Director: David Thorpe
Year Released: 2014
Rating: 2.0
Openly gay documentary filmmaker Thorpe is uncomfortable with his speaking voice, which he thinks is too "feminine," so he enlists the help of (several) speech experts to get him to speak in a more "straight" way - he also interviews other LGBT folk (including George Takai, Dan Savage and Tim Gunn) about their views on the issue (Gunn, as usual, is very amusing). There are some fascinating bits in here about gay culture's (supposed) fascination with "masculinity" and about whether the voice is a "give away" about a person's sexual orientation, but it plays out like a puffed-up short with much padding and repetition. Although at the end he concludes he's become more at ease with his speech, this left me feeling deeply sad, since I got the feeling many of the people he interviewed with a "gay voice" aren't - and will probably never be - completely at peace with it. Full disclosure: whenever I answer my parents' house phone, most people immediately think I'm my mother ... you'd think those cigarettes and Johnny Walker would have made me sounds like Tom Waits by now, but nope.
