [birthname] it at least sounds like the person they expect. In person I get some very confused looks. The beard probably doesn't help. lol
I'm amab genderfluid but rather feminine leaning in clothing and voice. however I struggle to do the same voice around my best friend and family because my voice gets completely relaxed and I would need to put a lot of effort and concentration to do it.
yes and yes 😂 i usually identify as queer but very gay. i use ASL as well as English and have been told i have “gay hands” lmao
You even write gay!! WTF???
Ironically am gay, and I have a little gay voice going on, but while my friends can tell, my parents don’t know. It may be due to my voice naturally being super deep, so even the gayest of voices only sound THAT gay to me, but everyone says “wow your voice is so deep”.
And then I throw a “omg slay queen yassss” (not with my parents, heck nah)
As a 6ft tall AFAB enby with loads of piercings, I will use what my dad calls my “little girl voice” if I don’t want to seem threatening/I need help/I want to play to someone’s masculinity. So… if I need to return an order in a restaurant, or I’m trying to help someone who’s drunk a bit too much, or if I’m trying to go “I’m not a threat, I’m just a little girl and you wouldn’t want to hit a girl would you? 😉”. I totally don’t notice that I’m doing it at the time.
I can relate 😂
It's time to admit to yourself you're trans. Your kind are NOT gay.
I find it interesting that lisp is considered gay in UK, because in Russia it isn’t a thing. Gay voice here is just hight pitch more expressive, slightly nasal with elongated vowel.
Btw, in Russia the most noticable speech impediment is called “kartavost’”, it’s when a person is unable to roll their rs. A lisp is also a thing but in, but it’s when a person pronounces “sh” sound instead of “s”
I relate to the voice manipulation aspect a lot as a neurodivergent person. I feel that I relate to a lot of the topics which also relate to how trans people present themselves, i just relate in a different sense. I love your videos, they are so well researched!
Most men when they see themselves on film usually think they come across as more effeminate than they expected. It's not just the voice, traditional masculine heroes are not bodily expressive and tend to talk in a monotone. It is less so these days but the golden age of Hollywood has numerous examples.
I'm gay, and I don't think I sound gay? Since I'm autistic, my voice is very monotone anyway, but I do put on a slightly more gay voice I think, when I'm around women, in an effort to make them feel safer, or when around exclusively queer people. But generally, no
I love the androgyny in the stereotypical gay man's voice. I don't have a voice like that despite being a gay man but if that's you then slay!
I’m obsessed with the concept of identifying the gay voice lisp as “a little twinkle✨”
I love that
This has made me realise so much about my voice and how my disability’s have affected it consciously and unconsciously.
I'm a straight woman, and nobody has ever told me I sound gay - but I always thought that one reason some men might "sound gay" aka more feminine was from spending more time socializing with women growing up than the average man. Like my younger brother grew up with two sisters and my Mom as his primary conversation partners until he was 13 because we were homeschooled and continued to have more close female friends than male friends throughout school. He had a noticeably more feminine way of talking in general, but he could do the "man voice" when he wanted to. I often observed that other men with more feminine or "gay" sounding voices also seemed to spend more time with women whether by choice or not.
Even the idea of the "gay voice" sounding a bit like a Valley Girl I think has a lot to do with media - Clueless had a big impact on the way teenagers in the 90's wanted to talk. I remember it being cool to do imitations of Valley Girl accents with other little girls my age when I was in elementary school and middle school, and occasionally boys who were with us would also participate.
