The gays are asking: Why do straight people walk so slowly?

Has this ever happened to you? You’re strutting down the sidewalk, pumping to the beat of a song blasting in your earbuds, when boom — a slow walker is blocking your path. A cursory investigation confirms your worst fears: it’s a straight person.

It may be a stereotype, but it’s one based in truth: the gays walk fast, no two ways about it. Why, though, are the walking speeds of gays and straights so disparate? One Redditor was determined to get to the bottom of things, so they asked their fellow gays for their input.

“Why can’t straight people walk at a reasonable pace of 25mph like we do?” they asked in their post. “It’s so annoying when I’m on cruise control while walking then I have [to] slam on my brakes because some str8 is walking in the middle of the street at 1mile/day.”

First things first, do people agree that queer folks walk faster than their straight counterparts? A slew of anecdotal evidence says yes.

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“Just a couple months ago I was shopping with my girlies and one of them commented ‘slow down — you started walking a lot faster after you came out,’” shared one commenter.

“My straight friends came and visited me while I was living overseas. I was so excited to show them around,” another wrote. “Problem was, I kept losing them like three blocks behind and they weren’t equipped to negotiate the culture on their own. Ya gotta love ’em. They’re like adorable sloths.”

“I’m in a union and we are on strike right now. I constantly lap my coworkers,” added a third. “I do share the fact that some gays just walk faster to those keeping up with me.”

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But those stories don’t get to the cause of the discrepancy. Several commenters had their own theories: “Straight people have a mutation in a specific gene, and the mutation affects their walking speed and their fashion sense,” posited one user.

“Straight people don’t have six Grindr hookups scheduled on a single day,” theorized another.

“Gays walk fast because we spent time in the closet and now we’re trying to catch up on lost time,” proposed a third.

Another commenter had a few working hypotheses: “Don’t listen [to] all of these liars,” they wrote. “The real reason that straight people walk so slowly is because they are not part of our agenda. You must walk fast when you are trying to take over the world… Be gay, do crime, overthrow the government, and walk fast.”

“But if you really want to know the actual answer it’s because straight people do not have ‘A Thousand Miles’ by Vanessa Carlton playing on repeat in their head 24/7 365,” they continued. “After all I’m making my way downtown walking fast faces past and I’m home bound!”

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One commenter met the question with sincerity. “It’s because they’ve never experienced the kind of dread that comes from ‘walking home from school while a gay middle school kid whose closet door is glass,’” they wrote. “Going into hyperspace along a poorly traveled route was the best defense I had, learned that really quickly.”

Those theories are all solid, but to come to any real conclusion, we’ll need a properly conducted study. Somebody call Pew!