Actually, you do. You really, really do . . .
9
Time to Make This Book Just a Little Bit Gayer
David Thorpe is embarrassed of his s’s.
He’s embarrassed of his o’s, his a’s, and most of his other vowels too. He thinks the way he pronounces them makes him sound gay. Thorpe, an otherwise proud gay man himself, is a journalist, and like most reporters plagued by a needling question, he can’t help but investigate the mystery of why the gay voice exists—and why he was beset with such an extreme case—by way of a 2014 documentary called Do I Sound Gay? In the film’s opening scene, Thorpe presents a microphone to a series of strangers on the streets of New York City and poses the very question reflected in his movie’s title: “Hello, sorry to bother you, I’m David Thorpe, and I have a question . . . do I sound gay?”
Thorpe is hoping his various subjects will say that he doesn’t sound gay, but most of them tell him yes, he does, citing his “gay lisp,” nasality, and singsongy intonation as proof. Thorpe isn’t the only gay man who doesn’t want to sound like it. “Do you think you sound gay?” he asks one guy with a yellow stud earring on what looks to be a corner of Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. “I hope not,” the man says.
A year after Do I Sound Gay? is released, a video is uploaded to YouTube called “Do You Sound Like a Lesbian?” Similarly, a host, this time a woman in her twenties named Taylor, invites Los Angeles passersby to listen to a lineup of half a dozen young women as they each repeat the same stereotypically lesbian phrases—“My favorite store is Home Depot” and “I never leave the house without ChapStick.” (They do this with irony, of course.) Then she asks her passersby to guess, based on the sound of the speakers’ voices, which of the six is a lesbian.
These interviewees are far less confident in their answers than David Thorpe’s. Most of them are unable to identify with any certainty which woman in the bunch talks like a lesbian, or flat-out refuse to try. Even the listeners that do wager a guess don’t provide evidence as specific as nasality or lipsy s’s. One man says he senses a little “anger” in one of the women’s voices. Three others base their guesses on the observation that a speaker stated her phrase “boldly” or with a “take-charge” or “assertive” delivery. “Ah, and [assertiveness] translates as gay to you,” Taylor confirms with a fellow in a striped button-down. “It’s out of the ordinary,” he clarifies. “So, confidence for women is out of the ordinary,” Taylor affirms. The guy blinks at her nervously.
As it turns out, all six of the women in Taylor’s lineup identify as lesbians, which she ultimately reveals to her guessers, putting them out of their awkward misery. “I wouldn’t have known,” admits a young guy with curly brown hair. “I’m surprised about her, I’m surprised about her, I’m surprised about her too,” agrees an older man in a bowler hat, as he points to a few women down the line. “So no chance for guys like us?”
The main difference between Taylor’s survey and David Thorpe’s is that the lesbian speakers aren’t relieved that their speech doesn’t seem to reflect their sexual orientation. “We like to affirm our queerness,” one woman says. Another agrees: “We’re not offended by [the idea of someone thinking we sound like lesbians]. We’re not bummed about it.”
The idea that you could identify someone’s sexual preference by how their voice sounds is objectively nonsensical (we don’t copulate with our vocal cords, after all). So it makes some amount of common sense that not a single player in Taylor’s “Do You Sound Like a Lesbian?” video was able to pass her test. What’s more curious is that when David Thorpe posed the idea of the gay male voice to his subjects, they all knew (or at least felt like they knew) exactly what he was talking about.
As we’ve learned many times so far, almost every facet of human speech, down to the very languages we use and oftentimes even our pitch, is a product of nurture, not nature. Nobody comes out of the womb with a genetic predisposition to speaking with a singsongy intonation, and linguists have found absolutely zero correlation between homosexuality and a propensity to lisp your s’s. Some languages don’t even have s consonants at all. Yet so many English speakers have the impression that a singular, recognizable “gay voice” exists, but don’t recognize a lesbian equivalent.
My first awareness of the “gay male voice” arose in the sixth grade, when my best friend, a boy from my drama class, broke down crying one day after having endured an afternoon of bullying for how he pronounced his s’s. “They said I have a lisp,” he told me. “They called me a homo.”
