Hey, Esprix – no driving by the thread! What with all the avatar of gay wisdom, etc… what say you to the sociological implications of a non-regional minority affecting a regionally-based identifier?
Would this only be possible after an association with other gay teens in one’s formative years? Is it a media-based trope for lazy self-identification? A legacy of the past used only for camp value? Has it changed over the years?
Do I need to cross-post to the legendary “ask the gay guy” threads to get a full response?
Why do you have to look down on people for how they live their life? What does it really matter to you? What in the hell does this have to do with the rest of your OP other than to insult gay people?
Just out of curiosity, how many gay men do you know that walk up to people and say “Hi, I’m Joe, and I like to boink guys in the butt”? Just because someone speaks in a campy tone is not an automatic “HEY EVERYBODY! I’M GAY!” statement. My friends and I do this all the time. Does this make me an honorary gay man, even though I’m a straight woman? And how would you explain the many ‘campy-voiced’ men that I’ve met in my life that are straight? [broad generalization] And they don’t even work in theater! [/broad generalization] (Granted, I have met plenty of gay men who camp it up, and mostly just for fun, or to piss off people with a bad attitude.)
And they are just who they are. So, why does it bother you for people to do whatever they want with their voices to be who they are? It’s not how people speak that is important. It’s what they have to say that matters. I personally find a lot of rap music annoying and I can’t stand the voices of some of the people. But the words that they are saying are the important part. There is a lot to be said for learning to look past things you don’t care for to see what’s inside.
Com2Kid, I think you need to take a step back and evaluate your opinion of people in general. I guess it may seem hard to look past the physical part of a person sometimes, but you’ve got to learn to look inside a person. Otherwise, you’ll just be a cranky, narrow-minded person who complains about silly things like speech inflections on a message board.
Skerri, who from now on will read Com2Kid’s posts in a totally campy, Big-Gay-Al voice…
Living in a city teeming with French fags, I can attest to the fact that the voice thing is not confined to English speakers.
I’ll add to what I said before about having spoken with a “gay lilt” since before I knew I was gay - I was not part of any “community” then, so that argument doesn’t hold water, IMO.
I think it comes from the rather fucktarded phrasing of the OP. No doubt it’s an interesting question–it’s always interesting to me to think about sociolinguistics and hear what other people have to say about the way others talk. However, when a poster writes something that confrontational and rude, you’re going to have some people angry.
I always thought that the accent was natural to some gay men, although I guess some may affect it. I have also known gay men that don’t have that accent. I don’t know of any lesbian accent, but I don’t know many lesbians. The few I have known have not had any discernible accent other than a regional accent.
Growing up, one of my childhood friends, for as long as I knew him, had a gay accent (much like Dana Carvey’s “Effeminate Heterosexual” character on SNL, albeit not as exaggerated). Even at age 5-6, when kids don’t have the hormones kicking in to affect their speech, this kid spoke with that gay accent.
His family moved away just before he reached his teen years. I learned years later from a mutual friend that he visited that he was gay. It didn’t surprise me; in fact, I would have been more surprised to have learned years later that he wasn’t gay.
I have not known any confirmed heterosexuals with this accent, although I do know people with the accent whose sexual orientation I don’t know about. It’s not like I’m out taking polls or anything to find out this vital information:p
Consequently, I don’t think that the accent is necessarily fake. Some may fake it, but some just have it naturally.
Do you think you might have known on some level and then subcounciously picked up on that particular identifier before you consciously knew? I’m not saying this is the case, I’m just curious.
Actually, rereading that sentence, I’m not sure how you could answer it. It looks a lot like “Hey, do you know if you knew before you knew?”
I mainly am interested to find out if there isn’t some genetic component that predisposes people to this type of speech pattern and if there is if it can be correlated with homosexuality. I know that this is a hot button issue (i.e. is homosexuality genetic or not… and should we even try to find out… and if we knew what would we do with that knowledge…) but I am curious about things like that. I like to know what makes humans do the things they do. At the same time I realize that it may be impossible to really get an answer for most behaviours.
Ok. I believe I have just written the most confusing / unclear post I’ve ever written. Mea culpa!
I’ve known heterosexual males that spoke with the gay inflection. However, most of them have careers in the theatrical arts; those that don’t are otherwise very involved in the arts community. I have a friend that perfers to call the inflection a “creative accent.”
