Of all the injustices of childhood, being mocked for your voice has a particular sting. If you’re meticulous, you can choose what you say and how you say it. But when you let your guard down—and who can keep it up forever?—your real voice waits patiently to slip out.

I was born in England to American parents, and lived there long enough to have an English accent for much of my adolescence. Because I was incredibly small, had buckteeth, and couldn’t pronounce the letter “r,” I sounded like a small, shrill hybrid of Elmer Fudd and Julie Andrews. Now, watching home videos, I find it hilarious. At the time, though, it was humiliating. The first time I remember being teased for it was when I moved to Colorado. This wasn’t motivated by patriotic disdain for the UK, so much as a kid’s ability to isolate anything peculiar and mock it. I made a concerted effort to sound American in response. But something residual, something non-geographical, continued to haunt me. I never could say “s” fast enough. I said “like” a lot. I always uptalked, and my friends said I always sounded “nice”. In high school, when I was mocked for speaking the way I did it had nothing to do with sounding outlandish. Mine was a voice everyone was familiar with, and they knew what it signified: That I was gay. It was true. My voice knew who I was before I did.

I suspect many queer people will identify with being bullied not only for what they say, but how they say it. Virtually every parody—malicious or otherwise—of gay men includes a nasal, lisping, high-pitched vocal timbre. Even though sexuality itself is interior, one’s behavior and mannerisms are used to infer with whom they like to go to bed. Do I Sound Gay?, a documentary by filmmaker David Thorpe opening this week at IFC, probes the history, science, and cultural significance of the gay male voice. The film is structured around his personal quest to get rid of his “gay voice”—recently single and middle-aged, David Thorpe began to find his voice a source of anxiety, worrying it turned off potential lovers—which grounds what could otherwise have been a disparate web of academic theories and talking heads. “When I started I wasn’t even really thinking of making a movie. It was more of a personal project,” he told me when I met him recently. That spurred him to look more systematically at the gay voice itself; eventually he realized he’d found something significant to say about the subject, a catalogue of people reflecting about the history, prevalence, significance, and science of the voice itself.

My voice knew who I was before I did.

It’s clear from his enthusiasm and breadth of knowledge that Thorpe, a writer with an inquisitive personality and a voice I found entirely pleasant, has enough material for a whole series on the subject. “It was always a tough call editing, trying to give each topic the right amount of time,” he told me. “I was kind of running down this long hallway just opening doors all over the place.” In the film, Thorpe consults a speech therapist, a voice coach, several linguists and anthropologists, a film historian, gay actors, and famous queer celebrities including David Sedaris, Dan Savage, Tim Gunn, Don Lemon, George Takei, and Margaret Cho. Thorpe also interviewed pedestrians, his friends, and children who have suffered bullying for their voices. Seeing so many people reflect about their own voices—where they think they came from, what they mean, and what annoys them—helps establish that Thorpe is working with something bigger than a personal affectation.

Thorpe investigates with a sense of humor. In one sequence, he recreates a train car full of boisterous gay men bound for Fire Island: They wear colorful beach costumes and talk non-stop about fashion, their mothers, chai tea, and what happened at the club last night. Later in the film, actor Jeff Hiller reflects on the grim prospects for gay men like himself in film and TV. “Well all the meaty gay roles go to straight actors, and I’m not buff so I can’t play the token hot gay guy, so really all that’s left is for me to play the bitter queen,” he says. It’s a welcome injection of levity. Admitting that a roomful of gay voices can be annoying gives us space to pick apart anxieties—which parts are just annoyance at other people’s conversations, and which are tied to toxic associations.