The belief that there are systematic differences in speech production as a function of sexual orientation has inspired a vast body of linguistic research investigating the acoustic correlates of sounding queer. Although gay-sounding voices and to a lesser extent lesbian-sounding voices are well represented in this literature, bisexuality is conspicuously absent. The current study addresses this gap through an acoustic analysis of bisexual English speakers’ read speech vis-à-vis lesbian, gay, and straight speakers, specifically attending to three measures of the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/: center of gravity, skew, and duration. A qualitative analysis of post-test participant information surveys contextualizes the statistical results. The study finds that bisexual women and men do not pattern consistently with lesbian, gay, or straight speakers, or even with each other. The results call into question the common methodological practice of grouping bisexual speakers with lesbian and gay speakers a priori and underscore the importance of intersectionality, gender normativity, and ideology in sociophonetic studies of sexuality and the voice.

The ideology of “the gay lisp” has inspired numerous quantitative studies examining the relationship between /s/ production and sexuality in American English (e.g. Linville 1998; Munson et al. 2006a; Zimman 2013). There are two key gaps in this literature. First, research in this area typically focuses on monosexual (i.e. lesbian, gay, and straight) speakers to the exclusion of bisexuality. Second, work in this area rarely considers the intersection of sexuality with factors outside of gender or sex, and to a lesser extent geographic location (e.g. Campbell-Kibler 2011; Podesva & Hofwegen 2014). This article addresses these disparities by (1) centralizing bisexual speakers and (2) attending to social factors such as race, place, age, and their intersections in the analysis. To that end, we build upon previous work by Willis (forthcoming) and apply a random forest (Breiman 2001) to /s/ center of gravity measurements. In doing so, we follow Tagliamonte and Baayen (2012) in demonstrating the utility of random forests as an approach to quantitative sociolinguistic analysis. Ultimately, the analysis underscores the need to attend to power structures and biases within research practice: the monosexist ideologies of sexuality and gender normativity that obfuscate bisexuality, and the privileging of whiteness that permeates quantitative studies of sexuality and the voice.

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