People do comment on my voice and accent a lot. I code switch a ton for a lot of reasons. For example I speak Chinese as a second language and my Chinese voice is much deeper and gruff sounding than I ever sound in English. My Mom always thought I sounded like I was having arguments when she would overhear me speaking Chinese, when actually most conversations I have in Chinese tend to be super friendly and positive. In Chinese I was always pretty aware of wanting to sound confident, knowledgeable and strong so I naturally emulated Chinese speakers that gave off that energy to me. High pitch voices in Chinese tended to come across as weak and confused so I avoided this for the obvious reason of being a single woman living in a huge city overseas and wanting to be taken seriously. I did on a few occasions notice my voice would sound "softer" if I was talking to children, elderly people or trusted friends. I even adapted to using Chinese baby talk with toddlers without consciously trying! I started studying Chinese in Singapore but when I moved to Beijing I quickly adapted my accent to the "Beijing er-hua" and now I distinctly sound like a Beijinger unless I put effort into using a more neutral Chinese accent.
My English accent varies a lot depending on who I am talking to. People either guess I'm from California or Atlanta depending on who I'm talking to and in what context.
I have a few different work voices I've noticed, though I don't intentionally switch them. As a woman I'm tech I often need to avoid sounding feminine in order to be taken seriously so people won't interrupt me in meetings and will listen to me.
I even have two customer service voices depending on the context of the conversation I'm having.
@@millyvinevinny6031 lisp is when 's' sounds like a 'th'. Mike Tyson has a more obvious lisp than any gay celebrity I know
@@millyvinevinny6031 Right, but I don't think the lisp is a universal feature of "the gay voice" and other cultures have "gay voices" that don't include it. Lisps can be genetic, but I think the gay voice is a very layered, nuanced thing.
@@millyvinevinny6031 umm, what? I thought they did have a pretty nuanced conversation and it definitely seems like they would know a good deal about actual gay people since most of their friends are in the LGBTQ+ community.
Also it is just not true that all gay people have a lisp or else they're hiding it. I'm confused about your comment because they cited actual studies on this that collected real data, and also almost anyone with gay friends would know someone who is gay and doesn't have "the gay voice" at all.
Kal Penn is a celebrity example that comes to mind.
I'm a bisexual non binary and I sound like a little girl
i am also bisexual non binary and i have such a high pitched voice. i always think i sound normal until i hear my voice on video and it’s sooo odd
Give me your voice!
@@Kelly_Jane only if I get an androgynous one in return
@@Noarobyn93 Alas, this girl shall remain stuck with my annoyingly deep voice... at least until I work out this vocal training stuff 😅
@@Kelly_Jane well, honestly, maybe, I‘d take that one, too, if I wasn’t afraid to confuse my kid
kind of the perfect timing to get an episode that talks about voices in general, as if i've recently started voice training much more actively, so this is well within my field of interest at the moment lol. great episode as always!! always love hearing about codeswitching and the ways culture impacts our language and the ways we express ourselves
Such an interesting topic! I recently heard a lot about voice training and how it was and maybe still is common for gay men and other queer people to undergo if they want a career in acting or even in a high position in a company. I think there was also training for mannerisms associated. And the other thing it got me thinking about is voice actors because every one off gay or bi man character in a US show felt like they were voiced by the same guy in Germany doing a very stereotypical voice (I was surprised they found two for Scott and Mitch from Pentatonix when they were on Bones). Otherwise, this is a topic I know nothing about, especially not separately from gay slang or Polari. So I'm very curious what you have to share!
This just brought back memories of when my choir teacher has our class watch a video of the vocal chords moving and half the class had to turn away
There is a link between lisps and autism, and autistic men are 2 to 3 times more likely to be gay..
I've heard that the gay voice was early on adopted so that gay men could spot each other out in the wild without it being obvious to the generally homophobic public. Like queer coding during the Hays Code era in Hollywood. Although that queer coding seems ridiculously obvious now, back then it mostly went unnoticed by the viewers. But gays knew. And so they started doing that stereotypical voice themselves, even very toned down, as a kind of bat signal, "Hey, I'm down with men."
And I'm trans and bi. So queer squared.
