Archive for the ‘Gay voice’ Category

Pengrooms on parade

July 13, 2024

A surprise from my tiny family this morning, as my grandchild Opal presented me with two gifts: the children’s picture book The Pengrooms by Paul Castle (Paul Castle Studio, 2022), together with an adorable plushie toy of Pringle the Pengroom — Pringle, who is grooms with Finn (both sporting rainbow bow ties, in case you missed the same-sex theme). The cover of the book, showing the couple atop a wedding cake, with the publisher’s blurb:


(#1) Follow Pringle and Finn, two penguins with big hearts, as they deliver wedding cakes to their friends in the animal kingdom. Each cake tells a story, and each [same-sex] wedding offers a challenge that Pringle and Finn must face together. The Pengrooms is an enduring tale about love, diversity, and the importance of working as a team.

Pringle is larger than Finn — couples differ in many ways — but they’re equal partners as a team. The Pringle plushie:


(#2) Pringle, with a really big bow tie

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Posted in Books, Effeminacy, Gay voice, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Penguins, Rainbow, Social interactions, Sociocultural Roles, Toys | Leave a Comment »

Pleasantly gay and deeply serious

June 29, 2024

Noticed for the first time yesterday, on Alex Wagner Tonight on MSNBC, 6/28, in “‘Republicans in robes’: Supreme Court critics see politics behind action on [the Grabpussy] immunity case”, on-line here: commenter Mark Joseph Stern (a senior writer covering courts and the law for Slate Magazine), in his pleasantly gay persona — an engaging fem (vs. butch) presentation of himself — while, with deep seriousness and evident passion, picking apart the Supreme Court’s behavior in the immunity case.

What came to my consciousness for the first time was the gayness of his persona, a collection of his specific variants of fem characteristics, including his particular gay voice and his particular gay eye gestures (eye widening, some flirtation with eye roll and slant-eye). Wonderful that he doesn’t edit out these behaviors, even if many people take them to be indicators of a superficial mentality (just like a dumb broad”, they think to themselves).

I had somehow not attended to any of this the day before, 6/27, when MJS was again on Alex Wagner Tonight, in “‘A seismic shift’: Supreme Court Chevron ruling radically alters U.S. government with power grab”, on-line here; or in his earlier appearances on her show, explaining the intricacies of various US courts to the MSNBC audience. But now I’m a fan, of his brand of a fem persona, combined with visible playfulness and enjoyment in his own performance, and of his elegant explanations of complex legal and political matters, in which his expertise is combined with visible, urgent, commitment to a system of moral values.

I see lot of this in my gay world: pleasantly gay and deeply serious, in tandem. In a while I’ll pull up, from my earlier postings, another example of this pairing, with all the details wildly different from MJS’s case.

But first, more about MJS.

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Posted in Effeminacy, Facial expression and gesture, Gay porn, Gay voice, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language and the law, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

He opened his mouth

October 5, 2017

… and a/his purse dropped / fell out.

Meaning: and he revealed himself to be a flaming faggot. Said by someone (usually a gay man) who is distancing himself from flaming faggots and (usually) expressing disdain for them. A variant of the formula in an ecard:

    (#1)

(Eventually there will be a bit of sex talk, from Dan Savage, but otherwise this material shouldn’t be problematic.)

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Posted in Formulaic language, Gay voice, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Movies and tv | 3 Comments »

On the fierce femininity of drag queens

June 12, 2017

Linguistics news from Stanford: the public portion of a PhD oral exam, next Monday, 6/19/17, 3-4:15: Jeremy Calder, Handsome Women: A semiotics of non-normative gender in SoMa, San Francisco.

Drag queens in the 2015 SoMa “Oasis Follies” drag night

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Posted in Gay voice, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Sociolinguistics, Stanford | Leave a Comment »

More on sounding gay

July 10, 2015

Back on June 11th, I posted about the documentary “Do I Sound Gay?”, as I was about to be interviewed by a journalist about it. I had a number of critical things to say about parts of the film, though I didn’t post them here. Now NPR’s Terry Gross has interviewed two of the principals in it, the filmmaker David Thorpe and a speech pathologist, Susan Sankin, with whom Thorpe worked in an attempt to sound “less gay”.

Enraged by this interview, Sameer ud Dowla Khan (a phonetician at Reed College) wrote an open letter to Gross, which Mark Liberman has now posted on Language Log (with a link to Fresh Air and one to a transcript of the interview). Khan has many of the same criticisms of the interview that I had of the trailer for the film (I haven’t been able to view the whole film), both of which exhibit deep ignorance about simple (and well-known) facts about language in social life. Some excerpts from Khan’s letter follow.

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Posted in Gay voice, Gender and sexuality, Language in social life, Language in the media, Sociolinguistics | 1 Comment »

Do I Sound Gay?

June 11, 2015

That’s the title of a new documentary movie. From the website:

Do I Sound Gay? A documentary about finding your own voice

(Director David Thorpe seeks advice from vocal coaches, linguists, historians, friends,  strangers, celebrities and others in order to better understand his voice. “Where does my ‘gay voice’ come from?” he asks.)

Is there such a thing as a “gay voice”? Why do some people “sound gay” but not others? Why are gay voices a mainstay of pop culture — but also a trigger for anti-gay harassment? The feature documentary Do I Sound Gay? explores these questions and more and includes revealing interviews with Margaret Cho, Tim Gunn, Don Lemon, Dan Savage, David Sedaris and George Takei.

I’m about about to be interviewed by a journalist in connection with the movie, but without having seen the thing (it premiered at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival but won’t be released in theaters until July 10th, starting in NYC). Considerable trepidation.

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Posted in Gay voice, Gender and sexuality, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »