Erik Piepenburg investigates what happens when some hot butch guys turn out to sound like little girls—and takes on the notion of “gay speech.”
All I can say is he looked butch to me.
Standing on a street corner in Chelsea one summer day was a 6-foot-3, ridiculously hairy hulk of a man wearing The Uniform: a wife beater, cargo pants, the latest sneakers (in a size well into the high teens), and sunglasses that made him look like a marine made over by Tom Ford.
Then he opened his mouth. “Gu-u-url, you shoulda s-s-s-e-e-en what I s-s-saw las-s-s’ night,” he purred deeply into his cell phone, with enough sibilance to make Paul Lynde sound like Vin Diesel by comparison.
The spell had been broken. Call it the “See Tarzan, Hear Jane” dilemma: A man judged by sight is judged quite differently by sound. As an old-school queen once told me regarding an allegedly butch number he’d picked up the night before: “Honey, he looked like rough trade at first. But then he opened his mouth, and I’ll be damned if a purse didn’t fall out.”
If clothes make the man, voice makes his manhood. As evidenced by my street encounter with Mr. Deceptively Masculine, how manly a man sounds when he speaks (or has sex) often determines how attractive he is to other men.
(Keep Reading: Out.com)
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