This is fascinating. My son is trans and for a while he lamented his too-high-for-a-dude voice. Then he realized he's also gay so he says his voice is now perfectly appropriate. :)
That's cool! Trans guy here who came out at 45. I acquired a pretty deep voice through testosterone and I have really masculine intonation. Zero gay voice even though I'm bi leaning heavily towards men. Somehow 45 years living as a woman (and never sounding masculine then) really quickly transitioned to super masc guy. Without any real effort on my part. I'm glad he's happy with his voice. I think voice dysphoria is one of the more challenging dysphorias to deal with.
Or maybe he is just a tomboy who is straight....just saying.
@@kellharris2491 Or maybe a parent who knows their child is the better judge of their kid's stated identity than a random person reacting to a one paragraph comment. Just saying.
Good for him slay man
@@kellharris2491 Or maybe not.
being a trans guy who started t in august, i've really learned how much of my true character i've been suppressing. now that my voice has dropped, i find myself speaking in a much more natural way for myself. especially considering a lot of my peers are cis gay men. i went from trying to sound like a bro, to speaking in my natural voice(which is quite higher) using more "gay" lingo, even a bit nasally, etc. so yes, i suppose i do have a gay voice.
Wow this made me remember all the horrible things my dad use to say about the 'gay voice' when I was a kid
he oughta have created self hatred in yo. that's brutal . Chiiiile !
"I'm not sure as to whether there are people who literally have physical reasons that means they are incapable of producing sounds clearly." yes, there are! I'm one of those people.
I'm unable to pronounce a rolled r due to my short tongue, which is clear when I speak my native tongue Finnish, as the Finnish r is always a rolled one. We call it having a "ärrävika" ("faulty r") and I was made fun of it a lot growing up. There's a lot of kids who have trouble figuring out how to pronounce it, which is why there is speech therapy for it, but for me it is purely physical. My dad and brother were the same, though unlike me, they took a surgery as kids to cut the thing that holds your tongue to the bottom of your mouth (I was too much of a scaredy-cat to do it and my parents didn't force me) to make them longer. After that and some speech therapy, they are perfectly capable of pronouncing a rolled r.
I've considered doing the surgery as I've gotten older (though I don't know if they do it for adults), but from what I've understood it seems like even if I did it I would be unable to learn how to do the proper pronounciation, so I don't see much of a point in that.
I also have a bit of a lisp with my s sounds (they tend to sound "sharp", have kind of a "sh" sound, and stick out to me when I listen to recordings of my voice), though I'm not sure if that is related or if voice training/coaching could help me get rid of it.
"...the thing that holds your tongue to the bottom of your mouth...."
It's called a "frenulum". Everybody has several of them.
I find it so unfair that these speech impediments always have a name with the troublesome lettet in it..
LiSP is called SliSSen in my native language Dutch, ÄRRävika fits right in there.. 🙄
Considering that people around my found out I was Gay before I even knew I was Gay, and the main reason according them is my voice and the way I speak... Yeah, I have a Gay voice
No one tells me i have gay voice bc of my tiddies, but as a bi trans man raised by very flamboyant gen x gays ive absolutely inherited some inflection that people just see as part of why they think im a woman
Fun fact: in Italian lisp is not consider gay at all just a minor defect, while the thrill on the r is, but it may sound french, effeminate, gay, noble, depending on the listener. Also I have the thrill but only when I am talking with Italian, Spanish or German people the other billions of human don't realize this. 😂
I can't believe there's people going to speech therapy for rolling Rs in England and people going to learn that in Italy. That's cwazy, if you ask me.
Sorry I really don't know what you mean by a "thrill on the R".
You're telling me that the biracial queer Scottish guy in England code switches and changes his voice the most? Shocking
Pansexual, AFAB, genderqueer. I've never been told I have a gay voice 🤷
I'm so happy that Noah is coming to Portland!! Really hoping to grab tickets 🤞
I’m AFAB non binary and I like all types of women and NB people- I wish my voice was lower but it’s still pretty high!
