Sounds Gay, Bro: Vocal Timbre and “Gay Sound” in A Strange Loop 

The performed vocal timbre of Usher in Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop portrays queerness in accordance with societal expectations and stereotypes. How does the musical accomplish this, and more importantly, why?  In American media, performed masculinity defines a timbral space in which voices outside of it are labeled as queer and unnatural. This space often aligns with the queer sexual and gender orientations of those that fall outside societally prescribed boundaries of the cis-het normative. Specifically, in the speech of cisgendered men, traits of nasality, effeminacy of vocal range, and lisping have frequently been attributed to “sounding gay.”  This “gay sound” has permeated popular culture in various forms of media, but especially in theater and film. In the musical A Strange Loop, the protagonist Usher easily falls into the stereotype of sounding gay, especially in comparison to other characters that surround him. To explore the use of the sounding gay stereotype, I will survey how the use of nasality, expressive vocal range, and lisping aid in the presentation of Usher as a gay character. By doing this study, I hope to show how and why musicals use stereotypical presentations of gay voices to contextualize them within the underexplored oeuvre of musical theater and to challenge whether these stereotypical conjectures are necessary for audience perception.

First, it is important to briefly summarize the narrative of A Strange Loop. In this musical, Usher, who works as an usher at Lion King on Broadway, is trying to write a Broadway musical about his tumultuous life but faces various roadblocks tied to his identity. Alongside Usher, the audience is privy to his internal thoughts, which are played by six different cast members. Usher’s thoughts externalize the internal struggles with his identity as a self-celebrating/self-deprecating fat, Black, gay man. A throughline in the musical that ties many of the narrative facets together is the use of Usher’s overtly obvious gayness, in part accomplished by his stereotypical gay sound.

Musical theater scholars such as Knapp and Wolf have explored how deeply intertwined identity and stereotypes are on stage.[1][2] They argue that musical audiences are presented with stereotypical characters, so consumers have something to grasp onto within the fast-paced narratives typical in this medium. Furthermore, genre theorists such as Bazerman suggest that sociopsychological categories in media are created to evoke shared understandings of typified actions in typified situations, a.k.a. sounding gay and being a gay musical theater composer.[3] Drawing from film genre theory, Altman claims that narratives often contain syntactic expectations that are set up by semantic signals, which, in this case, entails perceived sexuality tied to vocal production.[4] The works of these scholars thus deeply intertwine with Butler and their notions of performed gender as the stylized repetition of acts that constitute gendered interpretations and perception. Applying the gay sound to Usher is thus normalized and expected by audiences who have been enculturated by the pervasive gay sound in media. As Usher repeatedly reaffirms his gay identity in tandem with his stylized sonic vocal productions perceived as queer, audiences can then place their assumptions about queerness onto his character, reinforcing their overall perception of him outside cisheteronormativity.[5]

In the opening number, “Intermission Song,” Usher sings with a high-pitched head voice mixed with an extremely forward-placed nasal tone with little to no chest voice included, setting himself up as audibly queer in contrast to other voices of audience members present in the opening number[6]. In a study done on nasality in homosexual men that focused on the speaking voice, it was found that, for the most part, homosexual men and heterosexual men scored nearly the same on nasality in speech. However, when certain nasal vowel sounds were prolonged, the nasality scores of homosexual men were higher and mirrored closer to heterosexual women in sonic production.^[7] This finding relates to perceptions of gender and sexuality in singing, as vowels are often held for longer and at higher frequencies than natural speech, giving them audible prominence. As heard with Usher, his extremely high and nasal tone sets him apart from typically performed heterosexual expectations, immediately signaling to listeners his overt queerness.

Moreover, in a study on pitch variation in homosexual males, it was observed that homosexual men’s voices, on average, occupied a higher normative frequency range than heterosexual males.  Furthermore, the expressive range of homosexual men was also found to be closer to heterosexual women than heterosexual men. It is perhaps no surprise that in the study, men with higher voices were subsequently more likely to be perceived as homosexual.^[8] These discussions also closely relate to methods of acting, the central backbone of all theater performance. In one acting study, it was discovered that actors who play homosexual characters often shift their voices toward normatively effeminate frequencies with higher-pitched, lighter, and more expressive ranges.^[9] The combination of these studies thus points to how and why Usher performs his gay sound within the musical. He is not only reaffirming his gayness but also is falling in line with preconceived audience understanding of gay sound, further repeating stereotypes of what kinds of stylized acts gay men enact vocally.

