Stereotyping on Gay Speech: Do Gays Sound Gay?
You know we are getting places of gay liberation when the media is discussing how we speak. Why? First because someone in the spotlight who happens to be gay brought it up. Secondly, now that the media is more comfortable with us and hopefully we are generally speaking also more comfortable with ourselves, that at least in the West, we are seeing results from our fight for equal rights civilly and humanly speaking.
After reading Time and other publications I decided to print The New Yorker because it was the best written and it had humor since talking about high tones and ’S’ tones is funny; but also because we have mature to the point we can look at ourselves with a critical and funny ways. I think that is a good thing. Since chances are you wont be able to read all the media stories, I brought you this one and that you read it in the way it was intended; In a light hearted way and also looking inside of us and discovering how some of us are different from straights and some are not.
The filmmaker David Thorpe has a warm, woolly speaking voice with a bit of a lilt. It’s a little floaty on the cadences, a little strong on the “S”s. You know what I’m getting at? He sounds gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Or is there? Not long after Thorpe broke up with his boyfriend, he began thinking about the way he speaks, and the way other gay men speak, and why both suddenly bothered him so much. When he listened to himself, he felt “out of synch” with his own voice. On a train to Fire Island, he was repelled by the chattering men around him, who sounded like “a bunch of braying ninnies.”
This is how he describes the moment in his documentary “Do I Sound Gay?,” which opens this weekend at the IFC Center. The subject sounds slight, but Thorpe digs surprisingly deep, asking questions about stereotypes and self-loathing that are seldom asked. (Try saying that last sentence out loud with a lisp.) Putting himself on camera, Thorpe visits a speech therapist who points out his “upspeak,” his “nasality,” and his “singsong pattern.” He talks to a linguistics professor, a film historian, and a Hollywood voice coach who trains actors to sound straighter. He interviews gay public figures, including David Sedaris, Tim Gunn, Don Lemon, and George Takei, who have had to listen to themselves for a living. He even asks people on the street if they think he sounds gay. “I woulda just maybe lumped you in with the artsy-fartsy,” one woman tells him.
The subject turns out to be a minefield, because what’s more connected to personality than the way we speak? Gay adolescents, Thorpe points out, often learn that the “tell” of their sexuality is their voices, even more so than physicality—a limp wrist is easier to straighten out than an inflection. The world’s homophobia becomes internalized homophobia. Even within the gay dating community (and in gay porn), hyper-masculinity is habitually prized, so self-disgust gets easily turned back outward. The pop-culture roots run deep, from the aristocratic pansies of the pre-Hays Code cinema through wink-wink camp figures like Paul Lynde and Liberace, up through the effete Disney villains of “Aladdin” and “The Lion King.”
Of course, not all gay men have the same voice, or any “gay” voice: it is a stereotype, after all. Thorpe talks to a straight friend who sounds “gay” (he grew up on an ashram, surrounded by women), and a gay friend who sounds “straight” (he has jock brothers). But Thorpe admits that there’s something unnerving about having learned, subconsciously, to adopt a stereotype. Did he choose to sound gay or did sounding gay choose him? A friend from childhood tells him that, when he came out in college, his inflections suddenly changed, and part of her still hears the voice of an “imposter” when he talks. It reminded me of a straight friend who once told me, soon after I came out, that I was starting to sound “essy.” (The gay “lisp” is a bit of a misnomer, usually referring to a sibilant “S.”) Was I finding my true voice, or just reprogramming myself to conform to a different group?
Obviously, the conclusion—the film’s, and mine—is to dissociate the “gay voice” from shame and reattach it to pride, but it isn’t so easy. “For many gay men, that’s the last vestige, that’s the last chunk of internalized homophobia, is this hatred of how they sound,” Dan Savage tells Thorpe. The obstacles, once you think about them, are seismic, given the countless ways our culture awards status to masculine attributes over feminine ones. One of the ways gay people tend to compensate, the film suggests, is to adopt the supercilious speech patterns of the leisure class, i.e. sounding “artsy-fartsy.” You might also call it wit or intelligence, a benefit of cultural remove. Either way, you can end up sounding like Addison DeWitt.
Any marginalized group faces its own version of this dilemma, whether it’s immigrants straining to erase their accents, the debate over Ebonics, or women of the “Lean In” age redefining what it means to be assertive without imitating men. The CNN anchor Don Lemon tells Thorpe that he worked harder to neutralize his Southern black accent than his “gay” accent. (The phenomenon of gay white men imitating black women’s speech is its own thorny subcategory.) Hillary Clinton’s speech patterns—that here-and-gone Arkansas twang, those “authoritative” masculine cadences—are sure to keep linguists busy for decades. As gays and lesbians gain cultural capital, helped along by equality victories like the one just handed down by the Supreme Court, “gay voice” will surely evolve, too. For more and more people, there will be less need to hide it, at school, at work, or on television. On the other hand, it could assimilate into oblivion. But I hope not. Because how do you spell “fabulous” without a treble “A” and a sibilant “S”?
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