Particularly within North American English, gay male speech has been the focus of numerous modern stereotypes, as well as sociolinguistic studies. 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. Historically, gay male speech characteristics have been highly stigmatized and their usage may be sometimes coded to a limited number of settings outside of the workplace or other public spaces. 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 (rather than innate) ways of speaking, like many aspects of language, though their origins and process of adoption by men remain unclear. One particularly relevant feature is sometimes known as the gay lisp, though researchers confirm that it is not technically a lisp. There are similarities between gay male speech and the speech of other members within the LGBTQ+ community. Features of lesbian speech have also been confirmed in the 21st century, though they are far less socially noticed than features of gay male speech. Drag queen speech is a further 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 (gay versus straight). Like with other marginalized communities, speech codes can be deeply tied to local, intimate communities and/or subcultures. North American English Linguists have attempted to isolate exactly what makes gay men's English distinct from that of other demographics since the early 20th century, typically by contrasting it with straight male speech or comparing it to female speech. In older work, speech pathologists often focused on high pitch among men, in its resemblance to women, as a defect. Since the gay community consists of many smaller subcultures, gay male speech does not uniformly fall under a single homogeneous category. Gay "lisp" What is sometimes colloquially described as a gay "lisp" is one manner of speech associated with gay speakers of North American English, and perhaps other dialects or languages. It involves a marked pronunciation of sibilant consonants (particularly and ). Speech scientist Benjamin Munson and his colleagues have argued that this is not a mis-articulated (and therefore, not technically a lisp) as much as a hyper-articulated . Specifically, gay men are documented as pronouncing with