Do you sound gay? What our voic tell – and what they don’t | David Shariatmadari | The Guardian

Contents:

• ‘WHO SOUNDS GAY?’
• WHAT DO IT MEAN TO SOUND GAY?
• DO YOU SOUND GAY? WHAT OUR VOIC TELL – AND WHAT THEY DON’T

‘WHO SOUNDS GAY?’

Tle: Who Sounds “Gay“? Summary: This short documentary explor one theory of why some people sound stereotypilly “gay.

I’ve always wonred why some men sound gay and others don’t.

To me Kris sounds gay and Matt sounds straight. The cleart most lady-like gay one.

WHAT DO IT MEAN TO SOUND GAY?

And ’s not so much that a kid who is gog to be gay later life is gog to say I want to sound like a woman, so much as a kid is intifyg here is a particular speaker, and here is a particular of that person’s speech that ptur what I fd so engagg about them and I’m gog to emulate that.

People want gay men to be like women and maybe they picked up on the fact that many of the characteristics of gay- soundg voic are feme characteristics but they’ve got all wrong. Bee a lot of those gay-soundg voic are om straight guys. I knew I was gay when I was like 11.

Do I have a gay voice? The big problem i have is when people assume I’m not [gay] and then I’m anx are they gog to say somethg stupid? In the end, if someone thks I’m gay, then they’re wrong...

DO YOU SOUND GAY? WHAT OUR VOIC TELL – AND WHAT THEY DON’T

Me was a voice everyone was faiar wh, and they knew what signified: That I was gay. Virtually every parody—malic or otherwise—of gay men clus a nasal, lispg, high-pched vol timbre. Do I Sound Gay?, a documentary by filmmaker David Thorpe openg this week at IFC, prob the history, science, and cultural signifince of the gay male voice.

The film is stctured around his personal qut to get rid of his “gay voice”—recently sgle and middle-aged, David Thorpe began to fd his voice a source of anxiety, worryg turned off potential lovers—which grounds what uld otherwise have been a disparate web of amic theori and talkg heads. That spurred him to look more systematilly at the gay voice self; eventually he realized he’d found somethg signifint to say about the subject, a talogue of people reflectg about the history, prevalence, signifince, and science of the voice ’s clear om his enthiasm and breadth of knowledge that Thorpe, a wrer wh an quisive personaly and a voice I found entirely pleasant, has enough material for a whole seri on the subject. ” In the film, Thorpe nsults a speech therapist, a voice ach, several lguists and anthropologists, a film historian, gay actors, and famo queer celebri cludg David Sedaris, Dan Savage, Tim Gunn, Don Lemon, Gee Takei, and Margaret Cho.

In one sequence, he recreat a tra r full of boistero gay men bound for Fire Island: They wear lorful beach stum and talk non-stop about fashn, their mothers, chai tea, and what happened at the club last night.