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.