The Gay Walk. Or: How music affects the way you walk

November 14, 2024

Why not listen to some music whilst reading this post?

Grace After a Party

by jemima coulter

Sometimes people tell me that the way I walk looks gay, and at first I didn't think much of it, but people kept telling me. So I had to do the only reasonable thing: investigate.

Gay Walk

As we are currently living in the 21st century, the first step of my journey of figuring out the gay walk, was asking ✨ the internet ✨.

And in fact, my friends are not the only ones obsessed with ✨ the Gay Walk ✨

Apparently this is a whole meme thing. Someone even beat me in writing this blog post 😲. "Why Do Gay Men Walk So Fast?" published on 19. June 2019 by Louis Staples ¹ looks into reasons why gay people might walk faster.

“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.”
person on Twitter

Staples suggests that gay men often live in urban areas, where walking is the default/preferred travel method. Additionally, it could also be used to avoid homophobic situations. Staples also considers it a visual cue, and you know what? I think there might be proof.

Arguably, not all gay people show visual cues, and I don't think that all gays do this on purpose, however I think most of us have seen someone and gone: They look gay 🌸. Someone even conducted a study, analyzing visual cues of gay men. ² The study found that casual observers seem to be able to read cues of gay men better, than cues of lesbian women.

[..] [W]e've found that casual observers can use gait and body shape to judge whether a stranger is gay or straight with a small but perceptible amount of accuracy.

To do this, participants were asked to walk on a treadmill for two minutes while wearing a motion capture suit. This allowed researchers to track shoulder and hip movement, and revealed that gay participants tend to have more gender incongruent body types and body motion.

Interestingly, the casual observers were much more accurate in judging the orientation of males than females; they correctly categorized the sexual orientation of men with more than 60 percent accuracy, but their categorization of women did not [exceed chance].

It should be noted that this study was conducted in 2007. And maybe not as many people were confident being "out" in public, which could be why most of the people who participated in the study were more extravagant in how they presented themselves. You obviously don't have to dress differently to be valid.

I had a lot of fun, looking at gay walk studies; however, I feel like I'm way too non-binary 🍂 and aro-ace-spec. Basically, what I'm saying is that there has to be a better explanation.

How music affects the way you walk

Over time, I noticed that my walking speed varies a lot between walks. Obviously, I walk slower when I'm around my friends, no matter their gender. But some days I'm walking faster and other days slower, and sometimes other people overtake me…

Before we continue, we have to take a look at the way I listen to music: I normally choose an album depending on the mood I'm in, or the weather. Additionally, I listen to the album from beginning to end, as it kind of pleases my brain. With some albums, I also queue a specific album after it, as my brain expects a certain melody once the first album finishes.

Unless my Bluetooth headphones are dead, I'm always listening to music when walking from point A to point B. A couple of months ago, I noticed that I fall in line with the tempo of the music I'm listening to. This is actually what got me to write this post, as I wanted to know if and how music might relate to the way you walk or improve your mood in general. \ I'm not a psychologist, but luckily for me, other people are, and these people have conducted some fascinating studies.

Mood & Music

Firstly, let's focus on how music might affect your mood and sense of security.

In 2022, a researcher published a paper on the effect of music on stress and safety when walking at night. The experiment consisted of 178 female students, of whom 78 listened to prerecorded instrumental music. After they finished walking across campus, they were asked to rate their experience. \ The study found significant correlations of perceived safety or satisfaction with nighttime walking, with the perception of the environment. Additionally, the study found, that participants who found the music helpful to feel safer during the walk, also perceived the environment as more secure.

Lastly, there was a significant correlation between satisfaction with the music and feelings of safety […]. This indicates that participants who were more satisfied with the music perceived their nighttime walk as safer.

To be honest, I'm not really sure how representative this study is, as all participants were female and from the same university. Additionally, they are probably somewhat used to walking around campus, which means that they were already calmer, than when walking somewhere unknown, like a somewhat remote area of the city. However, I do think that walking around on campus at night can be scary - heck, I feel like, walking around in our garden after dark is scary.

Depending on how music is perceived, the perceived benefits of music may vary.

Besides increasing your sense of safety, music can also create a better sense of wellbeing, as found in a 2015 study ³. The study consisted of three exercise sessions:

Sample screening and familiarization
incremental test to exhaustion to determine physiological variables
a 30-minute walk on a treadmill at a self-selected pace

The researchers found that music improved fatigue tolerance, when walking at a self-selected pace, which they attribute to fast music temporarily distracting the person, and diverting the attention away from the sensation related to fatigue. Additionally, they found that faster music promoted greater performance at the end of the walk. With music overall improving the sense of wellbeing, whilst performing an activity.

Effect on walking speed

So far, we have looked at how music might affect you mentally. But studies also found a correlation between music and walking speed.

A 2007 study, called "Walking on music" ⁴ had participants synchronize their walking speed with the tempo of the music and, in a separate experiment, with the tempo of a metronome stimulus. By looking at the speed measurements, they found that people walk faster when listening to music, than when walking to the metronome stimuli.

This is further illustrated by a 2014 study, ⁵ analyzing walking patterns along a route, with and without music. The researchers found that both, people, who walked slower without music and people who walked faster without music, walked (even) faster when listening to music. With the speed gap being significantly larger for people walking slower without music. These results indicate that listening to music while walking, increases motivation, causing the subjects to take longer steps. Because the speed difference wasn't significantly larger for the group, who already walked fast without music, the researchers concluded, that they were limited by physical constraints. As they could not take longer steps without it becoming unpleasant.