Personally, I couldn’t hear anything different about my friend’s s pronunciation—it definitely didn’t sound like he lisped—but in retrospect, I realize what his tormentors were talking about. As it turns out, the “gay male voice” that David Thorpe, his street interviewees, and many other English speakers seem to recognize is indeed a systematic phenomenon. Phoneticians (people who specialize in the study of speech sounds) have been able to describe the sound variations comprising this “gay voice”: they include clearer, longer vowels; prolonged s and z sounds; a nasal vocal quality; and an over-articulation of t’s, p’s, and k’s (this is when you release a little puff of air after a consonant-final word, like cat or thick, almost so it sounds like “cat-uh” or “thick-uh”). Scholars have also noticed that upspeak and a swoopy, musical inflection are features of this so-called gay male voice. And then of course there is what’s commonly known as the “gay lisp,” which, as it turns out, is not a lisp at all.
In the spirit of vindicating my middle school friend, I want to clear the air about the “gay lisp” right now: A real lisp is a phonological delay usually found in children’s speech that’s caused when one pushes their tongue too far forward in the mouth, resulting in an “s” pronunciation that sounds more like a “th.” (Think of Cindy from The Brady Bunch: “They ttthhhay I talk like a baby!”) But the s that we might identify as “sounding gay” is not in fact a lisp; instead, it’s what linguists classify as a sibilant s, and it’s produced by placing the tip of the tongue on the roof of the mouth so that a sort of whistling noise results. Speech scientists guarantee there is absolutely zero evidence that gay men are likelier to lisp, but that in decades past, young boys who spoke with sibilant s’s were often mischaracterized as having a lisp and sent to speech therapy to fix it. “There was a lot of confusion back then,” explains University of Texas language scholar Ron Smyth, “between a fronted ‘th’ sound and just sounding too feminine.”
The concept of a man “sounding too feminine” is an important piece in the puzzle of where the gay male voice comes from and why it causes folks like David Thorpe and my middle school friend such grief. As you may have noticed, many of these gay speech variations are similar to the elements first identified by Robin Lakoff in the 1970s: upspeak, an over-articulation of plosive consonants, and a swoopy inflection are also stereotypes of how women talk.
We already know that not all women speak with these features, and it’s also not only women who use them. The same logic can be applied to gay men. Just as there are plenty of men who use tag questions and vocal fry, there are plenty of straight guys who have nasal, singsongy voices; and equally, there are plenty of gay men who “sound straight.”
Smyth argues that how feminine or masculine our vocal affects sound might have to do with the speech of the communities in which we grow up. In Do I Sound Gay? Thorpe introduces a straight friend of his who was raised on an ashram surrounded by mostly women and now sounds stereotypically gay (his voice is “all treble, no bass,”* the guy explains with a smile and one of the most sibilant s’s I’ve ever heard). Meanwhile, another one of Thorpe’s friends, who is indeed gay, grew up in a family of jock brothers and now talks like your average heterosexual, football-loving bro (low monotone pitch, extensive sports vocabulary).
Scholars argue that many gay men might unconsciously “learn” the gay voice not only from their communities but also from TV and movies. Since the nineteenth century, gay male
characters have had a place in mainstream American entertainment; it’s just that until the 1990s or so they were always in the form of some extreme stereotype, like the wealthy, foppish “pansy” or the hyperintellectual cunning villain. In Do I Sound Gay? David Thorpe explains that growing up, he didn’t have any gay figures to relate to in his community (at least none that were out),* but he knew what gay men sounded like because of a few on-screen archetypes. These included Liberace and Truman Capote, with their nasally affects, as well as sophisticated movie villains like Waldo Lydecker in 1944’s Laura and Addison DeWitt in 1950’s All About Eve, both portrayed as impeccably dressed, acid-tongued dandies.
