Sounding Gay: Pitch Properties in the Speech of Gay and Straight Men

Abstract

\M ANY GAY, LESBIAN, AND BISEXUAL PEOPLE can recall the pre-coming-out experience of rifling through dictionaries, encyclopedias, and textbook indexes, nervously seeking any reference at all that might have something to do with our incipient sexualities. We pored over terse, clinical definitions of homosexuality and sodomy as if we'd found forbidden fruit. We watched television and movies and waited for those rare appearances of swishy fags and heartless dykes, never letting on how closely we were paying attention to the ways these stereotyped characters looked, acted, dressed, and talked. To see even these negative, damning treatments of queer folk' helped us feel that we were not alone, that even if we were different, abnormal, or immoral, there were more of us in the world than our parents and teachers knew or told us about. When we came out, we began to discover the actual, rich diversity of our communities. Those of us fortunate enough to have received higher educations now find ourselves in institutions where terms like gay history and lesbian literature are almost commonplace. In linguistics, however, we have barely left the earlier days of enforced invisibility and negative stereotypes. If one were to take sociolinguistic literature as actually representing