“Sounding Gay: Pitch Properties in the Speech of Gay and Straight Men,” Rudolf P. Gaudio, American Speech, vol. 69, no. 1, Spring 1994, pp. 30–57 (http://dx.doi.org/
10.2307/455948). (Thanks to Elmore Todman for bringing this to our attention.) The author, at Stanford University, explains:The fact that listeners fairly consistently judged speech as sounding either “gay” and “effeminate” or “straight” and “masculine” points to a need for sociolinguists to investigate the cultural sources of these judgments, not only in the area of pitch and intonation, but also in other phonological domains, such as the pronunciation of sibilants, duration of vowels, the use of standard versus nonstandard phonological forms, and voice quality.
(That’s an except from the article “Sounding Gay,” Published in AIR 13:4.)