Your popularity and recognition depend, frequently, on your voice and the impression it makes. —Eugene Feuchtinger, founder of the Perfect Voice Institute 

 

“CUT!” The instructor’s voice blasts through the hotel conference room filled with fellow fake eaters looking for their big break in fast food commercials.

When I was signed by a Chicago acting agency in my mid-twenties, my then-agent suggested to fork over one-hundred-fifty bucks to take a commercial acting workshop to learn the ropes of eating on camera. She insisted “the only way to get the good gigs” was to be classically trained in artificial eating. A real thing people pay money to do.

The instructor’s eyes jab into mine. “Listen. When you’re eating on camera, you have to really extenuate, dramatize the steps of eating.” His tone teeters from demanding to persuading. He lifts his hand to his mouth, takes a wide bite that parallels swallowing the head of an infant, then chews empty air like a dog ripping the pant legs of an intruder. He swings his chin back at me. “You ready to try this again?” 

I wasn’t. I didn’t want to be standing in front of a crowd of disinterested strangers being used as an example of how not to eat air pizza—I didn’t even want to be an actor. I fantasized about being a travel show host or an entertainment news correspondent dazzling on the red carpet with teeth bright as Wite-Out. It was a dream of mine to find some sort of validation from others, something my 20s were also about. As a closeted gay guy raised in the Midwest, fame was going to be some sort of liberation therapy. It was going to show the proverbial thems in my life that I had made it as an adult. I just wanted a gig that proved all my worth. But many I knew in the TV business insisted: “Start with commercials, then move up.” 

 “Now, don’t forget to say the line after the bite: ‘Safe to say this pizza is tops.’” My head bobbles at the instructor again. “ACTION!” 

I slowly open my mouth to place the invisible air triangle into it. My eyes fill with white as I open them in dramatic effect. I swivel my jaw with enthusiastic chews like a cow gnawing on grass, then smile. I look to the instructor for any urgent coaching. He’s leaning towards me, nodding with a mesmerized grin. 

Mid-chew I say, “Safe to say—”

“CUUUUUUUUUT!” The instructor woofs. My head tilts like a bird questioning a crumb tossed at me being a possible trap. “I’m sorry . . . can you start with the line again? Just repeat it . . .” He rolls the paper into his hands, clutching it like a tubed kaleidoscope. 

“Safe—” 

“Not sssafe. It’s ‘safe.’ Your ‘s’ is . . . it’s lasting too long, too sharp.” He crouches on his haunches, exposing sockless ankles in his Crocs. 

“Safe,” I parrot.

“Safe. Say it like me . . .” He’s so close to me that I can smell the mint almost covering his coffee breath. 

“Safe.”

“No. Say it with more of a growl, huskier. Not a sassy pitch. You’re sounding like a cheerleader selling pizza. Give me the quarterback.” 

Two guys with soap opera–hunk jawlines, in tight black T-shirts outfitted over muscles, are seated in the back row of the class, snickering with their arms crossed. Still, as an adult gay man, having brawny cis-straight men in an audience is as terrifying as giving a speech in high school sociology.

“Sure. I’ll try—” 

“See, right there. Too high. You were like, ‘Sure!’ Like . . . a peppy little waitress. Try this with me: Sure.”

“Sure.” 

“Lower. Sure.” 

I drop my head low as if the angle of my neck would add to the plummeting of decibels. 

“Sure.” I go for a gravelly rasp like a cowboy from an old western with a dab of accidental southern drawl: “Shore can.”

“Hmm, okay . . .” His shoulders lift to his ears as he relieves a sharp breath of air with a huff. “Well, let’s give someone else a try.” 

I slump the weight of my body into a cold foldout chair in the back row of the room, feeling defective like I did back when I was nine.  

_____

“STHnake!”

I loathed every time I had to be in the teeny room with Ms. Van who drenched herself in a scent that stunk of every department store perfume counter mixed together. I also hated every s word in the fucking English language that sabotaged nine-year-old me. But I especially hated one specific s word: “speech therapy.” 

