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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
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Yep, give me a guy who's engine runs with a little sugar in the tank. I'd take that any day over some guy who feels the need to refer to himself as "straight acting".
Gay voice = sexy voice.
Although I disagree about McKellen. Although he can do straight just fine when acting, in his regular speaking voice he definitely has at least a touch of the gay.
But, foreign accents tend to jam my gaydar.
(No, seriously, how could she not realize how many of the 2nd round are?)
Not much in the wallet at the moment but I'll try and put a few pounds into the KS before it finishes.
Now *this* is a question I want answered. It's almost worse for the straight guy with a non-manly or gay voice. Because dude gets persecuted from all sides - the homophobes, the libs who are pissed at him for being "closeted", and the ladies who are generally turned off by it. Poor guy doesn't get a break.
@9
"Foreign accents" sound gay?? Holy shit you live in a bubble. Were you aware that your American accent makes you sound dumb? True story.
Do you know how stupid you sound when you put words in people's mouths? Were you aware your brain makes you sound dumb to other people? True story.
However -- although there is academic literature on sociolinguistic markers of gay speech among men, there's precious little that I or my colleagues can find about gay speech among women. It's a gap in the literature that could be relatively easily filled (modulo the fact that collecting data about people's sexual orientation classifies your study as high-risk in the eyes of an IRB), but I don't do sociolinguistics.
I'm still occasionally hit on by guys at bars and especially when making my way through the gay neighborhoods down here in Portland. I always find it flattering, as most of the gay people I've known have been really interesting and cultured.
I'm trying to picture the list and wondering if it is a good one, like the guest list Truman Capote had put together for the Black and White Ball, or more like Nixon's enemies list.
@9: my bf is Korean and has a significant accent. When speaking English he doesn't "sound gay" to me at all. But when he's on the phone with his Korean friends, it's another matter entirely. Which I don't mind in the least.
He actually mentioned once how he was talking to a woman at a bus stop or something who assumed he was gay, and he was very shocked by that. I told him it was because of his voice, and he was surprised to hear that. I thought his voice was lovely and I really enjoyed listening to him (it helped that he was incredibly smart and very knowledgeable about a subject I find really interesting) but he had no idea that his voice was so gay.
He's so terribly conjectual.
Why he behaves that way, he's not gay!
He's just Lyle, he's swishy yes it's true
But he's as straight as me, and probably you!
The effeminate heterosexual
No use getting intellectual
Because nobody knows why
He runs like a girl, he throws like a girl,
Walks like a girl, talks like a girl
He's Lyle and I'll tell you so help me
He's all guy"
Read "Authority and American Usage" by David Foster Wallace. It's brilliant.
A primary function of vernacular and dialects such as teen slang and Ebonics is to signal that one is not a member of mainstream culture. And it works. So, if you have a mainstream job, it's hard to be effective if everything you say includes the implicit footnote "I am not like you people, and I reject your values."
The gay accent, in contrast, isn't really about rebelling against mainstream culture. It basically just says "I'm gay".
The BBC iPlayer website has one Kenneth Horne radio show episode per week. Right now, they're doing "Beyond Our Ken". Kenneth Williams is in the show, but not the Julian and Sandy skits. In a few months they should switch to "Round the Horne".
Aaaaand now I'm wondering if I have a "lesbian" voice. I want that documentary too!
I honestly think people are looking at the wrong thing when they speculate that gay voice is due to gay guys emulating adult women. I think it has much more to do with their peers. Little girls who are tomboys and hang out with all guys probably develop more masculine speech patterns- I know I have. The girls who hang out almost exclusively with other girls have girlier speech patterns, as do the boys who hang out with only girls. The boys who hang out only with boys end up with brospeak, while people who have both female and male friends when they're little probably end up with neither super-butch nor super-femme speech patterns.
