Do I Sound Gay?
Directed by: David Thorpe
Documentary - 77 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 23 July 2015
Documentary - 77 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 23 July 2015
I had no idea Captain Hook, Jafar from Aladdin, and Scar from The Lion King are all gay. As a kid, I noticed their respective voices differed in pitch from the protagonists but I assumed it was because they were extra evil. It turns out the haughty attitudes, long vowels, and crisp enunciation were clues they were in fact homosexual. Who knew? David Thorpe knew. Self-proclaimed “on the wrong side of 40” and newly single, Thorpe accidentally picked up on ‘the gay voice’ on a crowded train to a popular gay destination. It hurt his ears and irritated him. Did he have the gay voice too? Best to make a documentary and find out.
When Thorpe says a word with a pronounced ‘th’ at the beginning, there is a not so subtle ‘s’ which pops out as well. He engages in that ever more common phenomenon of upspeak, where all of your sentences, whether they be declarative or interrogative, end up almost an octave higher than where you started even when one is not asking a question. David’s friends confirm he sounds gay, the common folk on the street he comes across with his camera mostly confirm he sounds gay, and pretty soon, he agrees; he has gay voice.
When Thorpe says a word with a pronounced ‘th’ at the beginning, there is a not so subtle ‘s’ which pops out as well. He engages in that ever more common phenomenon of upspeak, where all of your sentences, whether they be declarative or interrogative, end up almost an octave higher than where you started even when one is not asking a question. David’s friends confirm he sounds gay, the common folk on the street he comes across with his camera mostly confirm he sounds gay, and pretty soon, he agrees; he has gay voice.
What to do? Accept it? Nah, David has a whole 77 minute documentary to fill; he wants to change it. He enlists a voice coach to help tame those unwieldy consonants and vowels, he buys a self-help CD set from an acting coach who claims to have helped dozens of Hollywood homosexuals cover up their lisps, and he ardently practices at home in his Brooklyn apartment the diaphragm exercises to work out the gay voice.
A lot of Do I Sound Gay? is David in voiceover explaining what he’s up to now or following him around to his various appointments. Things pick up a bit when he sits down with well-known homosexuals to discuss their feelings and ideas about the gay voice. The most logical voice of all is no surprise, it belongs to Dan Savage, columnist for Savage Love and the co-founder of the It Gets Better project. Savage explains many gay men, like David, are self-conscious of how they sound because they trained themselves growing up to hide any and all clues concerning their sexuality lest they be subjected to violence after being singled out.
A lot of Do I Sound Gay? is David in voiceover explaining what he’s up to now or following him around to his various appointments. Things pick up a bit when he sits down with well-known homosexuals to discuss their feelings and ideas about the gay voice. The most logical voice of all is no surprise, it belongs to Dan Savage, columnist for Savage Love and the co-founder of the It Gets Better project. Savage explains many gay men, like David, are self-conscious of how they sound because they trained themselves growing up to hide any and all clues concerning their sexuality lest they be subjected to violence after being singled out.
David has no recordings of his voice as a child, but his parents and childhood friends confirm he did not ‘sound gay’ as a youngster. So where did his newspeak come from? Exactly where we think it would come from and confirmed by David’s freshman year college roommate. David came out in the fall of his freshman year when he talked ‘straight’ and by May, he adopted the new tones, inflections, and syllables he associated with the stereotypical gay lifestyle and community. David asks a lot of what sound to be rhetorical questions, but most of them have obvious answers. Almost all of us change in college as we discover who we are as people. What David did was no different than the rest of the folks in his dorm, his transformation just happened to include his voice.
Other interviews include David Sedaris, Tim Gunn, CNN’s Don Lemon, Margaret Cho, and George Takei with Sedaris the most witty and effective of the bunch. The idea of sounding gay is a nebulous issue because there are plenty of gay people who sound straight and plenty of straight people who sound gay. Yet, all of us know right away what Thorpe is talking about when he mentions the stereotypical gay voice. Even though the subject is easily received by the audience, it’s either the subject itself or the manner in which Thorpe films his exploration of it which does not work as a complete film. Do I Sound Gay? perhaps would work better as a documentary short because there really is only a shell of a feature here. Following Thorpe to appointments and dinner dates is not an effective way to glean truths. Also, I am still not sold on all of those Disney villains being gay, but Captain Hook I can believe; he dresses a bit too flamboyantly, even for a Neverland pirate.
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