i am in the early stages of developing a character who is gay and has a lisp. the thing is, the idea to give him both these traits came independently from each other, and i only realized later that "gay guy with a lisp" is a stereotype iirc? should i avoid this even tho gay people with a lisp surely exist irl? he does not fall under other common stereotypes as far as i can tell, and there are other gay characters without a lisp in the story if that helps. would love to hear your thoughts
I think you’re fine. It may be a stereotype, but it is kind of a more common thing with LGBTQ+ folks for assorted social reasons. I know a lot of trans people for example who were put through speech therapy because they “lisped” or otherwise didn’t speak in the way that was expected of them, gender-wise. At least where I grew up, this is usually more implicit bias than anything overt. It’s not really something I think a lot of young children or speech therapists for them think about as something to necessarily intentionally eradicate because it’s ~too gay~ or whatever, they just perceive talking this way to be wrong. (Which sucks, because it’s still prioritizing a certain way of speech associated with cisheteronormativity.)
There’s a lot of general research on this sort of thing too. If you look up “gay lisp study” on google, there’s no shortage. Honestly I don’t trust all of those studies, but I do want to recommend the documentary, Do I Sound Gay (2015). (I saw it on Netflix shortly after it was released, I’m not sure if it’s still there.)
This is a tangent, but I also want to caution you about being mindful on how you write dialogue for people with lisps. I think it’s probably a good idea to check sensitivity for that as well. Things like stutters, speech impediments, etc, aren’t always written in a respectful way. I’m not comfortable advising on that here. I think @cripplecharacters might be able to help? Within the ScriptFam, there’s also @scriptspoonie but Tumblr has labelled their blog explicit for literally no reason and I’m not sure if they’re taking questions until that’s sorted.
- mod nat
