Come now. Regardless of the rest of this issue, surely you understand what the poster meant by that?
I don't know what an "obvious gay accent" sounds like in Australia or Italy, but I sure know what one sounds like here in the USA.
My wife and I had a hilarious moment a few years back. We were vacationing on Cape Cod in Massachusetts and took a day trip to one of the most well known homosexual enclaves in the northeast US, Provincetown.
We were having breakfast in a cafe, and were looking at these two guys at a nearby table. Seeing two guys together in Provincetown is pretty much a dead giveaway, but...as they spoke with each other, they didn't "sound" homosexual due to the complete lack of the "obvious gay accent". As my wife and I played the "are they or aren't they" game, the door opened and a guy walked in and went over to their table.
As if someone had flipped a switch, the voice patterns, intonations and inflections of the two guys changed immediately to an "obvious gay accent".
We nearly fell out of our chairs. It was both illustrative and funny.
In any case, perhaps it isn't as obvious to Aussies, but the "obvious gay accent" is pretty much a well understood phenomenon here. Doesn't mean all men who have it are homosexuals, and it doesn't mean those who don't have it are straight, but it is there.
> Come now. Regardless of the rest of this issue, surely you understand what the poster meant by that?
Nope. There is no such thing as an “obvious gay accent”. Not even in America. It is a figment of television’s overheated imagination.
> Doesn’t mean all men who have it are homosexuals, and it doesn’t mean those who don’t have it are straight, but it is there.
There is an accent that occurs “in the wild” near Portland Oregon. People from that part of the world all talk in the manner you describe, complete with camp lisps and inflections: most of them are straight. When you hear it, it sounds funny and it is easy to draw conclusions, and it is even easier to be wrong in those conclusions.
So not only is there no such thing as an “obvious gay accent”, but what sounds like one is actually a regional accent that applies to both gays and straights — which makes accent an unreliable indicator at best.