GT, but with acting and public speaking my whole life, I think everything was trained out of me… my vocabulary and body language can be more of a give away I think 😅
I am gay, and sometimes i do feel like i sound gay (basically my voice goes higher and im speaking with gay slang)
Yes I am gay. I don't think I sound gay but sometimes my inner gay is vocalised
inner gay lol
Lisping has its origins in dental problems, which has a genetic component to it and will therefore have geographical cohorts. And there is the other factor that we all unconsciously copy the speech patterns of those to whom we are speaking, especially if we want to be friendly, be liked, or impress.
as someone with a thick accent i can vouch for the second half of your comment! i can always tell someone likes me because after a while of talking to me theyll randomly say certain words like me. and i know its not on purpose because they look confused as hell every single time, and are shocked when i tell them it happens all the time lmao.
another example- im hearing and dont really know any sign, but after spending the weekend with my deaf cousin, id come home with a slight deaf accent and would occasionally accidentally use ASL grammar (for example, "mom go where?" instead of "where did mom go?"). i always felt so embarrassed when my family called me out!
to answer the question: yes, and without effort, also yes. but i do find myself switching to a more masc/ “straight” voice depending on the circumstance
I think your assertion that the fact that speech therapists/pathologists exist means there's a large number of people whose speech impediments are behavioral rather than structural could very well be wrong. I think it's perfectly possible that some people have a physical reason why they struggle with a given sound and the speech therapist helps that person either reduce or overcome that problem
Yeah, I agree with you. I have a cousin who had to have multiple surgeries as a child to correct a cleft pallet and this caused her to go through multiple cycles of re-learning how to talk with the change in shape of her mouth. She is still working with her speech therapist now because she still struggles with some sounds now. I have another cousin whose kids both had to use a speech therapist because their stay at home parent basically just doesn't talk very much at all and so during COVID shut down they really weren't getting enough language exposure and this really impacted their language development. They just overall hadn't been exposed to sounds enough or done enough trial and error with sounds to other people and gotten positive/negative feedback the way other children normally would at their stage in development.
There are really just tons of reasons speech therapists might be needed.
The question wasn’t structural vs physical, so much as it was about it being physically *impossible* for people to make said sound. In this dichotomy you’ve presented, if the physical reason can be overcome, then it’s “behavioural”.
@@SciGuys I think this is assuming that just because it's technically possible for you to produce a sound that you should be able to figure it out on your own as everyone else does, which I think is minimizing some of the potential issues.
Also, as someone with a bit of a speech impediment myself and who has seen a speech therapist at a young age, I think it's even more complicated than that. I've recently discovered that speech therapy for me only really made me replace one impediment for another less obvious one because it's physically very difficult for me to do the correct sound (though strictly speaking, not impossible)
Not at all - there's no implication that one should be able to figure it out alone. The question was about whether speech impediments were caused by a physical inability to make a sound, not just a physical limitation.
I think you're adding in more than was present in the conversation, based on what you assume my stance is. The point of the exchange was very simply: Are speech impediments caused by a physical impossibility in producing a specific sound? No, given that people can overcome speech impediments without surgical alteration, they're evidently not due to a sound being physically impossible.
That doesn't mean that a physical limitation can't be a root cause.
There are three of us in this episode. Two of us are in a relationship. Curious how you landed on us not knowing anything about gays...
We didn't even talk about speech therapists "correcting" a gay voice?
However, what you've described is pretty much exactly what was said in the episode... There is a physical difference leading to the most natural way of speaking producing an incorrect sound, speech therapy trains you to say the sound correctly by reinforcing the "unnatural" pronunciation.
Did you actually watch the episode before commenting?
idk idc I do tell people I'm gay to deal with homophobia at the office, since I'm a pretty big guy with a serial killer look
This was extremely interesting!!!
