So he had a gay accent, on top of a Jewish accent, on top of a Long Island accent.
I don’t think it’s a “gay” thing, so much as a “wants to be an artist” thing.
When I was in college, half of the art majors, and most of the theater majors, talked like Truman Capote, whether they were gay or straight.
One of my high school classmates had speech patterns fairly typical for our socio-economic class. Then he moved to New York, and worked in the theater. At the ten-year class reunion, he lisped, and swished, and conformed to the stereotype. At the twenty-year reunion, he was back to normal.
Not that simple. I’ve spent decades involved in professional opera, operetta, and theatre, and I’m also involved in organized Oz (as in Wizard) fandom, and whatever it is, it’s very nearly always a gay thang. (I’m straight, myself.)
A hypothesis I have, that I thought was Cecil’s but I don’t see in the column, is that “swishy”* straight men try to suppress it, lest people think they’re gay, whereas “swishy” gay men aren’t as worried about that (though they may have been more worried 20 years ago) – since, after all, they are gay.
On Saturday I went to a meetup for an online community, and the only other dude there had the mannerisms, and mentioned going on a date with a woman. So not all straight men suppress it, at least not successfully.
*The term used in the column. “Gay sociolect” is probably a more neutral term.
No, they just get that supremely annoying ‘baby doll’ garbage, ultra high giggly lispy ‘awen’t I jutht the cutest pwetty pwintheth’ crap.’ Bitch pwese… nothing makes me want a baseball bat as much as that. And I got stuck in a call center next to one for 7 months … I was almost driven to murder.
Yeah, that is baffling. There was a tiny indie film called “In A World” about voice-over artists, and one of the characters ran a school to teach woman how to improve their voices…and one of the flaws she could repair was “baby doll talk”.
It’s baffling, because some very bright people like journalist Jolie O’Dell have that. She was a guest on a webcast I watch and it took half the show to realize just how bright she was, because her baby doll talk voice reduced her apparent intelligence by at least 50 points.
I have spent enough time learning how to use my voice … my mom has a degree as a speech therapist so I grew up learning to use an inside voice, an outside voice, a telephone voice [slow down, drop to a lower register and enunciate clearly] and she never spoke to us with baby talk. Nothing I hate worse than that damned baby doll talk, though valley girl type crap and ghetto bother me especially if I know the person can speak perfectly good modern generic midwestern english.
Underneath my geek-speek sociolect is a Kansas City, Midwestern accent - basically the same one as Walt Disney. It is the ISO Standard American Accent.