Characters like Lydecker and DeWitt contributed to the stereotype that to be educated and refined was to be gay, and to be gay was to be evil. This notion went so far that the villains in many Disney movies were painted as pretentious gay men: think of Captain Hook and Jafar with their flamboyant hats and aristocratic airs, not to mention Ursula the Sea Witch, who was openly inspired by the iconic drag queen Divine. Even Disney’s badly behaved animals, like Shere Khan, Scar, and Professor Ratigan from The Great Mouse Detective, were characterized as soft-handed homosexuals, all assigned the same vaguely British accents, bombastic vocabularies, and disdain for working-class stupidity (“I’m surrounded by idiots” is one of Scar’s famous lines).
With the help of these characters, an effeminate, learned style of speech became a symbol of the gay community and something that its members could learn and teach each other. It’s a dialect of sorts, which one can drop into or camp up whenever the situation calls for it. This is called “code switching,” and sexuality aside it’s actually something almost all English speakers do. Most of us speak more than one dialect of English, which we might learn from our ethnic community, the geographic region where we grow up, or a new region we transplant to (think of, say, a native Texan living in Los Angeles who speaks Standard English around Californians, but drops into their hometown accent the second they’re around other Texans). Consciously or unconsciously, we all adjust our codes depending on the context of the conversation. This is an incredibly useful tool, because it helps us better connect to the people we’re talking to.
The male “gay voice” that David Thorpe and his interviewees were referencing does not represent the entire gay community, but instead just a small part of it—the white and cosmopolitan part. And it’s a code that people outside that community can drop into when the situation calls for it, as well. A good example of how this type of code switching can work comes from a group of first-generation American Latino gay men in a Southern California town outside Los Angeles. According to a 2012 study by Cal Poly scholar Anthony C. Ocampo, these men didn’t speak with the white cosmopolitan “gay voice” at home because it didn’t meet the masculinity standards of their families. As American-born Latino sons of immigrants, these guys possessed a very strong ethnic identity, but a rather ambivalent sexual one, because the effeminate characteristics of nearby white gay Los Angeles, which weren’t accepted in their home communities, didn’t match their macho presentation, which, on the flip side, was stigmatized in West Hollywood.
While with their families, these guys would speak a masculine, more “straight sounding” form of English (or Spanish). Among other gay Latino men from similar backgrounds, their speech styles and vocabularies remained fairly macho—playful insults, boasting about their sexual conquests (in this community, “manning up” to the fact that they wanted to have sex with other men was actually seen as the masculine thing to do and thus more highly valued than hiding or denying it). It wasn’t until these men physically immersed themselves in the scene of white gay Los Angeles that they would code switch into the more feminine style, like using sibilant s’s and gender-inverted pronouns (aka calling each other she or girl). They were able to do this knowing that in the West Hollywood environment, their masculinity would not be questioned.
If you’re a person who code switches a lot, it’s possible to forget what your most natural speech sounds like. One speech pathologist suspected this might be what happened with David Thorpe, who has been pronouncing his s’s and vowels like his white gay community in New York City for so long that, to his frustration, he finds it almost impossible to switch back.
So the “gay voice,” if you want to call it that, does exist—it’s just that not all gay men of every background and ethnicity use it, those who do don’t necessarily use it all the time, and not everyone who happens to use it is gay. In fact, one of Smyth’s studies revealed that listeners could correctly identify a man’s sexual orientation by his voice with only 60 percent accuracy. The cultural stereotype that all gay men naturally talk like women is as precarious as the stereotype that all women naturally use uptalk and prefer to gossip about people instead of debating ideas. It’s just . . . not that simple.
Our culture wants it to be that simple—to believe so badly that all gay men sound like women—because that makes it easier to size them up and potentially ridicule them. Thus, the stereotype prevails. “Why do you think gay men sometimes reject other gay men for sounding gay?” David Thorpe asks gay media pundit Dan Savage. “Misogyny,” Savage responds. “They want to prove to the culture that they’re not not men—that they’re good because they’re not women. . . . And then they punish gay men who they perceive as being feminine in any way.”
