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Miss Poubelle has from time to time mentioned the enduring mystery of the "gay voice" in this column. How is it that we can often tell the sexuality of another person by listening to them talk? A first guess might be that gay men use different words that give them away.

But that can't be all of the story. The linguist Rudy Gaudio published a paper in 1994 wherein he reported on an experiment that he had conducted. Four gay men and four straight men read the same passage from an accounting textbook. The samples were then played back to college students who were then asked to guess the sexuality of the readers. Astonishingly, they were able to guess correctly seven out of eight times. And since the passage that the men read was identical, nothing about the vocabulary can be serving as the signal.

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hen Gaudio looked at the audio recordings, however, he couldn't find anything in the sounds that distinguished the two samples-- not the pitch of the voice, nor the range of the pitch. Clearly the subjects in the experiment can hear something in the signal, but linguists haven't figured out what that something is. Other experiments have confirmed that listeners have high rates of accuracy in judging sexual orientation from the voice.

Research along these lines continues, but the mystery only deepens. The latest effort that Blanche has seen is by Erez Levon, from New York University (published last year in American Speech.) Levon investigated, among other things, a factor known as sibilant length, which is approximately the same thing as a swishy lisp.

Sibilants are hissing sounds like s, z, and sh. Other researchers had investigated the possibility that gay men hold these consonants longer than straight men do. The stereotypical gay lisp doesn't involve substituting th for s, but holding s and similar sounds longer than in ordinary speech. So a typical faggy stereotype of speech would be a phrase like Ssso sssweet. (Linguists use software that can measure sibilant length from a recording.)

Levon conducted an ingenious way to test the idea that sibilant length was influential in judgments of sexuality. He recorded one speaker reading a passage and tested listener's perceptions of the speaker's masculinity, sexuality, and other character traits. This subject was apparently extremely nelly, because all the listeners judged the voice as quite effeminate and gay. Miss Thing also had long, swishy s sounds.

Then Levon went into the sound recording and manipulated it to shorten all the sibilants. He played the altered recordings to various listeners and found that they still judged the speaker as extremely effeminate and gay. So shortening the stereotypical lisp didn't change the perceptions of the listener.

Levon also tried manipulating the sound recording to lower the voice and found that had no effect either. Nor did simultaneously shortening the sibilants and lowering the voice. Apparently a husky, short-s'd queen still sounds like a queen.

Levon's experiment was carefully thought out and rigorously tested. The fact that manipulating sibilant length and pitch had no effect on the judgments seems to show that they are not the essential cues in a gay voice. Something else in the signal is still letting the listeners pick up on the orientation.

So that leaves the original question intact. How is it that we can judge another's sexual orientation by hearing their voice? There are clearly some complicated things going on at a subconscious level when we hear another person speak, complicated enough that hard-working scientists haven't yet been able to figure out what information the brain uses when it makes these judgments.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, talks about what he calls "rapid cognition"-- the way that the brain can almost instantaneously tell us if another person is dangerous, sexually available, mentally alert, or physically well. It's not that we are always right, but we are right so often about people and situations that these mental abilities seem almost magical. In the same way, the brain in some mysterious way can guess sexual orientation from a few minutes of listening to a person's voice. Maybe some day the linguists will be able to figure out how people do this.

Blanche doesn't believe that voice-based gaydar involves some sort of extra sensory perception-- it's got to be something that the ear can hear. But this is another area where our biological abilities outpace scientific explanations. Over millions of years of hominid evolution, we've acquired a formidable ability to process and interpret visual and auditory cues to come to conclusions about other people and the world around us. It will doubtless take many more generations of scientific investigation before we clearly understand how the mind does what it does.