Michael Schulman on “Do I Sound Gay?,” a documentary by David Thorpe that explor how vol nc are associated wh sexualy.
Contents:
- GAY VOICE: STABLE MARKER OF SEXUAL ORIENTATN OR FLEXIBLE COMMUNITN DEVICE?
- TOAST FROM THE CLICK HERE FOR MORE MANCHTER GAY VOICE-OVER
- IS THERE A “GAY VOICE”?
- THE SOLUTN TO "GAY" INSULTS: FREEDOM OF SPEECH
GAY VOICE: STABLE MARKER OF SEXUAL ORIENTATN OR FLEXIBLE COMMUNITN DEVICE?
Listeners rely on vol featur when gusg others' sexual orientatn. What is ls clear is whether speakers modulate their voice to emphasize or to nceal their sexual orientatn. We hypothized that gay dividuals adapt their voic to the social ntext, eher emphasizg or disguisg … * toast gay voice over *
As much as he hat them, that's nothg pared to the rage he feels towards his actg rival and arch-nemis Ray "Bloody" Purchase, a rampant homophobe whose wife Toast is havg an affair wh. In Study 1 (n = 20 speakers, n = 383 Italian listeners and n = 373 Brish listeners), g a simulated nversatn paradigm, we found that gay speakers modulated their voic pendg on the terlocutor, soundg more gay when speakg to a person wh whom they have had an easy (vs. Combg experimental and archival methods, this rearch suggts that gay speakers modulate their voic flexibly pendg on their relatn wh the terlocutor and as a nsequence of their public g out.
You”reports which uld e zynga datg for s etiquette is onle your own you”relatns Exactly what, the particular nowadays generatn to get gog affairs si the nigeria cyou”rease gay perd gay los gimnass, snapchat als you”relatnships applitn. ”“We lerally had to hire guards to protect our liv, bee the people were so hurt and angry wh , ” he said at the time, bee “Christian people” felt the pany’s gay datg se was “a vlatn to scripture.
”“This eHarmony ad brawash children and adults by sensizg them and nvcg them that homosexualy is natural, ” a statement on the One Milln Moms webse reads, “when realy is an unnatural love that is forbidn by Scripture jt like love rooted adultery is forbidn. Gay adolcents, Thorpe pots out, often learn that the “tell” of their sexualy is their voic, even more so than physily—a limp wrist is easier to straighten out than an flectn. This phenomenon is generally referred to as “gaydar” and fed as the abily to distguish another person’s sexual orientatn g direct cu (Valentova, Rieger, Havlicek, Lsenmeier, & Bailey, 2011).
TOAST FROM THE CLICK HERE FOR MORE MANCHTER GAY VOICE-OVER
The Unspeakable Play: Directed by Michael Cummg. Wh Matt Berry, Robert Bathurst, Fna Mollison, Harry Peack. Pilloried by the public after appearg a ntroversial Wt End play, actor Steven Toast is recently-divorced and livg wh his iend Ed Howzer-Black and Ed's elrly mistrs Goodhoe, an agoraphobic who has not left the hoe two years for fear of a lol flasher. He would move to the club where his shell-shocked ex-soldier brother Blair liv but Ray Purchase, a rival actor who ught Toast bed wh his wife, prevents . Toast dns to play a gay tective 'Summer Time Murrs' but has to dn prison sce the producer Cliff Promise has been sent down for racial chantg and the dn leads to a rt. After a long-wd voice-over ssn, Toast returns home to watch 'Crimewave' on TV and fds that Purchase, who also works as a police artist, has ed his face the Intik picture of the flasher." data-id="ma * toast gay voice over *
Wh this bate, Vasilovsky (2018) cricized gaydar rearch for nceptualizg sexual orientatn cu mostly as “static” and “nate” rather than as “dynamic” munitn addrs this cricism, we foc here on a cue that may have some relatively stable featur, but that is also known to be open to modulatn, namely voice. We will exame whether voice is a fixed enty and whether gay and straight speakers modulate their voic strategilly or spontaneoly le wh their munitive tent and wh the social ntext, so as to eher emphasize or mimize their sexual orientatn.
When judged on the basis of voice alone, gay speakers are generally perceived as (relatively) ls heterosexual than straight speakers, but they still tend to be systematilly misclassified as heterosexual, suggtg that heterosexualy is the flt rponse (Smyth et al., 2003; Sulpiz et al., 2015, 2020; see Lick & Johnson, 2016, for this straight tegorizatn bias) lerature has also examed the actual atic cu that distguish gay and straight speech styl.
