American writer-director David Thorpe turns the camera – or more importantly the microphone – on himself to create this engaging, lively documentary about gay identity. It starts with Thorpe explaining how, following a break up with a boyfriend, he comes to hate the way he talks and decides to see if he can eradicate all the up notes, longer vowels, and overenunciated consonants that mark out his voice as gay sounding.
In his quest to find out what it means to “sound gay”, Thorpe meets speech therapists, psychologists and experts in linguistics as well as various random famous people (Project Runway’s Tim Gunn, the writer-broadcaster and humourist David Sedaris, the comedian Margaret Cho and actor George Takei, among others) who all have, of course, wildly different opinions on the subject. But the point is inclusiveness, not conclusiveness, and that makes this open, honest and endearingly slapdash work especially interesting – although British viewers may be a little baffled by some of the film’s overlong digressions about, for instance, US gameshow star Paul Lynde.