I am indeed gay and I’ve always been told I sound gay too lol that I “deepened” my voice and all that
I had speech therapy as a child for a lisp that was blamed on the placement of my front teeth (they do not meet cleanly, it was blamed on thumb sucking). I am also pansexual, and transmasc. Not too sure if I lisp nowadays much, but I do tend to have confusing vocal cues apparently, I've had my voice called... A little campy, but also a little like an older woman, but I also am reliably identified as a man by others everywhere except over the phone. I think it's a bit complicated because my exaggeration of expression is strongly affected by my autism, I can be quite flat or veer into deep overcompensating and end up lingering in sounds that feel particularly good. It seems to be reminiscent of "gay" and "girly" in some ways but from people's hesitant, thoughtful confusion when I've asked them to describe it, it doesn't come off enough like either of those things to actually put me in that box most of the time even when I do sound very different.
As far as code switching goes, I've seen a couple of bilingual folks who are extremely fluent in both their languages and can switch accents call it code switching, but I'm not sure if that has a distinct terminology. But one really good example was a comedian complaining about people giving him shit for pronouncing an English word with Japanese flow and syllables when speaking Japanese, and then giving a very striking example of how actually pronouncing those words in pure American English in the middle of the sentence completely buggered the flow.
I agonise a lot over whether I should pronounce certain loan words like "Mexico" with the English x or my best approximation of a more genuine version, it feels like there is not a non-annoying to someone way to pronounce that word 😭
it's so wild when people make comments on "that's not your real voice" for people who sound differently
like take LilyPichu or Corpse Husband
I remember people trying to use the fact that Lily saw a vocal coach (for voice acting) as a reason why her voice is "fake", or because she can talk in a lower voice it means that higher one is "fake"
when people can talk comfortably at a lot of different vocal states, and even IF these people had trained their voice so it was more natural for them to talk at those pitches it doesn't mean it's any faker
Yeah! It's weird seeing those types of comments because it's _really_ hard to keep up a voice for long when it doesn't feel natural or comfortable. And even if it isn't their natural voice (which... I really doubt it isn't, their voices are unique but not actually that weird, Idk why some people can't believe it), that doesn't mean it's fake, in the same way code switching doesn't mean you're fake
I'm a biromantic asexual NB, and I've been told that I sound a lot like Patrick Stump from fall out boy, especially when I sing (which I do a lot, because I'm obnoxious)
im trans and sometimes when im with people i trust i let loose and i have a slightly more flamboyant speaking tone. its not necesarily the pitch, its just the speech paterns are pretty much what youd expect, just without a bunch of "slay" and "yassss" tho
i also do death metal vocals so the positioning of the tongue relative to the teeth, spaces of resonance, and mouth shape are really important to all of that. i like applying what i learn here to the metal screaming so i dont damage my voice.
Pansexual genderqueer AFAB, got told by multiple people I talk like a stoner and I noticed my AMAB friends lower their voice when they imitate or do an impression of me 🤷🏽♀ but it might be my vibe rather than the timbre although my voice is contra-alto when I sing, which is basically soprano male lmao. Also with ADHD, when Im stressed or tired I’ll not enunciate as well and voice will drop even lower because it feels more comfortable.
Corrys scary man voice sounds hot so you know, when you said you wanna sound less intimidating around white women, just remember some of us might like it 😂
Also was literally thinking about Abigail Thorne and then you mentioned her!
It's hot from a screen but you wouldn't want to hear it if you're walking alone, especially at night, from any race of man.
I think a very stereotypical gay voice, like what Corry did when he was putting on a gay voice in this episode, seems to me to be mostly characterised by elongated vowels, especially at the ends of words. That's not something you talked about, but I think that's the most noticeable thing.
I'm straight but I had severe speech impediments growing up, as a result I over-annunciate my words and still have a bit of a lisp. My voice is very high. As a result a lot of gay men I have met throughout my life have told me they instantly picked me up on their "gaydar".
