So already younger men in cities are the fastest walkers–perhaps gays just have an edge on that?” “The fastest walkers are men, younger people and people who live in urban areas. Psychologist Ian MacRae agrees that walking speed and style can be affected by either positive or negative emotions, but also says that gay men are statistically predisposed to walking fast.
“When the weather’s good and I’ve got my music, there’s nothing I love more than sashaying through the city like it’s my personal runway,” he says. “I lived in Sydney for 20 years and there were a lot of confident walkers in Oxford Street, one of Sydney's gay areas, as this was a ‘safe’ area for people.”ģ1 year-old Ben has never driven a car and strongly identifies with the fast-walking trope. If you feel safe somewhere, then you may feel like ‘strutting’, being more open and feeling more extroverted,” she explains. “It is all about the feeling of safety and security in the body. Though Phillips also says that feeling confident can increase walking speed. to create “gay walking lanes” because gay men supposedly walk so fast. On Twitter, one person writes: “Straight people, look behind you, chances are there's a gay person trying to get past because you're moving at an extremely glacial pace.” Others joke that gays can halve the journey time estimate on most travel apps, or suggest that gay men walk fast “to flee the straights” because “they learned to walk to the beat of ‘Womanizer’ by Britney Spears.” Bizarrely, there’s even a petition in the U.K. If “walking gay” really is a thing, it seems that many gay people perceive speed to be a part of that. In that sense, the new(ish) stereotype that “gay men walk fast” is no different. Both found the accuracy of these new tropes difficult to prove, but explored their complex and often contradictory origins. Earlier this year, Vice writer James Greig attempted to fact-check the “new gay stereotypes.” GQ writer Alim Kheraj also investigated the gay love of iced coffee. From “gays can’t drive” to “gays love iced coffee,” new ones seem to appear every day. Inevitably, gay people being active online (Twitter gays, I’m looking at you) has caused new stereotypes to emerge.
Yet today’s gay men aren’t as reliant on representations crafted by others, with social media helping to democratize storytelling by providing a platform for people to share their experiences. Historically, gay stereotypes have been even less kind.
To find out what else was gay, I looked to popular-culture, where I saw gay men mostly adhering to a fairly one-dimensional set of stereotypes: fashionable, witty, effeminate. Growing up, people would often tell me that I “walked gay.” I used to wonder how putting one foot in front of the other could seem gay, but I heard it so frequently that I accepted it as truth.