I kind of knew why I was there. My teacher told my parents that she was concerned with the way my tongue seemed confused and forced me to talk in a way that “just seemed off.” Looking back the “off” was that my tongue was too tangled and my voice was too pitchy, too high. I mostly just didn’t understand why I was pulled out of class two days a week for over a month and, still, nothing was changing, except the therapist’s patience. 

“No, it’s ‘ssssnake!’” Her pitch amplifies and hisses the “s” sound again. 

“STTTHHHHHHH.” I focus on her rouge-rimmed glasses that match the red of her hair. I pretend to really care about her dedication, but there was never a moment I didn’t want to go back to my fourth-grade classroom. Mostly, I was tired of missing reading rainbow time, when the classroom lights would go black and LeVar Burton’s soothing voice would talk books. I dreamt about marrying LeVar because he liked books just like I liked books, but I never told anyone that I wanted to marry him because I knew marrying him was just as wrong as the way I talked. 

“I’m just not sure why this isn’t working,” she snaps. Her wrist tosses cursive scribbles across a lined paper. Every week her pen color changed, something most nine-year-old boys probably wouldn’t notice. But I did. Last week was green, pink the week before, and a few weeks ago she used a pencil that had a tiny troll doll with fiery orange hair bouncing on top of it. She uses the sharp tip of the pen cap and points at the picture of the cartoon reptile with googly eyes again and says, “Let’s try this. Just say ‘Sssss’ like the sound of a snake.”

“STTHHHHH.”

“Okay, erm, try this.” She widens her mouth, slowly clamps down both rows of her teeth together. “Now, say the letter ‘s’ just using your teeth like this.” She whispers the sound of the evil devil consonant out.  

“StttttHHHHHH.” Spit flutters from my mouth.

“Stop using your tongue!” 

“I’m trying not to!” Why did it always get so hot in that room?

“Well, you’re not trying hard enough!” Suddenly, the friendly lady’s casual jottings become frustrated scribbles. “You have one of the worst lisps I’ve heard in years. If you don’t work harder than you are now, you will have it forever, and that’s not okay.” 

My stomach collapses like a roof not meant to carry the weight, dropping to the bottom of my belly button. Her head shakes back and forth as she feverishly scratches purple observations into her notebook. Her wrist continues to glide across the page with so much frustration that the sound of her dangling bracelet sounds like a fork scraping across a tablecloth.

“Why isn’t it ‘okay’?” My voice sounds even tinier and more high-pitched than usual. She takes her pen, points it at me as our eyes align.

“You don’t sound like how a young boy should. You don’t sound normal.” Her scowl says enough, but the lip curl “tsk” of disgust is the placing of the crown on my head.

A few weeks later, I graduate out of speech therapy with a certificate that has a googly-eyed snake sticker in the lower corner and the same voice I’d now learned to hate. 

_____

“Why do you talk like a girl?” Jordan asks, sitting pretzel-legged kitty-corner from me on the basketball court during P.E. my sophomore year. 

“Voice confrontation,” they call it, when you hate your own voice. Countless people will admit they can’t stand hearing a recording of themselves. For the majority, they hate their voice because the little bones in their ear, the ossicles, fool them into thinking they sound higher pitched than they actually do. It’s biology for most, but I hated mine because it was a siren for my latent homosexuality that everyone wanted to constantly sound off. All I could think to do was try to muffle it by not speaking up, which is how I spent most of high school.  

 “Hey . . . you hear me? I know you do, girl talker. Say something. I want to hear you talk.” He never said a word to me outside of P.E. or any other time in the gym unless he was bored and wanted to entertain his friends at my expense.

Why do we have gym class? Why is this still a thing? What are we really learning here? Most of my high school gym experience, I learned that what went in one ear were the rules of football/basketball/soccer and what came out the other ear was how to cope with every single boy in class begging that I don’t show up on their team, or them screaming at me that I suck and screw everything up in any physical activity I attempt. So while most kids were practicing pivots and drills, I had begun to develop a different type of skill set—pretending I didn’t hear someone trying to make fun at my expense. I’d now had years of experience. 