Also, what Corey said about his accent changing as he moved to England. My accent changed when I moved to Yorkshire, and I didn't even move that far. Where I moved from was only just outside Yorkshire, but my "natural" accent (the autistic accent, which I got from my dad) was within the range of normal there but within Yorkshire it sounds "posh" or "southern" so over time I developed something that was close enough to Yorkshire that I wasn't immediately singled out as different. I still get called "posh" sometimes but life is a lot easier.
not you doing something on the gay voice just when I decide to do my linguistic essay on that, THANK YOU
the way i see is that we subconsciously try to emulate who's around us to feel in, and, when you stop caring, we start getting our "true" voice out, being more expressive and melodic, but, in general, we're social monkeys that want to feel a part of a group, but if we stop caring and show our true selves, we'll find someone similar and we'll still emulate them and change voices in contexts, but it's less important than being yourself.
but, as said in the video, we have more than one way to communicate, words, tones, gestures, so, we try to change no matter how we feel, to get the emotion across, to get the right meaning out.
It's mostly based on wanting your identity to be related to publicly known concepts of what gay is, because for most young/ old teens who figure out their sexuality, are still at an age of figuring out their identity, and for most gay people who grew up, they tend to grow up in an environment where others are not fully accepting of homosexuality; obviously we have come a long way now compared to 20 years ago compared to 50 years ago and compared to 100 years ago etcetera etcetera.
Now to watch the video and see how wrong I am on the answer i came up with when I was in my early 20's that I''ve been carrying ever since.
As a bi girl, I can confirm I have a fruity voice and mannerisms - my friends say I'm "literally the gayest presenting person I've met" so take that as you will lol
I'm a cis gay guy and I don't have a gay voice" lol. My style gives off Charlie Spring Vibes (from Heartstopper) with my own touch to it lmao.
Im a bi ace guy, and I find it so funny that I go unnoticed on the gaydar so often, I'm into pretty "cis straight guy" things and I have a pretty nonchalant matter of fact voice so it's a double wammy
Pansexual, cis AMAB and I do not have the gay accent. I’ve known straight people who had the gay accent their entire lives too so I just have no idea how to explain it. Perhaps it comes from having been around more feminine people when growing uo
I know I did speech in school as a child during our reading out loud time. I would have to go out of the room and into the library with an older woman (there were a few and we called them the grandmas.) I didn't recognize it within myself at the time but apparently I had a lisp. As I got older I got too embarrassed getting pulled out of the class so I stopped going. I do notice from time to time that I have a bit of a lisp still with certain combinations of letters. For example even the word lisp sometimes comes out as listhhhhp it's like I get tongue tied feeling and I'm trying to correct it as it's happening. Another word is memorial. I end up stuttering a lot on the ms trying to get it to come out right. I didn't think about it until watching this episode but I do have a long tongue. Like I can touch my nose with it 🤷🏻
Edit: also for the question, I am afab (gnc, gq w/e u wanna call it. More masc presenting) and I like women 😄 there is also an idea in the lesbian community of a gay voice but the gay lady version. Which I think stems from not having to play up the femininity to attract men. So it'll come across as more "chill" which may come across to some as a masculine cadence or even sometimes pitch.
I always assumed the lisp thing was from some famous Hollywood person who was known as gay and had a lisp. And then it just spread in the same way any accent does.
a lot of people with lisps have a large tongue tie (the flap of skin under your tongue) that restricts movement of the tongue and so causes a lisp
I'm Gay and have been told I sound like a foreigner. And sometimes people ask if I'm gay.
I'm a queer trans guy with a lisp but I don't think I sound gay. For my first 4 or 5 years of school I was forced to do speech therapy to correct my lisp but it didn't help that much. Maybe just cause I didn't really understand why I was there since I was so young. Either way, nowadays I barely hear my lisp unless I really mess up, though my friends tell me it's quite noticeable :')
Thank you for talking about this! 😅
I’m not gay, but trans and hetero (at least, technically). I don’t think I *sound* queer (I’ve been on T for a hot minute), but I have had a number of people think I’m gay based purely on vibe before they know I’m trans 😅
What do you mean by “at least, technically”?
I think technically you are gay, because you are biologically in same sex relationships.
@@masterofreality230 No. Like just, no.