Regardls of their sexual orientatn, speakers wh ontal lispg tend to be rated lower on masculy (Mowrer, Wahl, & Doolan, 1978) and are more likely to be perceived as gay (Van Borsel & Van Putte, 2014).
IS THERE A “GAY VOICE”?
* toast gay voice over *
Pch is associated wh explic gay speech stereotyp (Kachel et al., 2018a), but often is not predictive of the perceived sexual orientatn of specific speakers (Gd, 1994; Smyth et al., 2003). Overall, the lerature nfirms that some voice characteristics are stereotypilly associated wh homosexualy and/or femy/masculy (see Kachel, Simpson, & Steffens, 2017; Kachel et al., 2018b) and that listeners are not only fluenced by actual atic differenc but also rely on stereotypil cu when formg an imprsn of the speaker (Munson, Crocker, Pierrehumbert, Owen-Anrson, & Zucker, 2015) few exceptns, rearch on dory gaydar has nceptualized gay and straight voice as a relatively stable characteristic of the speaker and, hence, has foced on habual ways of speakg. Rearch on sexual orientatn modulatn (Ambady & Hallahan, 2002; Sylva, Rieger, Lsenmeier, & Bailey, 2010) has shown that gay dividuals are able to exaggerate and partially nceal their sexualy, pecially if they are not a gnively mandg suatn (Sylva et al., 2010).
This creat a social vacuum which gay and straight speakers produce voice sampl that do not allow ntext- and dience-specific variatns speech styl as they occur real-life nversatnal settgs (Posva, 2007). Th, prr rearch has foced on variatn between rather than wh speakers, although there are a few notable has been suggted that gay speakers may specifilly mimize or emphasize the stereotypil atic cu scribed above to nceal or signal their sexual orientatn (Kachel et al., 2018a; Zwicky, 1997; see also Zimman, 2013). Crist (1997) observed a systematic lengtheng of (some) onset nsonants when four gay and two straight speakers were asked to read a text a “queeny” (flamboyantly effemate), rather than an “ordary, ” voice, suggtg that both straight and gay men were able to modify their voic.
However, a sgle se study by Posva (2007) volvg one gay speaker, there was remarkable speech variatn across three suatns (an rmal enunter wh iends, a phone nversatn wh the father, a profsnal teractn wh a patient). The only exceptn to this is reprented by a study showg that gay men dislikg the ia of soundg gay avoid engagg gay stereotypil speech and, th, were ually perceived as heterosexual (Mann, 2012) is some evince that gay dividuals may, to some gree, be able to nceal their sexual orientatn, but only when talkg about general topics (Sylva et al., 2010). Th, remas to be seen whether gay speakers modulate their voic pendg on ntext and terlocutor and whether such voice modulatn is succsful exprsg or ncealg sexual and Overview of RearchIn le wh the ia that voice signals social tegory membership (Posva & Callier, 2015), our voice sexual orientatn modulatn hypothis poss that speakers flexibly adopt stereotypilly gay/lbian vs.
THE SOLUTN TO "GAY" INSULTS: FREEDOM OF SPEECH
Therefore, sexual inty management is expected to be ls cril for straight tt the above hypoth, we vtigated, two studi, whether gay dividuals would spontaneoly modulate their voic. In this se, we examed voice modulatn a non-experimental settg and across 1: Voice Modulatn as a Functn of Interactn PartnerStudy 1 tted whether gay dividuals modulate their voic terpersonal munitns. G., through the media), gay dividuals generally do not experience a sgle g out, but tend to e out to different people at different tim (Beals & Pepl, 2006; Heathergton & Lavner, 2008).
As a nsequence, speech styl signalg a gay tegory membership should maly be adopted wh people who are aware of the speaker’s sexual orientatn and who had reacted posively to their g out (Lville, 1998; Munson & Babel, 2007), but gay speakers may mimic straight speech styl wh unaware or unacceptg teractn vtigate whether gay speakers spontaneoly modulate their voic to reveal or disguise their sexual orientatn, we nducted a simulated nversatn study which gay men imaged talkg to terlocutors wh whom they had e out easily, wh difficulty, or had not me out at all.