Reared in front of the television, I might have spent as many hours watching films and shows as I spent interacting with my parents. I remember him in this pose, somberly concentrating, so absorbed he’d virtually dissolve within his listening. In a handful of old photographs, he is dressed in one of his Grateful Dead T-shirts and wearing a pair of headphones-sulking, slouched in an armchair next to his turntable and rack of records.
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Such a fixation on music marked my childhood.
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But the dates don’t corroborate this statement my somewhat premature birth occurred a full twelve months later. Once, he boasted that my mother discovered she was pregnant with me while he was working at the inaugural Farm Aid benefit concert of September 1985. To remind us of which side was inflicted with hearing loss (so we’d speak nearer to his better ear), he wore an earring in his right lobe-coincidentally, a signal associated with male homosexuality in the late eighties and early nineties, which provoked my peers to broadcast the rumor that he was queer.Īlthough he frequently changed employers and professions, he did keep the steady weekend gig as audio engineer for local and visiting bands, and he picked up numerous odd stage-production jobs, most notably for the Rolling Stones’ “Steel Wheels” tour in 1990. However, he possessed perfect pitch he could play, by ear, any given melody on a keyboard, and he claimed to have superior hearing on his left side-his hearing on the right side, damaged from having stood next to a loudspeaker during his decades of moonlighting as an audio engineer.
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He was a drummer in high school, but beyond that, he didn’t pursue expertise in any instrument, and his singing voice was treacly. Now, let’s acknowledge that those dominant, legitimized norms have assigned explicit but arbitrary attributes to “masculine” and “feminine” behavior, which queer people transgress. If we’re talking about queer people, then we’re primarily referring to people who prefer nonconforming sex and gender presentations. Here, let’s define queer: “ whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant”-according to queer theorist David M. There, the cultivation of my personality commenced, kindled by the incandescence of a female-bodied singer. My mother loves to reminisce that even before I learned to walk, every time a certain 1987 Pepsi commercial aired-in which a vending machine opens a portal into a crowded nightclub where Gloria Estefan is exuberantly lip-synching a verse from “Conga” (its lyrics replaced by Pepsi marketing slogans), backed by the members of Miami Sound Machine miming its unmistakable instrumentals-I’d crawl to the television, pull myself up, press my hands against the screen, and bounce to the beat of the song. Is there a fundamental “gay voice?” What are the features of a gay voice? Guests:īenjamin Munson, Professor in the Department of Speech, Language, Hearing Sciences at the University of Minnesota.You can hear, as soon as I start to speak-effeminate inflection, nasal vowels, slight lisp-qualities of tone that may sound dissonant from my gender presentation: a queer voice.
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Some say the gay voice is an affectation, some say it’s an expression of one’s sexual identity, some say they have no idea why the gay voice exists. The film features conversations between Thorpe and a range of people, including gay cultural icons George Takei and Dan Savage, to linguists, to a speech pathologist to total strangers. The documentary is appropriately titled, “ Do I Sound Gay?,” where filmmaker David Thorpe explores the cultural and sociological meanings behind the linguistic phenomenon known as the “gay voice.”