@@FireTurkey its called homosexual, not homogenderal.
@@masterofreality230 that’s a lot of assumptions about a person you don’t know and their relationship that you fit into one comment
I can speak normally when I hope my nose at first I can't but then somehow there is something that I can like change and it switches back to my normal voice I can do the same when humming and singing notes and make them sound the exact same and I don't know why
It's interesting what you say about your "on camera" voice. It mirrors what I call my "customer service voice". Significantly higher, more sing-song. I don't even know why I do it.
This topic is oddly relevant to me. So when I was a teen I had crossed my abusive father and his favorite way to attack my self esteem was to insist I was was gay on a regular basis. I do have a mild speech impediment due to being tongue tied and a voice range that is kind of in the middle of two different octaves (which can really be funny when singing certain songs because I will have to switch octaves in odd places to hit the right notes). Anyway I wouldn't say I am overly feminine but definitely not hyper masculine either. Occasionally I will have people who don't know me really ask me if I am gay, most often not out of interest but because of how I grew up I used to very much dislike the question from straight people and would respond somewhat hostilely to it. At one point in my early 20s I got sick of it to the point where I decided fuck it, I want to find out for sure so that I would have one less reason to be bothered by it. Nope, not attracted to men even if I get piss drunk at a gay bar lol. I don't know where I was going with this it just surprised me how relevant this one was to me. I'm surprised you guys never mentioned Snagglepuss when talking about gay voice stereotypes =P
Your dad was low key a bully. i almost want to whoop his ass on your behalf rn. he must have picked up on the fact that you are sensitive about it and decided to weaponize it.
i find it so strange that people stop and ask if you are gay but really nothing surprises me. but depending on who you meet this could spell danger.
i am an albino , adults that would tell me to my face that i remind them of those lab rats with red eyes , or a tape worms. and my favourite is the albino crocodile . People have been trampling over my self esteem for so long that i feel at times as if there ain't none of it left. the witchcraft jokes no longer scare me .
As a trans guy who doesn't really pass all the time, I have to code switch often in public depending on how someone perceives my appearance. If someone recognizes me as a guy, I'll lower my voice, but if they don't, I'll adopt my pre-transition feminine way of speaking, and it's not intentional at all. I wish I didn't do it, but at the same time, I live in a fairly conservative area, so I don't make an effort to stop it because it protects me. I also use a more feminine voice in any confrontation in order to sound more appeasing and, well, non-confrontational.
generally speaking, yes but specifically I'm pansexual. Do I sound gay? I have no idea.
corry rlly went Stupid Baby mode in this episode
He rickrolled us I can't believe!
This is by far the funniest episode !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!😂😂😂😂😂
so im pretransition ftm and i didnt realize i do the same thing Corey (is that how u spell ya name) does until it came up and it feels so validating somehow?? even though im actually not that tall and probably would lose an actual fight i dont even care in that moment when some stranger is being an arse to my friends at a party or smthn im like do not mess with me, leave, or else... and it works??
but i also do the "oh im so silly i dont know this or that please smart person help me" A LOT and i dont know how to feel about that one. its actually kinda sweet how helpful people get when i do that, regardless of gender but i didnt realize its because they see me as a child makes a ton of sense tho
He spells it "Corry".
54:21 I feel so called out (and I'm not even a woman)
I'm gay, and I don't know if I sound gay. I'm bi but very gay. mostly gay. uhhhh. men!
Trans gay guy, i don't know if i sound gay, though my voice is still a bit high.
Anyway, our voice differs also depending on which language we speak. For example, english has a lower frequency than french. So my voice is naturally a little lower when i speak english.
I don't know if I missed it, but mirror neurons and mimicking as fundamentals of social interaction seem like they would be a central concept on accent adoption/development (and are very interesting topics, in and outside of language, in general, I think :)
Also, the underlying information behind different ways of speaking throughout social interactions, plus what we individually pick up and mimic, and why, does seem like a very interesting topic to cover. I think it would be great to maybe bring a linguist in to discuss and inform a related convo (possibly bringing up internet comments/written interactions, and how it can relate to creator-audience relationships/online communities too?)