I used to live in a neighborhood that has a large lesbian population. I identified a distinctive lesbian inflection – dry and serious, with a half-question lilt of intonation toward the end of most declarative sentences. I know straight women that speak with the inflection, but more often than not they are “tomboyish” or “athletic.”
Maybe. It’s certainly worthy of a frank discussion.
:rolleyes:
Oh puh-fuckin-lease.
If there was a “pile-on”, then it was certainly warranted by the tone and language of the OP, in that it was a slam disguised as a question (Personally, I think Com2 and Surreal should go start their own little message board). If the OP didn’t mean to be rude and antagonistic, then monkeys will be flying out of my butt any minute now…
…
looks back…
nope.
No monkeys yet.
Now, as far as the “accent” goes, I have wondered about that too, while acknowledging that of course all homosexual men don’t speak that way, while some straight men do. The OP is guilty of not looking at the entire population. He claims to know 4 guys who are gay and speak that way. Well, how many does he know who are gay and don’t? Or does he even know?
As to why speech patterns among certain groups may be prevalent, I think that Francesca’s post summed it up just fabulously.
Hey, I had a thought - maybe the “gay accent” is much more prevalent than we thought, but it’s prevalent among all men. If that’s the case, it would be straight men who are affecting an accent, i.e., something a little more butch so people won’t assume they’re gay. The men who are gay, however, don’t feel a need to change their speech patterns, because, as we gay folk know, once you come out, you realize how patently ridiculous society’s sexual mores are - after defying the whole society-mandated “boy/girl” mentality, everything else is up for grabs, and a few sibliant "s"es ain’t nothing compared to the joy of being a drag queen, bull dyke, leather man or rice queen. (Ooo, did I just say that? :eek: ) We’re much more likely to be true to ourselves than those hapless, fake straight guys who don’t have the guts to speak a little liltly around their bar buddies. COWARDS!
You may be on to something, Exprix. I will admit that when I speak to my dad (who doesn’t know I’m gay), I speak slower and lower than I do when I’m talking to anyone else. I’ve done this for years, long before I ever came out even to myself. So I’m affecting a “butch” accent to avoid being disowned.
Anyone else find parallels between Cecil’s posting and this thread? Including, I note, the defenders of good gaydar declaiming the need for such affectation.
Ok, sure, the phrasing in the OP was maybe a little fucktarded, though I’ve hardly noticed sober phrasing on such subjects leading to less pilings-on. Posing any questions at all about gay life is like asking questions about Fidel in Florida. Let me then cautiously take up the 'tard flag; In Cecil’s informative investigation, an accent is explained as normal for a ghettoized minority. Unfortunately, outside of Chelsea, I am at a loss to think of any other actual regional concentration of gay speakers. They may certainly be “Ghettoized,” as in marginalized, but are certainly not as a general rule, growing up in the same neighborhood, so I tend to discount this as a rhetorical diversion.
Dialects refer to locations and inform a trained ear from what province you sprang forth – anthropologists can tell what part of Russia one is from by the accent; however the flaming accent doesn’t contain a regional signifier, it contains a sexual signifier, therfore are we arguing there is a secret society of gay cablists who teach gay children to speak? Gay camp? A gay gene that causes sibilancy? I think not.
This leaves us with a media-liberace theory, which then, would imply that those gays who do the accent are imitating the gay media stereotype, which would explain the scorn from the normal talking gays. Possible? Certainly, when playing GVB, I’ve been known to get a little dramatic – like accidentally falling into a brogue when speaking to a scotsman, eh?
My wife, like me, was born in Northern New York and spent most of her life there. But after her mother’s death, her father took her and her brother to Jacksonville, FL, to live for a six-months period. She came back with a lovely Southern drawl that took months to fade.
Since then every time she has returned to the South and hears people talking in one of the Southern accents (there are several) she naturally falls back into her Jacksonville drawl.
So I would not rule out the unconscious-influence idea totally.
However, it occurs to me that prior to modern gay liberation, the use of “camp speech” was was one way in which gay people could show solidarity for each other and rejection/defiance of the social norms that were condemning them. Though I was not at all acquainted with much of anybody who was “out” at that time, I can see quite clearly the idea of a subculture adopting a particular argot or “style” as part of a group coherence thing being a most reasonable explanation, given the climate of the times.
(Granted, I have met plenty of gay men who camp it up, and mostly just for fun, or to piss off people with a bad attitude.)