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David Thorpe confronts his ‘gay voice’ in his new film Do I Sound Gay?
David Thorpe wondered if other gay men were as distressed about the way they talk as he was.
So in his new documentary, Do I Sound Gay?, he asked some very famous ones including actor George Takei, designer Tim Gunn, author David Sedaris, newsman Don Lemon and columnist Dan Savage to weigh in.
Comic Margaret Cho also shares some insights in the film which opened Friday (17 July) in Los Angeles., Atlanta, Philadelphia and Denver.
‘Sometimes a voice is just a voice and sometimes it’s a symbol of something much bigger,’ Thorpe told the audience after a sell-out screening at the Outfest Film Festival in Los Angeles this week.
Thorpe shares in the film his life-long struggle with ‘gay voice’ – something you can’t quite define but you know it when you hear it.
He examines the questions ‘Do gay men who talk like gay men do it naturally or it is learned?’ and ‘Why are so may gay men so hung up on not sounding gay?’
One of the reasons is survival and how sounding gay as a boy or a teen can lead to bullying, says Savage who founded It Gets Better Project.
Thorpe said that while growing up, ‘if something sounds gay it’s like the worse thing ever. It’s associated with a lot of shame and a lot of stigma. … It’s amazing to me how many of my gay friends had speech therapy as kids.’
When he came out in college, he believes he got a lot less self-conscious: ‘I wanted to look gay and sound gay. I was so excited to be out of the closet.’
But later he began to wonder: ‘How did I get this gay voice stuck on me? Is it my real voice or this voice I reached for after I came out?’
In the film, he works with two different noted speech therapists in an attempt to see if he could change his voice to make it sound ‘less gay.’
In the end he learns that the real issue is this: ‘Coming to terms with my voice is coming to terms with myself.’
To find out where the film is screening, go to DoISoundGay.com
The post David Thorpe confronts his ‘gay voice’ in his new film Do I Sound Gay? appeared first on Gay Star News.
Greg Hernandez
www.gaystarnews.com/article/david-thorpe-confronts-his-gay-voice-in-his-new-film-do-i-sound-gay/
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