My question is how do I come out to everyone in my family about being transgender
This is probably my favorite episode so far, liguistics is really interesting
I used to have lisp (also: can we can up with a less mean word... liSp, rlly?)
I eventually traine myself out of it w shear willpower before going to highschool. Speachtherapy brought me nothing; my tongue wasnt lazy and weak. Yrs later my vocal coach remarked my tongue is big for my mouth so i learned a different technique to make certain sounds. There is soooo much stigma on lisping. That probably makes it harder because you start self muting and even cramp up before talking. Like stottering it is emotion related. Every aspect that withholds you from impulsively speaking, that forces you to think about how it might sounds is debilitating. And really impactfull on all your social interactions and therefor (self) image.
So yeah, less confronting word for lisp, pleazz
I find it fascinating you guys call the “flags” camp
But I believe the understanding of some of who you surround yourself with definitely affects your voice.
I’m young (31) but I very much experienced bullying when I was a teenager. It was that strange transition time here in America before things were more commonly accepted. I definitely surrounded myself with females, I couldn’t even help maybe talking like them sometimes.
I’m older now, surrounded by many fewer females, and also maybe just aging of my voice but I believe it’s much much harder for someone to tell if I’m gay.
I'm a woman and I have a fairly monotone voice, people think I'm rude or a bitch if I don't exaggerate my tone and expression to add more dynamics to it. It's tiring and annoying to have to do because of sexism. It's okay for a dude to speak without a lot of expression but not for me.
Ftm and bi, I absolutely have one and I love it haha. I mean all my friends all my life have been lgbt so it's all environmental lmao. I spoke this way before transition but more subdued just because I didn't feel free. I'm a nursing student and coming off the way I do really seems to ease my patient's anxiety because I'm a man. I become wayyy more 'gay' with patients. I've never said I'm lgbt but even women who don't like to have men care for them are happy to have me stay. I tend to prefer female spaces in general, I code switch massively between women, straight men and even gay men. I tend to be neutral towards non binary folks but it depends, im drawn to more feminine people generally.
@millyvinevinny6031 they literally explained in the video how that's a stereotype and that many other ls have the same way of speaking. I'm a bi male btw, not sure what you meant by that comment but if I'm getting your tone wrong let me know
I’m gay but my friend say I sound straight so when I say slay or something along those lines it’s really weird
im a trans guy and i try so hard to talk in a low smooth voice but everyone tells me i have a gay voice, my voice is usually in the e range but when i try to make it deeper its a d3 . my voice gives me so much dysphoria.
the trick is to be less expressive, and talk monotone if you have to. Talk like you don't really care about the conversation you're having, or have no interest in whats being said. Might seem weird, but this is how guys talk. You can begin to re-add emotion back into your speech over time once you've found a good baseline.
My question going into this was: Why do gay guys talk the way they often do?
I don't really feel like my question was answered but it was an interesting listen regardless! Thanks
I will give $100 dollars to the first person who can correctly count the amount of times Corry says “sort of” in this episode.
If I’m non-committal no one can complain that I’m wrong
I'm bisexual and most people assume I'm straight judging by my voice.
it seems like a kind of cycle, where people consider certain ways of speaking to be gay, so gay people are more likely to speak like that to signal to others that they're gay, then that re-enforces the idea that that's what gay people sound like. it's the same as how men and women speak how they do because that's how they were taught men and women speak, it being way more cultural than biological since apart from the adam's apple, none of how men/women speak is biologically determined
"I'm just a little guy"
LMAO me 😭😭😭
I’m lesbian so yk I don’t have a “gay voice“ since that’s more or a gay guy thing… but I very much do have a very different and much higher “customer service voice“…
For the question first one yes second one also sort of yes
I'm a chonky lil pan boi and nobody has ever guessed.