Choir Boys

Forget Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the Fab Five. In Minnesota, the most effective ambassadors of gay culture may be the members of the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus.

by Joel Hoekstra, Mpls St. Paul Magaine, July 2004

Labels have their limitations, as Glenn Olson knows. A few years ago, Olson, who is openly gay, invited his corporate co-workers to a performance of the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus, a group he's sung with for more than two decades. For most of his officemates at Northwest Airlines, Olson's sexual orientation was immaterial - they treated him like any other employee. But the call-center specialist stopped short of issuing a personal invitation to his "redneck" boss. "I never thought in a million years he'd come," Olson says.

But his boss did come-and soon became an ardent supporter of the choir. "Now, every year, he's the first person to ask about getting tickets to the holiday concert," Olson laughs. "I guess everybody has their stereotypes."

Music doesn't always soothe the savage boss, but for more than two decades, the members of the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus have used music as a vehicle for breaking down preconceptions about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals. The group's aim? To demonstrate that queers sound, act, and look as normal, odd, and pretty as heterosexuals. If nothing else, the concerts prove that, gay or straight, all men in tuxedos look like penguins.

In fact, the 140-member chorus itself has undergone something of a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy makeover in recent years, transformed from a community choir run mostly by volunteers into a professional non­profit with four full-time and three part-time staff members. Since 1999, when its first full-time executive director, Joann Usher, was hired, the annual budget has tripled to $750,000, and season subscriptions have increased from 250 to 650. (According to a 2002 survey, more than half of its audience is straight.)

Then, in 2000, the chorus got a new artistic director, Stan Hill. A native of Southern California, Hill, intrigued by the chance to live and work in what he calls the "choral capital of America," left his position as artistic director of die San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus to join the Twin Cities group. "I wanted to notch things up a bit," he says. "This has always been a great group of singers, but I saw an opportunity to bring it to the next level."

The chorus's most recent commission, Metamorphosis, is perhaps the most potent symbol of the group's growing artistic significance. The fifty-minute work, based on the personal experiences of the chorus members, was commissioned two years ago and premiered in March during the group's spring concert at the Ted Mann Concert Hall. Hill hired a sixteen-piece orchestra and arranged a collaboration with the James Sewell Ballet, which performed dance interpretations of ten of the work's twelve movements. A CD of the work was released in June, and this month the chorus travels to Montreal to perform an abbreviated version of Metamorphosis at the quadrennial convention of the international Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses. (A send-off concert, including several excerpts from Metamorphosis, is scheduled for July 16 at 8 p.m. at Ted Mann.)

But perhaps most notably, Metamorphosis is a departure from the "we're part of the mainstream" message the chorus has historically sounded. Its texts are drawn from personal interviews with choristers and the gay- male experience, from birth to coming out. The tides of its movements- "Kicked in the Gut," "If I Could Choose"-hint at the physical risks and mental anguish many gay men and lesbians face in the course of their personal development.

However, the leitmotifs that emerged in rehearsals and performances resounded universally, which was Hill's goal from the start. (Even when the term prodigal son appeared in an early draft of the lyrics, Hill says he requested that it be changed to something less gender-specific.) Straight dancers from James Sewell's company easily related to the work "What's universal about the piece is that everyone comes to that point in their life where they have to think about what they want to do," Sewell says. "Is what you want to do more important than what other people want you to do, what other people think about your life? Sexual orientation can be a very charged issue. For some of us, it was about deciding to be a dancer. Everybody has to make hard decisions."

Most important, audience members of all sexual orientations left the performances in tears. "What I know is that people were crying-straight people and gay people," says one member. "It struck a chord."

ENJOINED IN SONG

Works for all-male choruses are few in number, and "a lot of the literature doesn't get down to the nitty-gritty and tell our story," Hill says. To that end, two years, ago Hill asked composer Robert Seeley and lyricist Robert Espindola-musical collaborators and life partners who live in Palm Springs, California, and who had worked with Hill in the past-to develop a piece that was unique to the Minnesota singers yet could also be performed by other groups. The pair interviewed more than eighty members of the Twin Cities choir, listened to their stories, and distilled the themes from those conversations into the backbone of the new work.

Hill conceived Metamorphosis with the Montreal GALA gathering in mind. He knew that the 167 choruses attending the event would be receptive to the pieces message, and he hopes the city's vibrant gay community will also take an interest.' (The local chamber of commerce courts gay tourists and gay-event organizers.) What's more, Quebec is one of three Canadian provinces that awards marriage licenses to same-sex couples. America's neighbors to the north are definitely queer-friendly, says Jeff Brand, a member of the Twin Cities choir. "They even have queens on their money," he quips.