“I know you can hear us!” now Chad, sitting two rows over under the basketball hoop, yells across the checkerboard layout of the class. “You sound gay! You’re probably gay. Say something . . . SAY SOMETHING, gay-rod!” Now the four or five other students near us have pivoted their bodies towards me. 

The art of pretending to not hear is tricky because it really means controlling your facial expressions: tightening the jaw, gazing the eyes over the nose to not make eye contact directly with anyone or anything, the muscles in your face going statue-stoic. 

“Say something, faggy!” Chad’s laughter clinches around his slur. “Faggy! Faggy!”

But there’s only so much someone can fake-hear.

“STOP. PLEASE STOP!” My begging sounded more like a hoarse whisper than a yell. I wish I could scream loud enough to echo off the gym’s exposed ceiling.

“Oh, my fucking God, did you hear him; he was all, “Pleeeassse, STTTHOP. STTHOP.” Chad flicks his wrist down like a loose hinge needing tightening. 

Another guy behind me, someone I thought was normally pretty nice, chants, “STTTHOOP, PLEASSSTH STTTOP. He stands up and swishes his hips back and forth with one hand propped on his side, his untied tennis shoes screeching across the shiny wood of the basketball court. He swishes around like he’s carrying a purse on his forearm.

When the P.E. teacher catches the boy strutting, he steps in between them and me. There’s an abrupt hush. He swivels his hips under his bulging belly and turns towards me to say, “You know, if you just stopped sounding like that, they’d stop making fun of you.”

_____

“Ah, baseball player this week. Nice look on you,” Newscaster Tim says as he pulls the barstool away from the wood counter I’m wiping down. My hand is already on the bottle of Dewar’s for his regular double shot and soda. I had been bartending in the popular gay neighborhood of North Chicago only for a few months—another job in my twenties to salvage a depleting checking account and lack of freelance jobs—and had gotten pretty comfortable with regulars like Newscaster Tim. All the bartenders there called him “Newscaster” because of his salt-and-pepper hair parted on the left, chiseled jawline, and ABC network veneer smile. He also always wanted to narrate his opinion about everything. 

Friday is always jock night at the bar. The DJ blares Jock Jam remixes of “Let’s Get Ready to Rumble” and “Whoomp There It Is.” The place is filled with backward-baseball-hat-wearing men holding vodka sodas or beer bottles. Bartending at a gay bar in Chicago was both work and acting, especially when you had to dress up. But it was a place where I could be the part of me that I had hidden for years—the gay me. 

“Well, ya know when you get the chance to wear tight white pants after Labor Day you go for it,” I snicker as I set his drink on the coaster.

“You could totally pull it off, well . . . until you open your mouth. Then the gay cat is out of the damn bag.” He barks out an on-air anchor “har har.” His hands clasp together in front of his glass as he checks out the twenty-something olive-skinned guy sitting next to him. Even as an out adult gay man, I’m antagonized by other gay men who deem it preferable to have the more masculine larynx. 

My body tenses. My lips compress. The fibers of my neck muscles pinch. Silence had become my mechanism, to only speak when I knew my voice would be heard, not judged for what it sounded like. I want to say to him that he should know so many gay men with “undesirable” high-pitched vocal tones that are mocked within the LGBTQ community— persecuted even—as gay cliches that “give the masc guys a bad rep.” I want to say to him how the uncontrollable vibrations of my vocal cords have forced me and so many gay men with voices like mine to feel safer in silence than speaking their truths—even in a space, like a gay bar, where I should be celebrated. 

But I don’t say anything because I know he won’t listen to me; my voice isn’t tuned to his liking. Instead, I place his couple-buck tip into my jar and leave him to flirt with the guy half his age wearing a Bulls baseball hat. 

