Years ago, I blogged about the Fannish accent — the pronunciation commonalities among sicence fiction fans, which seemingly predate their involvement in fandom (IOW, people are fans because they have the accent, not accented because they're fans). Now there's some research indicating the existence of a gay/lesbian/bisexual accent, too.
Vowel production in gay, lesbian, bisexual (GLB), and heterosexual speakers was examined. Differences in the acoustic characteristics of vowels were found as a function of sexual orientation. Lesbian and bisexual women produced less fronted /u/ and /[open aye]/ than heterosexual women. Gay men produced a more expanded vowel space than heterosexual men. However, the vowels of GLB speakers were not generally shifted toward vowel patterns typical of the opposite sex. These results are inconsistent with the conjecture that innate biological factors have a broadly feminizing influence on the speech of gay men and a broadly masculinizing influence on the speech of lesbian/bisexual women. They are consistent with the idea that innate biological factors influence GLB speech patterns indirectly by causing selective adoption of certain speech patterns characteristic of the opposite sex.
(via Plastic Bag)
Update: Dana sez: "Bailey is the author of a book titled _The Man Who Would Be Queen_,
about transsexuals. Aside from the fact that he was sleeping with
some of his research subjects (usually considered a bit of a conflict
of interest), the guy has some rather… prejudiced ideas about gender
and sexuality. He seems to be associated with a group called the
Human Biodiversity Institute — which sounds reasonable enough, until
you find out it's a group of right-wing Eugenicists who argue for
things like a 'gay germ' and support the guy who wrote _The Bell
Curve_, which 'proved' that blacks are dumber than whites.
"There's an enormous clearinghouse of info about Bailey, the problems
with his general theories, and the formal research misconduct (sex for
SRS recommendation letters, frex) and ethics violation charges
(practicing clinical psychology without a license) which are being
investigated as I type."