More than 5,300 singers, including members of several Minnesota groups, will flood the city July 17-24 for GALA. "It's fun to take over a city with gay and lesbian people," says Jane Ramseyer Miller, artistic director of One Voice Mixed Chorus, a Twin Cities ensemble that includes transgender, bisexual, gay, lesbian, and straight folks. She says the conference is the largest musical gathering many of the choristers have ever attended.

Concerts are held at the city's premier venue, Place des Arts. Over the eight days, each group gives a half-hour performance, but the mood won't be competitive. "It doesn't matter if it's a chorus of twenty people from the middle of Kentucky who can't carry a tune or a 100-voice chorus from San Francisco ," says Olson, GALA Choruses board president. "We're all fighting the same fight."

That fight, of course, is for equal rights. There's no federal law barring workplace discrimination against gays and lesbians, and fewer than a third of U.S. states offer such protections. Florida bars adoptions by gay people, and many judges are believed to favor heterosexuals over homosexuals in child-custody battles. As for same-sex marriage, it's legal only in Massachusetts -and that will change if the White House has its way.

Metamorphosis, however, doesn't directly address such hot-button political issues. Instead, it focuses on the experience of the individual. "Tidy Endings," for example, is a song based on the experience of chorus member Dwight Joyner. When his older brother died of a drug-induced heart attack a few years ago, Joyner flew to Chicago to clean out his apartment. The brothers had spent much of their adult life feuding. "He was a ladies' guy, a football player, a man's man," Joyner recalls. "I was the sissy brother, and in adulthood that drove us apart." In recent years, however, they had reconciled, and Joyner finds himself regretting the wasted time. As the song's lyrics lament, "for us the tidy ending came before we could say goodbye."

Hearing the piece still evokes in Joyner memories of emptying his brother's wardrobe and boxing up old letters and pictures, but he realizes the lyrics speak to untapped sentiments in people from a variety of backgrounds. "I was amazed at the number of people who were moved," Joyner says. "They saw their own brother's face. They saw their mom's eyes, heard their dad's voice, imagined a sister, or a lover. The words made them think about someone they cared for."

"This is really a tough song for the guys to listen to," says Brand, the baritone who sings "Tidy Endings." "I turn around after I'm done singing, and it's quiet. Everyone can relate to it in a different way."

Joyner, along with his father, Lyn Joyner, funded the commission of Metamorphosis. "When you lose a child, no matter what his age, it's always very difficult,'' says Lyn, a seventy-five-year-old Brooklyn Park businessman. He acknowledges that he might have lost both sons had he not come to terms with Dwight's homosexuality years ago. What moved him toward acceptance? "He was, after all, my son and my business partner and-well, more than anything, my son," Lyn says.

THE "G" WORD

Making music isn't exactly guerrilla theater. "As a form of coming out," Hill admits, "it's rather benign." Founded in 1981, the choir didn't fully emerge from the closet until 1991, when it officially added the word gay to its name. Since then, the chorus has increasingly become an ambassador of social change, making pilgrimages to Duluth, Fargo, North Dakota , and other communities. In addition to bringing straights and gays together, the organization seeks to connect the small constellation of gay-supportive groups and allies that exist across the Midwest.

But in today's polarized political climate, the "G" word makes plenty of people nervous. "Anytime one of the GALA choruses walks onstage, it commits a political act," says Olson. The songs are not radical; the environment is accepting. But the personal, in this case, is political. "It's making a statement about presenting to the larger world a different way of looking at lesbian and gay folks," he says. "It's a message to people who may not have interacted with gay men and lesbians before. I've seen it change lives dramatically."

Music is ideal for opening hearts and minds, Hill suggests, because it taps into our emotions. "It's just plain hard to get angry or distraught about a group of people singing," he explains. "And if one of them just happens to be your son, brother, or cousin, your first impression isn't, 'Oh, that's a bunch of queers.' It's, 'Oh, that sounded really nice.'"

Yet not everyone reacts so favorably. In addition to its own weekend performances of Metamorphosis in Minneapolis this spring, the chorus appeared at The O'Shaughnessy in St. Paul as part of the ballet's season. The ballet audiences generally embraced the work, but a handful of attendees walked out midperformance. Still, Sewell has no regrets. "I believed in the piece, and I believe in what it says," he says. "I think [homosexuality] is an important topic for our society right now to come to terms with, and the arts are the right place to grapple with these [kinds of] issues, to be confronted by them in a way that transcends stereotypes. There will always be a few people who aren't quite ready to go there."

For his part, Hill says the members of the chorus welcomed the chance to perform before an unfamiliar audience, to tell their stories to people who might never have encountered gay people and their struggles and dreams firsthand. "Somebody has to do it," Hill says. "If we don't tell our stories, who will?"