It think it's in middle school that the boys with feminine speech patterns start getting made fun of, so they probably start butching it up. I don't think this happens to girls at all, because a masculine voice is considered more authoritative. So girls just never get noticed for having a masculine speech pattern- in fact, girls much more likely to get made fun of for the same thing as gay guys.
That's why I hate it. I feel underminded by the fact that it's not mine to control.
In past works of fiction, the gay characters did have a very effeminate voice and obvious mannerisms, but I've always thought that was just satire/homophobia at work there, and a mannerism some current-day gays would pick up as a way to make a statement, but not their normal voice. So I appear to be dumb to "the gay voice".
As for "girly talk" in grown women, I find it extremely irritating, and I associate it unavoidably to bottomless idiocy and stringent pettiness. I do have high-pitched female friends, but no girly-talking ones. I steer clear of those.
of all the people that make the grammatical mistake of using "I" where they should be using "me" (eg. "between you and I", "give the report to John and I"), it seems that gay men are hugely over represented.
There's a linguistic term for this, but it slips my mind and I don't feel like looking it up. Basically, it's a form of overcompensation. You're told as a kid never to say "Me and John are going to play", so some people take from that, "never say me".
I think this is related to the subject of this article. Some gay men are overly conscious of their voice and this spills into this very peculiar grammatical tick.
You do it too, Dan.
I was taught in English class "I" was nominative and "me" was accusative, so that we should err towards using "I" whenever we would use "me" in our native French. Can't "between you and I" ever be the subject of a sentence ?
Between you and me, there is love.
"there" is the subject of the sentence.
Sorry that I clash with your incredibly snobby, elitist, condescending theory about who could hear Glass as sounding gay.
I suspect Dan does it deliberately to be more colloquial and appear less formal. And of course, once it was pointed out that he was using an incorrect construction, he was going to make absolutely sure to continue using it. Because he's kind of like that on occasion. Between you and me, it's fine with me if he wants to be a bit of a dick, but I also wish he would sound like someone with a middle-school education. But hey, it's his podcast.
Never suggested that made him gay or that he wasn't really straight. Just that his voice has characteristics common among a lot of gay men. And I say that as an East coast, NY born and raised, current resident of the gayest city in the country who has been pretty much surrounded by gay guys since I was 15.
In other words, fuck you.
As an experiment, I did a video search of 'dan savage' and clicked a random link. I'm listening to a long conversation now between Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan.
Dan just said that someone obviously hadn't "read my book about Terry and I"
I don't know that the kind of hypercorrection you talk about is disproportionately used by gay men. I hear it all the time. It would make for an interesting study.
Kids naturally use 'me' instead of "I", but to use "I" instead of "me" requires practise and self-training.
Of course, I'm an English teacher, and he's a former French teacher, so we tend to be sticklers for grammatical detail.
And we both have gay voices.
Back in the days when being at my place of work meant hearing Dr Schlessinger's programme when not engaged on the telephone, I found considerable compensation in noting that I never heard a call in which the caller began the question with the infamous phrase, "Me and my husband..." as the subject of the opening sentence (it was almost in the class of fairy tales starting with, "Once upon a time...") that left me taking the caller's side. Nor did I when it began, "Me and my wife..." but that happened much less frequently. I must admit, though, that this was all before 2004, and I would not have objected to hearing either incorrect phrase used by half of a legally married same-sex couple just to hear how the call would have gone if it weren't terminated at once.
Ms Cute @64 - You seem to imply that "I & TSARY" and "TSARY & I" would be equally correct. But isn't it just as bad when one has a joint subject in more than one person to put them in the wrong order as it is to mix up subject with object? Or is it merely uncouth not to put a first person pronoun last? I think I used to know the exact rank a person has to hold at which it becomes proper to put a third person subject before a second person subject, but, not having cause to mingle with aristocracy, I'm sure I'd always use the construction, "You, Mr Savage and I hold remarkably similar opinions on the issue." Second person first; first person last.