Filmmaker David Thorpe hears gay voices. He hears them every time he opens his mouth. Openly gay, Thorpe feels that his somewhat theatrical speech patterns let people know that he's a gay man.
"I'm a little mystified as to why I talk the way I talk," in his new film, Do I Sound Gay?. "How and when did I learn to sound gay?"
Thorpe shares his personal story as he visits a speech therapist in the hope of "butching up" his voice, while his mother, his grandmother, and several childhood friends all remember how his voiced changed during his college years. Before that, young Thorpe sounded as "straight" as everyone else.
But what exactly do heterosexual males sound like? As we meet more of Thorpe's friends, we see that his straight friend, who spent a lot of his youth in an ashram, has a voice that sounds as "gay" as Thorpe's, yet a gay friend sounds like a football player.
George Takei, David Sedaris, Margaret Cho, Tim Gunn, and a variety of Thorpe's friends discuss what constitutes a gay-sounding voice, as well as issues regarding the homophobic bullying which causes so many gay men to doubt their self-worth. These doubts are the reason that the filmmaker went began to question his own speech patterns.
"What's wrong with sounding like you are who you are?" Dan Savage asks, a question that ultimately becomes the overriding theme of Do I Sound Gay?.
When SF Weekly caught up with Thorpe, the first thing he mentioned was his impressive roster of celebrity guests.
"It wasn't as hard as you might think to convince them to participate," Thorpe said. "All of the people you mentioned care deeply about the LGBT community. I think they recognized that a documentary about the gay voice was an opportunity to talk about homophobia, especially internalized homophobia."
The stars were unconcerned with the fact that Thorpe was making his film debut with Do I Sound Gay?.
"The notion was compelling enough that it didn't matter that I had no track record, and, for much of the production, no backing," he said. While a few familiar faces declined, he's keeping mum about who.
Thorpe said that many of the more famous participants felt a personal connection to the film and their work. "David Sedaris wrote a great story called 'Go Carolina' about growing up with a lisp," he explained. "I thought he'd know a lot about the topic of the gay voice." (In the film, Sedaris observes that, "If I'm in a hotel and I call the front desk, they always say, 'We'll have that right up to you ma'am.'")
"Tim Gunn and George Takei are big anti-bullying advocates, and every gay man knows that sounding gay can provoke homophobia," Thorpe added.
Then there's the incomparable Cho and Savage. "Margaret Cho and Dan Savage are just balls-out about being themselves," Thorpe said. "The film is about getting to that place."
Getting friends and family involved was simple, the filmmaker said. "I was amazed that every one of them said yes without hesitation." Part of the joy he got out of making the film was realizing they love him for who he is, he added.
"My mom is still razzing me about filming me in her nightgown!" Thorpe said with a chuckle. "I think she and my stepfather were definitely a little baffled by the film at first, but then they saw it with an audience who reacted very positively to the film. Then the whole idea that my anxiety about sounding gay was emblematic of something much larger sank in in a big way."
While raising funds could be a challenge, Thorpe doesn't think of Do I Sound Gay? as a niche film, even though he realizes that film industry suits might disagree.
"The whole reason to do the film was to explore the issue in a way that anyone, gay or straight, could identify with," he said. "We all have aspects of our identities that we struggle to accept. One of the great things about having people like David Sedaris and Tim Gunn in the film is that people who aren't gay also love and trust them."
Do I Sound Gay?'s roots go all the way back to Thorpe's childhood, when he intentionally "butched up" his voice out of fear of getting bullied. "There was another effeminate guy in my school who sounded like a genteel Southern lady," he told us. "I was terrified I might sound like him."
But that was all a long time ago. "I feel even better about my voice than I did when I finished the film," said Thorpe. "I've found my voice and I relish opportunities to use it."
He hopes that people who see the film will laugh and have a good time but hopes that they stop to reconsider their assumptions about who we all are, basso profundo or soprano or somewhere in between.
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