Do I Sound Gay? Opens 5th Annual DOC NYC Festival
America’s largest documentary film festival opened its 5th season with a deceptively simple question that sparked a journey of self discovery through the mystery of linguistics.
Do I Sound Gay? is writer David Thorpe’s debut documentary film-one he was compelled to create in a period of intense self-loathing and personal insecurity, also known as a bad breakup.
“When you break up with someone, you start wondering, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ and you lose a lot of confidence,” Thorpe said to a packed house at the School of Visual Arts theater on Thursday night following the screening. “I became obsessively self-conscious about anything that made me sound feminine or would give me away.”
From family albums and home movies to film history, pop culture and speech therapy, Thorpe exhaustively examines the phenomenon of ‘sounding gay,’ and the strange and fascinating ways we use language to connect with each other and identify ourselves. In the film, Thorpe is quite literally trying to find his voice, and develop a way of speaking he could truly embrace. That quest led him to ask the title question to people like writer David Sedaris, comedian Margaret Cho, CNN news anchor Don Lemon, and random strangers in New York City.
“I talked to a lot of people, and when people would tell me that they hated their voice, and that they thought they’d lost partners and jobs because of it, I knew I had to make this movie,” Thorpe said. “It’s not a well-researched linguistic phenomenon or anything, but after meeting other gay men who had insecurities about it I was really compelled to do this.”
For all the perceived downsides Thorpe investigates throughout the film, he discovers that there is a silver lining to the distinctive speech patterns he identifies in himself and his close friends. The exaggerated consonants and elongated vowels are at times part of a consciously campy performance that is both declarative and liberating-‘loud and proud’ linguistics.
“By making this film, and working with people who inspired me, I got comfortable with my own voice,” Thorpe said. “That’s really the whole point of the movie.”
For more about Do I Sound Gay, visit the film page on the DOC NYC website.
Krystal Grow is an arts writer and photo editor based in New York. She has written for TIME LightBox, TIME.com, LIFE.com, the New York Times Lens Blog, the Magnum Foundation and the Stranger Than Fiction blog and is the 2014 DOC NYC Blog Coordinator. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @kgreyscale.