Ultimately, when it comes to how a gay man talks, any shame experienced results from the fact that this speech style defies our expectations of how a man should sound. Meanwhile, not one of the lesbians in Taylor’s lineup was sent to a speech pathologist for sounding too “assertive.”
There have been a few linguists over the years who’ve tried to identify a lesbian voice equivalent to the gay male one. But they haven’t been able to find much. And by “much,” I mean anything at all. In 1997 Stanford University phonologist Arnold Zwicky proposed that the “nonexistence” of a lesbian speech style might be perceived because gay men who use the proverbial “voice” are, whether they realize it or not, signaling a desire to remove themselves from normative, heterosexual masculinity. Lesbians, on the other hand, more often identify closely with their gender group, not against it, so they don’t share the same need to differentiate themselves from straight women. By Zwicky’s thinking, lesbians are women first, gay women second, whereas gay men go the other way around.
I love the idea that lesbian women have such strong gender solidarity (because women are the best, duh). However, asking, “Why is there no lesbian equivalent of the gay male voice?” isn’t the right question to begin with. That’s because this question treats the gay male experience as the standard to which the lesbian experience should be compared, instead of looking at the lesbian experience as its own separate thing.
Any social group’s language is a direct product of its history. Because gay men and lesbians do not have parallel histories, their language necessarily couldn’t be the same. Just look at the evolution of each community’s portrayal in the media: until shockingly recently, lesbian characters were entirely missing from American TV and cinema. And when they did finally appear, it was not in a positive light. One of first major lesbian story lines surfaced in the 1961 film The Children’s Hour, which tells the story of a disgruntled boarding school student who accuses her two headmistresses of being in a romantic relationship, ultimately ruining their personal and professional reputations forever. This movie didn’t make a comment on lesbian speech specifically, but it certainly portrayed lesbian life as dark, lonely, and career-ruining.
A slightly better question to ask, then, and the one that Zwicky seemed to be getting at, was why gay men seem to adopt linguistic features stereotypically associated with women, while lesbians don’t seem to do the same in the opposite direction? Why do gay men engage in gender inversion, but not gay women?
The answer is simple: it’s not that lesbians don’t speak in a masculine way; it’s just that it’s not as abhorrent for women to talk like men as it i
s for men to talk like women. “Because who wants to be female?” our NYU linguist Louise O. Vasvári asked me facetiously over the phone. “A male who wants to be female is the ultimate downgrade.”
This perceived downgrade is yet another example of our cultural view that masculine language is the neutral, unmarked default, whereas femininity represents otherness. Switching from a default position to a marked position is more noticeable than the reverse, so when a man opens his mouth and “feminine” traits come out, we flinch. “You can go toward power, but if you’re a man who chooses to be female sounding, you’re moving away from it, and that’s a negative,” says Vasvári, following up with this analogy: “I look at my classrooms and how many of the female students are wearing pants? Most of them. How many men are wearing skirts? None.”
Just like a man wearing a skirt makes a bolder social statement than a woman wearing pants, a man speaking like a woman makes a bolder statement than a woman speaking like a man. Certainly, it’s possible for a woman to go too far: Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher’s “abrasive” voices might be the equivalent of a woman, say, wearing a boxy tuxedo and no makeup to a black-tie event. A woman would have to take her gender inversion much further than a man for anyone to notice.
The inequity between gay and lesbian speech doesn’t stop at the voice. We have different impressions of each community’s slang too. For decades, language scholars have documented the vivid slang vocabularies of gay men in various communities around the world. In the Philippines, many gay men use a lexicon called swardspeak, which combines imaginative wordplay, pop culture references, malapropisms (word misusages), and onomatopoeia (words that sound like what they mean, like clink and swoosh). For example, in swardspeak, Muriah Carrey means “cheap” and is derived from the Tagalog word mura, which means the same thing, combined with the name of gay pop icon Mariah Carey. There’s also taroosh, a take on the Tagalog taray, which means “bitchy.” (Adding an oosh suffix to a word to make it cuter is a classic characteristic of swardspeak.)
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