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I was a loud child, and if my mother sang to me, I would be quiet.

I was one of those weird children that just couldn't talk to people, so I kind of had to make myself be not like that because I knew it was going to hinder me.

At 28 years old, seven years out of college, I was so convinced that my voice outed me as a fag that I had stopped speaking to people I didn't know.

As a child in the early 1980s, I tended to talk with things in my mouth - food, dentist's tubes, balloons that would fly away, whatever - and if no one else was around, I'd talk anyway.

If I tried to shout over my older brother, my mother told me keep quiet. If I tried to shout over my little sister, my father told me to shut up. I found the best way to be heard was to lower my voice and actually speak when I had something to say.

I credit my singing to my mom because she didn't give me a binky when I was a baby. I cried and screamed for the first six months - my mom would say four years of my life - and I developed wonderful lungs.

One of my earliest memories was me singing 'Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin' at the top of my voice when I was seven. I got totally carried away. My grandmother, Sarah, was in the next room. I didn't even realise she was there. I was terribly embarrassed.