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Particularly within North American English, gay male speech has been the focus of numerous modern stereotypes, as well as sociolinguistic studies. Historically it was a stigmatized variety and its usage, even among its speakers, may be coded to a limited number of settings outside of the workplace and many public spaces. Scientific research has uncovered phonetically significant features produced by many gay men and demonstrated that listeners accurately guess speakers' sexual orientation at rates greater than chance. One feature of the speech is sometimes known as the "gay lisp", though researchers acknowledge that it is not technically a lisp. Research does not support the notion that gay speech entirely adopts feminine speech characteristics – rather, that it selectively adopts some of those features. Gay speech characteristics appear to be learned ways of speaking, like many aspects of language, although their origins and process of adoption by men remain unclear.
There are similarities between gay male speech and the speech of other members within the LGBTQ+ community. Drag queen speech is also a topic of research and, while some drag queens may also identify as gay men, a description of their speech styles may not be so binary. Like with other marginalized communities, speech codes can be deeply tied to local, intimate communities to not deny the widespread influence of media depicting gay and trans personas in the vein of RuPaul's Drag Race.