David Thorpe, center, in the Fire Island reenactment from Do I Sound Gay? (Sundance Selects)

Some documentaries are very serious because they want you to consider their subject matter seriously—sometimes very, very seriously. These somber films want you to consider things through the lens of “history,” and they offer a host of historical facts for you to do just that. Some filmmakers impinge upon your hard-earned viewing hours with a lighter—though no less tricky—sleight-of-hand with films that want to move you to sympathize. They may walk you through a person’s day, for example, revealing the intimate and the mundane. This is the human interest documentary, and sometimes it may even want you to take home a valuable life lesson. These days such a message will often involve self-acceptance or self-esteem, which, in turn, bring identify politics and larger issues into the mix.

Do I Sound Gay? wants to move you to sympathy. Writer/director and Brooklynite David Thorpe is recently single again, and as he’s not getting any younger, he worries that his gay-sounding voice may turn away potential partners. He confesses that on a recent trip to Fire Island, he was repelled by the tintinnabulation of the gay men sounding off around him. This is where the laughs come in. In staged shots, Thorpe, bookended by two very chatty and beach-ready Fire Island types, looks directly at the camera—directly at you—with a look of muted horror. The funny also comes in when Thorpe walks down city streets asking passersby if they think he sounds gay. “Yes, not as gay as I do, but…,” “I would lump you in the artsy fartsy crowd,” and “I would definitively rate you a metrosexual” are among the responses Thorpe and his voice elicit.

In another staged shot, one which wants to convey the intimate, Thorpe spirals into hopelessness after reading gay marriage announcements in The New York Times. Depending on who you are, this kind of staged scene may be a little cloying. Yes, a solitary life can be lonely, but aren’t marriage worries also a problem of luxury? It doesn’t help that we see Thorpe and his two best friends discussing their voices and their relationships in their rather stylish, rather comfortable New York City apartments.

But Thorpe’s film is also ambitious. It wants to offer you a bird’s-eye historical view. Here it succeeds rather well. Through interviews with gay celebrities, like writer David Sedaris, writer/TV personality Dan Savage, comedian Margaret Cho, newscaster Don Lemon, and actor George Takei, as well as through a host of interviews with speech therapists, speech coaches, and linguists, Do I Sound Gay? will send you home with a good deal of perspective.

Cho and Lemon demonstrate how this movie might just as easily have been entitled Do I Sound Asian? or Do I Sound Black? “My father went to very great lengths,” Cho relates,” to rid himself of an Asian accent. He always felt like he was trying to catch up and be American. It really made me feel the same. It really goes underneath, all of that self-hatred and anxiety really gets shoved under, and it lasts for generations.”

A film historian walks us through the sissies we’ve seen on stage and screen, Liberace and Paul Lynde, to name only two, and points out that while the sissy was first used to get a laugh, he later appeared as a villain. No wonder those of us with gay-sounding voices, and that would include me, worry. “Many gay adolescents are right to be worried about how they sound,” Savage articulates, “because it draws violence.” To drive home the point, Thorpe includes the now notorious 2012 footage of Zach King being beaten by a schoolmate as the boys’ peers look on and do nothing. King was 15 at the time.

Thorpe doesn’t really delve into anthropological, theoretical, or philosophical questions, like aren’t ideas of the self, of race and status, masculinity and femininity really abstract constructs with no tangible correlations? Aren’t they, to boot, concepts that change over cultures and over time? But if this documentary went to such heady heights, Do I Sound Gay? wouldn’t be a good feel-good film and George Takei wouldn’t get the chance to say, “It’s that insecurity that you have in yourself that makes you conscious of the way you sound. This is an issue that should be discussed.”

Indeed, Do I Sound Gay? can easily be used in a college-level classroom to stir up discussion about the undeniably important issue of sounding gay (just ask Zach King). It’s also a great Saturday matinee you could take a friend to—you know, that gay-friendly friend you have, the one who still needs a little consciousness-raising.