The obstacles, once you think about them, are seismic, given the countless ways our culture awards status to masculine attributes over feminine ones. One of the ways gay people tend to compensate, the film suggests, is to adopt the supercilious speech patterns of the leisure class, i.e. sounding “artsy-fartsy.” You might also call it wit or intelligence, a benefit of cultural remove. Either way, you can end up sounding like Addison DeWitt.Addison DeWitt =
July 10, 2015
"Obviously, the conclusion... is to dissociate the 'gay voice' from shame and reattach it to pride, but it isn’t so easy."
"'For many gay men, that’s the last vestige, that’s the last chunk of internalized homophobia, is this hatred of how they sound,' Dan Savage tells [David Thorpe, whose new documentary is 'Do I Sound Gay?']."
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The gay brogue
Addison DeWitt is supposed to sound gay? He doesn't sound artsy-fartsy at all.
From an Open Letter to Terry Gross from her interview with Thorpe
"For example, straight male speakers of American English are known to have deeper voices than straight male speakers of many other languages; even prepubescent boys in the US have been documented to have significantly lower pitch than girls of the same age, even though the two groups are physiologically indistinguishable in their throats. This trend has been getting more extreme since the 1960s, with American boys getting deeper and deeper voices with each generation."
How does that work? Like, what force makes that happen?
Oh, come on!
Vidal Sassoon sounded gay, but he was extremely straight.
The biggest struggle of any man, whether gay or straight, is not for society to accept you, but for you to accept yourself.
It's the lisp. Just kidding.
There is never a last vestige.
I'll give them this much, these gays are much better liars than anyone gives them credit. Probably because they've got so much practice lying to themselves.
Wait a minute here. Do you sound female by showing a deep interest in art, literature, interior decoration, and the great female performers?
As God is my witness, nobody ever told me.
The easiest way to escape shame is to kill your opponents.
Rick Perry - Strong (real gay man's lisp remix)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg1reOJV27w
If this is the worst problem you've got ....
The clip is a film for women. Who cares what it's about.
It's overacted and you can't figure out what she's going on about.
Get a hobby or something.
Sometimes I've recorded a lecture of mine on a cassette recorder and then listened to it as the batteries were dying. I sounded like someone doing a ludicrous impression of a homophobe's stereotype of a gay man. It was just my normal speech, but with the pitch lowered (as the tape slowed), it was like I was clownishly mocking a gay man. It was really weird. Gave me some strange insight into the "gay voice" that this movie (which I haven't seen) is about.
Vidal Sassoon sounded gay, but he was extremely straight.
The biggest struggle of any man, whether gay or straight, is not for society to accept you, but for you to accept yourself.
Bingo!
For all of this talk of "Be who you want to be," it seems as if the "tolerant" folks are the ones most caught up in cultural and gendered stereotypes.
It's not the voice, it's the tone. And the tone has nothing to do orientation. If you're obnoxious jerk, it's that you fear people will see. Sadly gay people can get stereotyped as b@tches, I blame f*g h*gs in high school/college.
No one should come out, as anything until 18. Currently witnessing via social media a friend of a friend going through a male to female transition in one's teenage years.
Teenagers culturally are superficial jerks, and while I'm open to the concept of transgender, I'm not open to narcissism and this young man transitioning is not into a woman, but into psycho drama queen instead. I blame his female friends.
My heart aches, but he needs real female models in his life if he wants to be transgendered. He seems from his older FB posts to be a typical boy, but sadly had no male peers only female friends.
Thank God this seems more self motivated, and not like his parents pushing dresses on him as a young child and won't push hormones until he is a bit older. He just looks like an ugly girl overcompensating with sexy clothes due to no self confidence. I'm ashamed to say that. That's terrible to say. Will this teen get through high school & college, with authentic confidence? It's hard enough for those who are not transgender.
I hope he can work it all out, but with FB everything is just out there. Strangers like myself watch. I pray he has someone he can just talk to that's older, just to talk one to one in a trusted adult.
"The clip is a film for women. Who cares what it's about."
