Do I sound gay? David Thorpe is challenging the pop culture stereotype

At the beginning of his Kickstarter video, David Thorpe opens the blinds of his living room to let the light in.

He doesn’t have a shirt on—he’s a slight man, and pale. Handsome, in a roundabout sort of way. His head is shaved, and a tuft of brown beard pools at his chin as though willed there by gravity.

‘It’s going to be a beautiful day,’ he says to the camera as it takes in his morning routine. He smiles self-effacingly.

In a way, it’s not overly important to know what Thorpe looks like. Far more important is to know what he sounds like. It’s his voice that has led to a living room camera crew, to  nearly 200 interviews with speech pathologists, historians and actors over the last three years.

Thorpe, you see, sounds gay. He has what many would term a ‘gay voice’. But it’s not a term he agrees with.

‘It is such a stereotype,’ David says. ‘I would love for people to start thinking of it as “sounding gay”. It’s not about whether you are gay or are straight but it’s how you sound.’

The idea of a sexual orientation-defined register of speech that ‘sounds gay’ is familiar to most people in western culture. It’s everywhere from Mardi Gras to Modern Family, an integral part of any functioning gaydar. Ask a person on the street to list the characteristics that a ‘gay voice’ might have and you usually end up with something like this: it’s high pitched; precisely articulated. It might even have to find novel ways to dart around sibilants (s or sh sounds) lest it reveal to the world its lisp.

To be fair on our hypothetical vox populi, Thorpe's voice does contain some of these supposed markers of homosexual speech. While he doesn’t lisp, he had always been self-conscious about his words 'giving him away' as a gay man. And so he decided to make a film about that impulse, where it came from, and what it meant. Do I Sound Gay?, which premiered to standing ovations at the Toronto International Film Festival, is the product of a desire to scrutinise that feeling.

Thorpe freely admits that his dismay at being outed by his own voice is a form of internalised homophobia—something he says that people who aren’t gay don’t really understand. But schoolyard bullying starts early and hits hard. Zach, one of the subjects of Do I Sound Gay?, was in third grade when his cohort began to make fun of the way he spoke. ‘And that’s when the bullying started.’

Children are taunted for their physical characteristics all the time—hair colour here, waist size there—but being harassed for your primary mode of expression has the added effect of silencing any kind of comeback. LGBT children are far more likely to drop out of school, or self-harm because they feel unsafe. Zach was later punched repeatedly by his classmates, some of whom filmed the altercation but didn’t intervene. Internalised homophobia. Who wouldn’t cringe hearing their own voice?

‘It can take a lifetime to counteract what you’ve absorbed as a child,’ Thorpe says. ‘Those messages don’t just evaporate.’

Why do gay men sound so, well, gay? And how do you account for such stylistic uniformity across so diverse a range of accents and lived experience? There’s no research consensus—one of Thorpe’s reasons for making this documentary was to bring a more comprehensive exploration to the topic.

That’s not to say there haven’t been theories: Professor Arnold Zwicky from Stanford University outlined some in a 2003 presentation—there’s the idea that gay men, by deviating from traditionally masculine patterns of speech, are lumped together as ‘feminine’ due to a ruthlessly entrenched gender binary.

What’s more, folk myths about language are hard to put to rest. Once the idea floats that certain parts of speech have intrinsic social content—lisps are inherently effeminate; only gay men speak with question marks at the end of their statements—it can be difficult for the wider populace to consider such features of speech as Zwicky does, ‘bits of linguistic stuff’.

There are also social factors to consider. Camp mannerisms—in dress as well as speech—flourish in LGBT communities not just because of any inherent fabulousity but because they serve as a proud marker of identity to a culture historically mired in oppression.

‘There is a joyousness,’ Thorpe says, ‘and a celebratory side to sounding gay that is a big part of popular culture.’

Pop culture, too, can take some of the blame for this perceived uniformity. Rare is the gay character who is not solely defined by their sexuality—as GLAAD’s Alison Bechdel-inspired Vito Russo test makes clear. While portrayals of nuanced, non-stereotypical homosexuality on screen are becoming more prominent, the dominant conception remains similar to the camp hyperbole featured in sitcoms such as Will & Grace. It begs the question: could such a singular iteration of the gay-sounding identity in pop culture be shaping the way gay men talk? Some evidence suggests sexual identity is constructed with little regard for geographic factors, which normally do so much to shape the way we as humans talk.

How far back can we plot the history of men sounding gay? In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, tabloids would acidly caricature gay men—who they referred to as mollies—haranguing them for sounding effeminate. There were personal ads from women, adamant to find men of masculine brogue. The nascent speech therapy trade promised to ‘cure’ lisps and other maladies of the mouth. ‘We will never have recordings,’ Thorpe says, with more than a hint of sadness.

There are some areas of history from which we do have recordings. In 1967, Warren Adkins sits uneasily in a seat across from CBS journalist Mike Wallace. Adkins isn’t his real name—he’s actually Jack Nichols, an early gay activist and co-founder of the Mattachine Society in Washington, DC. Adkins, or rather, Nicholsis taking part in a controversial CBS documentary: The Homosexuals.

‘The innermost aspect of a person’s personality is his sexual orientation and I can’t imagine myself giving this up,’ Nichols says, a dark mixture of pride and deference. His voice, in 1967, sounds almost exactly like Thorpe’s in 2014.

A decade later and another television interview—this time in Britain in 1976. Across his kitchen table, gay activist Alan Clark is explaining to an interviewer his parents' reluctant acceptance of his long-term, live-in boyfriend. ‘I settled down with an Oxford graduate. But if I’d decided to settle with an Oxford docker—if there are any Oxford dockers—my parents would have difficulty adjusting to it.’

Mild in volume and devoid of any stumbling around sibilants, Clarke’s Britishness raises questions for Thorpe’s documentary. Are the stereotypical features of gay-sounding speech constant even across the Atlantic Ocean? The British, remember, are a people for whom Hugh Grant was once the peak of masculinity.

And more questions—what do lesbian women sound like? Trans-identifying men and women—where do they fall in regards to ‘sounding gay’? Neither are strictly within the confines of David Thorpe’s documentary, though he does admit that ‘there are definitely women who, quote unquote, “sound gay”’. Among them, he lists Jodie Foster and MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow, with their relatively low voices. ‘Again,’ he says, ‘it’s that cross-gender vocal expression.’

In 'Go Carolina', author David Sedaris describes a scene from his childhood speech therapy classes. He was being treated for a lisp. His speech pathologist muses about getting a sign on the door of the treatment room—Sedaris suggests Future Homosexuals of America. ‘We knocked ourselves out trying to fit in,’ Sedaris laments, ‘but were ultimately betrayed by our tongues.’

In 2014, Thorpe, the director and partial subject of Do I Sound Gay?, is far more sanguine than the child Sedaris. All the anecdotes Thorpe received during filming suggest that speech therapists aren’t seeing as many child patients as they used to. However, he admits that actors, businessmen—‘anyone who needs to be perceived a strong, male leader’—will seek out that kind of help, regardless of their sexuality.

‘You don’t have to be gay,’ Thorpe says, ‘to be persecuted for sounding gay.’

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