Sounding Gay: Not As Lite As You May Think

The GLBT documentary genre isn’t really compelling viewing unless your tastes are drawn to a predictable tableau of ideology within a freak show: a GLAAD-ly blessed pity-fest of dubious intent and questionable pedigree. Usually short on challenging points-of-view but long on the assumption that there's a generic LGBT person, you're left wondering just how many more “journeys” are there to be undertaken across a well-trod landscape.

With “Do I Sound Gay?” David Thorpe takes on the cringe-worthy topic with all the panache of an excellent journalist: here the tabloidish “both sides of the story” is eschewed in favor of pursuing the more truthful “all sides of the story”. And that’s exactly why the documentary is so thought-provoking, and just so damned good.  It’s to our great benefit that Thorpe as protagonist doesn’t egotistically presume to know himself very well: quite clearly he doesn’t, nor does he let personal vanity get in the way of letting others who clearly love him rat him out.  (Subsequent to the film’s release, his more stridently bitchy gay critics have helped him out with a “diagnosis” of self-loathing - that reliable old form of personal attack which often screams more about the user’s under-threat malice than anything else.)

“Do I Sound Gay?” works well because of its subversive elements, and they are many. Ultimately of course it’s not about David Thorpe at all, or whether or not he’s lovable as he presents himself. Undue weight isn’t given to gender issues, but you must have slept through the show if you didn’t leave asking yourself about the very broad implications of sounding gay in a world of entrenched sexual and gender binaries. Closer to the bone, the viewer may very well wonder how and what gay men communicate with each other (and to the world at large) beyond “Yes I have Histrionic Personality Disorder but it’s you who’ll suffer from it”.

 “Just be who you are!” may be a likely or satisfactory response to an apparently silly question (no spoilers!), but Thorpe isn’t asking a silly question. Unless you live by slogans alone you’ll be asking a lot more questions than the documentarian presumes to answer…this time around, at least.