Design by Yosef Phelan

To this day, I can not answer the landline at my parents’ house without the caller going, ‘Hello, am I speaking to Mrs George?’ There’s always then an awkward silence after I say, ‘Erm, no, this is her son,’ as the PPI seller reckons with their misgendering. Sometimes now I don’t even correct them, I just become my mother. 

The fagcent, gay voice, having the perpetual oral cadence of a helium balloon, whatever you wish to call it, is one of the first ways in which queer people realise their effeminacy is being projected outwards. Our voices give us away before we do, sometimes before we even fully understand what it is giving away. It’s one of the first forms of shame we learn and one of the last we unlearn, if we ever do. At the end of the film adaptation of her biographical novel The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp – known for her unapologetically gay physical expression – notes she learnt to “never [speak] to anyone unless spoken to.”