Mariah Yvonne Ongkiatco

Professor Roy Agustin

Purposive Communication

October 16, 2019

Homosexuality has become normal in the social context of the Philippines up until it

became a political debate. Although same sex marriage and the SOGIE bill hasn’t been approved

of, I personally believe that most homosexuals in the Philippines confide and freely express their

sexual orientation out in the open. As a matter of fact, even the Filipino media is filled with

openly gay people like Vice Ganda, Paolo Ballesteros, Boy Abunda, Jake Zyrus, and many more.

Having strong representations of homosexual people in the most influential communication

outlet in the Philippines has made me develop a general description of what ‘gay’ would sound

like.

High pitched voice, wide pitched range, rising intonations, and carefully enunciated

pronunciation are the speech features I normally hear from gay people, which resembles that of

feminine speech. Even in the movie Boy Girl Bakla Tomboy, Vice Ganda portrayed four

characters by changing his voice and speech. With the girl and gay characters, he modulated his

voice with soft tones in a melodious fashion; while with the boy and lesbian characters, he

modulated his voice with deep tones in a rugged fashion. Therefore, it has been my general

description of what gay sounds like.

In the New York Times documentary of “Who Sounds Gay?,” I was surprised that

Matthew, the guy with a deep voice, was actually gay while Kris, the guy with the high voice,
was not. It definitely challenged the things that I thought I knew because I never actually realized

that gay people can sound different than the expected ‘all-treble-no-bass’ voice.

In the video, they explained that people’s voices are influenced by its environment during

childhood since Kris was surrounded by ladies while Matthew was raised in a male dominated

family. It does make sense to me since there are families that sound alike such as the famous

Padilla way of speaking used by Robin Padilla, Daniel Padilla, Rommel Padilla, and others. It is

described as a masculine manner of speaking which confused BB Gandang Hari, formerly

known as Rustom Padilla, on her sexual orientation before. In an episode of Pinoy Big Brother,

she shared that since her voice was masculine, she thought it wasn’t possible for her to be gay –

only to realize that not every gay people sound the same.

In contrary to my knowledge of how gay people sound, the documentary made me realize

that what I was actually doing was stereotyping. I think that stereotyping can be dangerous due

to discrimination specially since most of them are viewed as negative features of a specific

group. However, discrimination can also take place even with the viewed positive stereotypes.

Stereotyping has the ability to deny someone of his or her rights, to dismiss someone from

opportunities, and to invalidate someone’s identity or value. Thus, the documentary left me with

a message saying “do not stereotype.” Looking into it, I think that the message is very timely

because in today’s world, people are stereotyping on a daily basis. With this, people are also

creating a culture that is insensitive and harmful –people cannot and should not be boxed into

categories. Indeed, people can share one thing in common but it should not be the only thing they

are.