Well, the movie "All About Eve" is just great, but that scene is ridiculous. I laughed out loud repeatedly and was imitating both of the characters: "LIES!!!!" "PLEASE!!!" (Great English words, those one-word lines that Omar Sharif loved.)
"How does that work? Like, what force makes that happen?"
Patriarchy.
" . . . given the countless ways our culture awards status to masculine attributes over feminine ones."
Earlier death, greater chance of violent death, greater chance of going to prison, greater chance of dying on the job . . .
Can Savage's contention possibly be true? Could this possibly be the "last vestige" of internalized homophobia?
It seems to me that it can't - if you dislike your voice because you think it sounds gay, surely that dislike arises from not wanting to be seen as gay, and therefore there is nothing vestigial about it?
Alternatively, it could just be that you don't like your voice, and that you are happy to wear the Gay Pride tshirt because you are not at all ashamed of being gay, but you want to sound like Arnold because that is part of how you wish to present yourself as a gay male, i.e., you think a deeper voice is sexy and therefore it's like going to the gym to bulk up or tone up - you want to be as attractive as you can? In that case there's nothing homophobic about it.
On the one hand, I have to believe that Dan Savage knows a hell of a lot more about being a gay male than I do. On the other hand, I cannot believe him.
How on earth can wanting to have a very deep stereotypically masculine voice differ from wanting to have the stereotypically bulked-up masculine body?? Isn't this really about sex appeal rather than homophobia? Isn't this really a style issue?
Surely this blog must have some gay male readers? I'd like to know their take on it.
There is never a last vestige.
eric wins the thread.
. . . given the countless ways our culture awards status to masculine attributes over feminine ones."
Earlier death, greater chance of violent death, greater chance of going to prison, greater chance of dying on the job . . .
Yeah, the privileged male patriarchy of Omaha Beach at Normandy is always so outraging, when you think about it.
this movie (which I haven't seen)
(sound of needle going across the record)
Wait...what? You've never seen All About Eve?
(Goes back to read more carefully)
Oh. Never mind.
Obviously a brand makeover is called for.
"He sounds NPR."
There ya go: fixed.
All About Eve is one of the greatest movies ever made, and it is a beautiful reference point for so many of life's real situations. If you haven't seen it, you must. "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night."
Thanks, Bette Davis!
And it is most emphatically not a film just for women.
The ending is a perfect film representation of Nietzsche's "Eternal Recurrance"!
1) The gay voice is a lilt, a lifting way of speaking that straight men and women, and lesbians, do not do. Think of yourself saying "I'm going to the store!" How would a gay man, affecting the gay accent, say it?
2) I once had a job transcripting magnetic tape recordings to digital text. My foot-controlled player had a speed setting, and I was a fast typist. All of the tapes I got were from this one lawyer, and they all were absurdly low and slow. Things like "Thiiiiis...iiiiis...a...leeeeetter...to..."
So...this story is getting really long...I turned up the dial on the player, and it sounded like a normal man, talking at normal speed.
And then the lawyer showed up. He said, in that weirdly low voice, "Hiiiiii, Booooooooob."
Bob, you owe me a keyboard. But I'll forego collecting because that quip made my morning. thanks. -CP
One of the joys of The Ten Commandments is Anne Baxter's star turn as Nefretiri. "Oh, Moses! Take me in your arms!" LOL.
Self-hating gays? Who'da thunk it?
Partly this is cultural.
Partly it isn't.
Gay effeminate Filipinos have a "gay voice", gay effeminate Spaniards have a "gay voice", but in both cases its not the same as the "American gay" voice.
I suspect that in all cases its a trait picked up from the subculture, that would not exist if there wasn't such a subculture.
For fun, I once lowered my voice in a software program while I tried to use masculine speech patterns.
I sounded (what used to be called) flaming.
Jeesum, I bet gays already miss being on the outside, part of a sub culture inaccessible to straights, private and hidden clubs. Furtive glances, desperate chances.
It must have been like being a teenage romantic your whole life.
To answer Bob Ellison's question -- this is how you would say it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJSgZYUnQn0
FullMoon, it's an affect. Those who do it are fully aware.
Bob Ellison said...