Another trait of performed gay sound in the show is when Usher confronts his lisp. Lisping has long been associated with gay men and is often weaponized through homophobia as a mocking gesture. Some studies on lisping have suggested that the prevalence of it is significantly higher in homosexual men than in heterosexual men and women.[10] Furthermore, lisping has also been linked to the perception of gayness. In a study from 2014, it was found that subjects, especially heterosexual men, were able to guess homosexual men’s sexual identity just from spoken voice when a lisp was present.[11] Whether it is something that is innately part of being born gay or a learned social code-switch is something that is still hotly debated in scientific and queer communities alike. In the final number that bears the same name of the musical, “A Strange Loop,” Usher sings about his “sloppy s’s” in a pronounced and melancholic way.[12] Despite the sociophonetic research that shows lisping can project radical “fierce queen” queerness in some individuals, Usher does not share this sentiment.[13] His admission of despising his lisp is something that many queer people who have a lisp have had to grapple with, further contributing to the overall performed stereotypical “gay sound” present in this musical.

Usher’s gay sound is omnipresent in A Strange Loop. Through a repetitious process of stylized vocal production within the musical’s narrative, audience members are consistently reminded of Usher’s gayness every time he sings, and not just because of the lyrical content about Fire Island and bottoming. This use of a stereotypical gay sound assists not only audience perceptions but also propels plot devices pertaining to Usher’s identity and the discrimination he faces from friends, family, society at large, and himself.  Many of these gay-sounding traits Usher performs could easily be altered by a performer to combat enculturated stereotypes. What obscuring would occur if the actor for Usher used a less nasal singing technique and instead employed a heavy chest voice? Would audiences that come in with enculturated notions of masculinity be challenged by a vocal performance that falls in line with stereotypes of cisheteronormativity if Usher’s lyrics and actions reflect a queer identity?  The removal of his gay sound by a performer, however, would impact both the weight of Usher’s perception of himself and how others ultimately perceive him. Furthermore, removing this queer sonic marker could obfuscate the overall significance of the struggles and discrimination Usher faces in relation to his queerness. I believe this removal would considerably detract from Jackson’s overall characterization of Usher as a fat Black queer man who struggles with not only the visible but also audible aspects of his identity. By championing the story of Usher and intentionally integrating his gay sound, Jackson provides a spot on the Broadway stage for a narrative that many queer men have experienced first-hand, illuminating a small part of the trials and tribulations of performing a queer identity in a cisheteronormative world.

Works Cited

Altman, Rick. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” Cinema Journal 23, no. 3 (1984): 6–18.

Baeck, Heidi, Paul Corthals, and John Van Borsel. “Pitch Characteristics of Homosexual Males.” Journal of Voice 25, no. 5 (September 1, 2011): e211–e214.

Bazerman, Charles. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec 1988).

Calder, Jeremy. 'From "Gay Lisp" to "Fierce Queen": The Sociophonetics of Sexuality's Most Iconic Variable', in Kira Hall, and Rusty Barrett (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality (online edn, Oxford Academic, 10 July 2018 

Cartei, Valentina, and David Reby. “Acting Gay: Male Actors Shift the Frequency Components of Their Voices towards Female Values When Playing Homosexual Characters.” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 36, no. 1 (March 2012): 79–93.

Heidemann, Kate. “A System for Describing Timbre in Popular Song” Music Theory Online.
Vol. 22, no. 1. March 2016. 

Jackson, Michael R. A Strange Loop. 2019. Score.

Jarman-Ivens, Freya. Oh Boy!: Masculinities and Popular Music. New York, NY: Routledge, 2007.

Knapp, Raymond. The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Suire, Alexandre, Arnaud Tognetti, Valérie Durand, Michel Raymond, and Melissa Barkat-Defradas. “Speech Acoustic Features: A Comparison of Gay Men, Heterosexual Men, and Heterosexual Women.” Archives of Sexual Behavior. Springer US, March 31, 2020. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7497419/.

Thorpe, David, director. Do I Sound Gay? Thinkthorpe/Littlepunk, 2015. 1 hr., 17 mins.

Van Borsel, John, and Anneleen Van de Putte. “Lisping and Male Homosexuality.” Archives of Sexual Behavior. U.S. National Library of Medicine, February 28, 2014. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24578106/.

Van Borsel, John, Els De Bruyn, Evelien Lefebvre, Anouschka Sokoloff, Sophia De Ley, and Nele Baudonck. “The Prevalence of Lisping in Gay Men.” Journal of Communication Disorders 42, no. 2 (August 18, 2008): 100–106.

Vanpoucke, Belle, Marjan Cosyns, Kim Bettens, and John Van Borsel. “Nasality in Homosexual Men: A Comparison with Heterosexual Men and Women.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 48, no. 5 (September 19, 2018): 1443–49.

Wolf, Stacy. A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2002.