The entertaining and provocative new documentary Do I Sound Gay? manages in 77 minutes to unpack a lifetime's worth of anxieties about what it means to be fully yourself (opens Friday). Filmmaker David Thorpe creates a cinema spotlight and bravely shines it on himself. Thorpe argues that all people have secrets they wish to protect, and they do so by constructing elaborate images of themselves, billboards projecting how they wish to be seen by the world. Thorpe warns that these personal closets can become prisons mitigating against the processes of growth and change that everyone must undergo.
Thorpe begins his film by asking a series of strangers �" American, French, male, female, butch, fem, young, old �" his film's deceptively simple question: "Do I sound gay?" An attractive young New Yorker saucily replies, "Yes, but not as much as I do." A young woman temporizes, "I would have lumped you in with the artsy-fartsy crowd." Others chime in, "There is some something slightly melodic [in your voice.]" "There is the nasality." "I would definitely rate you as a metrosexual." "We enunciate! And if that's gay, wha?!"
Thorpe discovers that his on-the-street strangers are polite, but most of them do confirm his worst fears that his slip is showing, linguistically. Thorpe then consults speech experts, most hilariously including the witty Michael Harrington, a young gay man whose study of the late flamboyant 60s TV personality Paul Lynde has morphed into an amusing Las Vegas stage act. The other experts advise that it is indeed possible to sound "less gay," but caution that, as with the characters in Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band, there is often a price to be paid. Thorpe includes a scene from the 1970 film directed by William Friedkin, in which the most "queeny" character at a birthday party, Emory (Cliff Gorman), confronts an imperious straight friend of the host. "I have such a problem with pronouns." "How many s's are there in pronouns?" "How'd you like to blow me?" "What's the matter, your wife got lockjaw?" "Faggot!"
At times, Do I Sound Gay? plays like a deft extension of the late Vito Russo's critique of film-industry homophobia in The Celluloid Closet. Visual quotes from Boys in the Band, Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, and a mean-spirited comedy routine from comic Louis C.K. demonstrate that the problem is both societal and personal. Thorpe employs a parallel analogy, the account of how his premature baldness also impacted his self-confidence as a newly out gay man. At first Thorpe compensated with a series of hair pieces. But although many said he looked younger and sexier with a wig, he decided that the disguise made him feel false, and therefore was too big a price to pay. My conversation with Thorpe illustrates how thorny the problems of identity, image and personal integrity have become for many gay men nearly half-a-century after Stonewall.
David Lamble: When you came out as gay in college, you changed, your voice changed. When did you become aware that you were gay as a kid?
David Thorpe: I became aware when I hit puberty. I was always attracted to boys.
Which is okay up to a certain age, and then the rules change.
Yes. I was in seventh grade in the early 80s. I was in South Carolina, it was the beginning of a conservative era, and certainly where I was gay people didn't exist, you know, men were men and women were women. Schoolkids enforce those stereotypes much more severely than adults. It was tough, I was kind of a fugitive from the beginning. My family moved to South Carolina when I was very young, from Pennsylvania. What's funny is that when my mother and brother are around Southerners, they have light Southern accents.
Then it can disappear, just like that?
Yes, we all code-switch, we all subtly change our voice. One of things I wanted to explore in the film is, When is changing your voice code-switching, being part of the community, and when are you caving in to homophobia or internalized homophobia? I mean, your eye color doesn't change, you can control how you dress, but your voice is a little more slippery when it comes to your identity.
Define the term code-switch.
Well, I'm not a linguist, but code-switching means changing the way you speak based on who you're with. Oprah is famous for code-switching, and Obama is also an example: if he's speaking at a black church, suddenly he's sounding more like an African American preacher. I pick those examples because everyone can relate to them, but we all do it. When adults talk to children, they change the way they speak. They say, "Oh Tommy, what a cute little shirt you have on." Their voice goes a little higher, and they may talk a bit more clearly. That's a kind of code-switching. Sometimes we find ourselves changing well beyond what we need to do because it's such a reflex to try to fit in.
When did you notice that it was a problem?
For me it first became a problem in middle school when I stepped on the bus. Soon after that I was being called "faggot" relentlessly every day and coming home in tears. I don't think I really knew what that was. That's when I realized that there was some sort of conventional way of being a boy that I wasn't succeeding at, and had to, in order to survive.
And you didn't even know it was a contest.
Yeah, listen, I'm over it, but it's still sad to think that we all, a lot of us, gay or not, went through that experience of being whipped into shape by the kids who were a little more sophisticated about being a boy or a girl.
How did your family treat you?
It was a mixed bag. For some members of my family it was a no-brainer, for others it took a long time. My mother and my stepfather took many years to get past what at the time was a really tricky subject. It was hard, but I feel really good about where we are now.
Even in the dreaded past, there were examples like Truman Capote and Paul Lynde of famous and successful gay men, if anything more successful because they were effeminate.
Exactly. Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly and a lot of these very flamboyant and successful 60s and 70s stars are fascinating because they seem so gay, but they were in this sort of glass closet where it couldn't be talked about, where this flamboyance might be coming from. Paul Lynde is such an intriguing figure. He was a huge star, he was on the cover of People. As one of my subjects says, he was bigger than John Wayne. But he couldn't say that he was a "fag." It all had to be implied, winked and suggested. You could look at Lynde and think he was a self-hating queen, but in another way you can think he was this amazing figure who managed to be wildly gay and successful, at a time when that wasn't supposed to happen.