FullMoon, it's an affect. Those who do it are fully aware.
I am not qualified to argue about it. I can say that acting like that back then was likely to result in an ass whoppin'.
Interestingly, in a neighborhood populated by mostly blue color,high school educated where boys regularly got the strap from macho dads, and men would occasionally have drunken brawls and seemed prejudiced against every one, no one harassed the gay people at all.
Addison DeWitt, the Shitt.
"I sounded like someone doing a ludicrous impression of a homophobe's stereotype of a gay man."
The word "homophobe" does not belong this sentence. The "stereotype of a gay man" is not homophobic, and it's really bigoted to use the word. Honestly, you really should be better than that.
The "gay project" is exclusionary. Those guys in prisons sodomizing one another? Not gay. Those guys molesting adolescent boys? Not gay.
Gays typically disown the child molesters and prison rapists in their group because many of them (but not all) self-identity as heterosexual. Of course, Bruce Jenner self-identified as a heterosexual man for years. He has four natural children, for God's sake. But to buy into the gay agenda, you must believe that Jenner has always been a transsexual. From the moment of his birth until the day he dies, he has been a transsexual, though he would have denied it until a few years ago. So self-identifying as a heterosexual is always suspect (unless you self-identify as gay).
The idea that there is a 'sexual orientation" that is immutable and set at birth by some unknown biological process is voodoo, invented to achieve a political goal.
"Obviously, the conclusion... is to dissociate cut-offs and flip flops from beachwear and reattach them to dinnerwear, but it isn’t so easy."
Shut up already with the gayness. Do you sound gay? yes. you're gay. This is the internal monologue of narcissists at this point.
Maybe it's a generational thing, but the gay men I know or know of in my social circles don't resemble old and creaky stereotypes of 1980s vintage unless they're deliberately and temporarily playing on them for humor value. Hardly seems a significant cultural issue.
Gay or not gay?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=jRjDu2XBpQs#t=52
Either way, you can end up sounding like Addison DeWitt.
You mean, like an Englishman? I know they say the English are a deeply homosexual society but that's going a bit far, I say!
The "gay voice" exists. It is an affectation which many gay men can turn on and off (or at least up or down.) I've never quite understood it, but I suppose it's role playing. I think gay men have had to learn to be good actors at some time in their lives, and this is a product of it. It's harmless, and like a lot of role playing and affectation, I think it's more common among the young. I've seen gay men who I know reasonably well "butch it up" very effectively. Sometimes just for the fun on it and sometimes (and quite honorably I think) to help straight people around them to feel more comfortable.
All About Eve is when I realized how much better Classic movies were written compared the crap out there today (Coen's exempted from this criticism up until O' Brother and including No Country).
Betty drunkenly demanding the same song be played over and over is strangely comforting.
I associate Addison DeWitt with what E.L.James tried to write Christian Gray to be.
Savage hasn't been attacked here for trying to spread disease to those with whom he disagrees politically?
Well, I'll do it: Savage should have empathy and compassion in order to help the world become nicer and better.
He should understand Christianity and celebrate people's freedom to live and believe as they like.
He won't. He will punch and push and push until he flames out, sadly.
Savage, I believe, is a man with deep psychological problems. He seems to feel a need to constantly challenge people about his worth.
We need a homosexual President for this country - someone to moderate our national LGBT hyper-awareness and hyper-sensitivity just as Obama has done to improve race relations.
No mention of "the lesbian voice."
There is a lesbian voice, just as surely as there is a gay voice. It is true; we all know it. It's not a perfect identifier, just as the "gay voice" is not a perfect identifier. It's only about 85-95% accurate.
And the lesbian voice is low and masculine. Like the gay voice is basically feminine.
I don't get this "artsy fartsy" thing. Gay men just sound like women to me. Even over-exaggerated women. I know an awful lot of straight women who don't sound as effeminate as some gay men. I presume that those gay men want very much to sound like women.
Piffle. I know a man who didn't "discover" he was gay until he was well into his forties, married with a son in college. He immediately began wearing caftans and eye makeup and his voice completely changed to the stereotypical "gay" lisp.
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