The Power and Trauma of Gay Male Speech
Plenty of gay males can tell you the journey of coming to accept their voices. A voice that forced them to reckon with things they weren’t ready to discuss for years to come. The very thing that made you stand out from others in school and became the bully's easiest way to get under your skin. A piece of you that you largely had no control over despite the many videos you would watch on how to deepen your voice.
I was 12 years old when I started to become insecure about my own voice. It was around that time that the boys in my class started to experience the first signs of puberty. The first sproutings of a mustache formed, the smell started to escape their armpits and the adam’s apples that grew to support the deepness in their voices. I was experiencing all the same things around that age except it seemed my voice was slightly different from the others. It wasn’t that it was overtly soft or feminine, but it didn’t have the typical “male” sound to it. Of course, at that age, there was no deep analysis into why my voice sounded the way it did other than it was different from others.
It took years of code-switching, acceptance of my voice, and ultimately embrace of my sexual orientation to come to love and appreciate the voice that I had. Regardless of people being able to easily identify me as gay, my voice was a sign of strength and resilience. That…