___

A few weeks after the imaginary food–eating workshop, I’m in my apartment, deleting random junk emails to kill time. The instructor had sent feedback to my agent, and my agent had forwarded it to me. 

 

1. Workshop Feedback

He has a T.V. smile, but my concern is the effeminate way he pronounces certain words. It will be nearly impossible for him to be hired for a mainstream campaign with speaking parts if the character is not intended to be an effeminate archetype. I advise speech therapy or a vocal coach to help otherwise his acting career could be a challenge. 

 

That same day, my agent called me to ask if I had seen the feedback email. The overt concern in her voice mimicked that of someone calling to tell me I had cancer.

“I highly suggest a voice coach.” Her tone suddenly lightened from cancer-calm to coersive. “We can fix this.”

What I read in between her plea: “We can fix you.”  

I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t the first time I was told my voice was flawed. My lack of baritone, masculine cadence paired with a sharp s sound that is deemed more feminine made it almost too apparent that I wasn’t sounding the way men should sound, society tells us to sound. Men should sound dashing like Sean Connery or powerful like James Earl Jones or husky like John Wayne. I wanted to tell her that I had spent years attempting to disguise my voice or judging my voice and learning about why gay men sound so differently and if there was a way to fix me. That I felt trapped behind this speaker. 

Then I wanted to tell her that there was nothing actually wrong with how I talk. The way that I speak my words is in my DNA. Who I am through and through will define how I sound. Speech scientists even acknowledge that a misarticulated s in homosexual men is more of a higher pitch than in a diagnosable lisp. Gay men also often pronounce the s with higher-frequency spectral peaks and for longer than most heterosexual men. I am gay, but I am not flawed. Our voices are who we are. If you don’t like how I sound, then you don’t like who I am. 

I wanted to tell her that another study—done by Fabio Fasoli of Gay Voice Research Project—found that auditory gaydar (the use of voice to assume homosexuality) has led to gay men being bullied, discriminated against in the workplace, and caused many gay men to give up public speaking. Most gay men would rather stay silent with their opinions, ideas, and words than speak up. Their attempt to change the way they speak has led to depression and social anxiety. 

I wanted to tell her that instead of being on their side, she could be a pioneer and sling my voice into the markets like a prized goose so that my voice would be represented in commercials for things that husky-larynx men sell—cars, grills, Home Depot blurbs—instead of recalibrating the gay man’s voice to a pitch that we as a society are so used to hearing. What if, maybe, people started hearing my kind of voice outside of sassy sitcom characters or one-liners by wedding planners in rom-coms? We wouldn’t even have a problem. Maybe if people would tune their ears instead of expecting us to recalibrate our voices to how people think men’s voices should sound, we could all move on. 

I wanted to also say, “Okay! Of course! Sign me up!” because people-pleasing for years after being beaten down by others was easier than speaking my truth. 

 “I’d prefer not to” is what slipped from my lips.

Her voice stutters. “I’m sorry, n—no? But . . . this, this is the only way you’ll be successful in—”

“I said ‘no.’”  

Her irritated sigh was her goodbye as the call dropped. 

And for the first time, I had really heard myself. And I liked the way I sounded.

 

---

 

Byron Flitsch is a writer, storyteller, and teacher currently living in Los Angeles. He’s been published in The Advocate, MTV, Chicago Sun Times, Forbes, Time Out and more. He’s told live for The Moth, on the Comedy Central Stage in Los Angeles, and Chicago’s 2nd Story. His work has also been included in two non-fiction anthologies: Windy City Queer and Briefly Knocked Unconscious by a Low-Flying Duck: 2nd Story Stories. He’s currently wrapping up on his essay collection on growing up gay and the healing of all that gay mayhem as an adult with the hopes of finding representation for the collection’s publishing.  You can visit his site at www.byronflitsch.com, react him at byron@byronflitsch.com,  and follow him on Instagram. You can also stalk him shopping at Target on any given Saturday.