Celebrate PRIDE MONTH With Us!

All around the world, the month of June is recognized as LGBTQ+ Pride Month. And every weekend, somewhere in the world, members of our community and our allies will hold events acknowledging and celebrating our heroes, history, progress, and lives. While the activities may look different from community to community, there’s one thing we all have in common —  whatever progress our community has made politically, socially, and culturally, has been driven by people whose pride in our community and in themselves motivated them to fight for more respect and recognition from society. And they did it not only for themselves but for those who would follow in their footsteps. That same pride and the inspiration it provides is why SFGMC exists and why we celebrate our community all year long, wherever and whenever we can.

This month, every week we will feature a personal story from one of our active singing members. Be sure to check back each Thursday.

As we celebrate all things wonderful and beautiful about our lives and community during Pride this year, let's remember these words from Nelson Mandela.

So whether you acknowledge Pride Month and Pride Weekend with boisterous celebration or are more inclined to seek quiet moments for reflection, we hope you’ll spend some time thinking about the people and events that have inspired you to more deeply embrace your sense of self and the pride you feel in your identity. And we challenge you to find ways to share that pride and allow it to motivate you to live in ways that are an inspiration to others.

Happy Pride, Everybody!

Written By:

THIS IS MY STORY

Coming of age in the 70s the word gay had not yet entered the language as an affectionate way to refer to my sexual preference. Instead, the word homosexual was whispered around small town Ohio but the more common words for me were faggot and queer.

As a result, I had no points of reference to better understand who and what I was. There were no role models on TV or radio No one was publicly gay. Even Elton John was still in the closet. And although TV did feature people who were obviously gay like Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilley, and Liberace, I did not relate to their flamboyance and their performances were never connected to their sexuality.

When I was 15, I began working at a grande show palace in downtown Cleveland that brought A and B, and sometimes D list level stars. Working there, I had my first exposure to gay men on a personal level. All of them were close to a decade older than me and all of them were alcoholics. And, I did not relate even though I was beginning to realize that parts of me were more like them than all the heterosexual's around me.

I, too, began to drink and party heavily. I thought this was the life that I was destined to lead. Being gay meant either being flamboyant or it meant being a sad drunk.

I chose a college close to my workplace so that I could continue to see the amazing entertainment that I was watching nightly. And as I had showbiz dreams of my own, I decided to try out for the college musical, COMPANY. I had never heard of the show nor of its composer, Stephen Sondheim. So I made an appointment to meet with the music director to ask him about the show and about the man who wrote it. The music director's mouth dropped when I asked but instead of being rude, he said, I have just the solution. He sat me down and played "A Weekend in the Country" from A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC and then continued to play song after song from the hits that Sondheim had written up to that point. I was taken aback not only by the genius of the writing but by the kindness and sincerity of the person taking the time to open my eyes to a different kind of Broadway than Rodgers and Hammerstein.

I don't know why, but something about the day clicked for both of us and soon I was hanging out at my mentor's house, playing pinochle with his roommates - even sleeping with one of them -, and experiencing a type of gay life that I did not know existed. Over my four years of college and the 40 years since we have remained close and spoke often. He didn't just send in the clowns, he made them perform just for me.

As I've gotten older, I have worked to set an example and mentor other young gay men. I freely talk about all my experiences, good and bad, in hopes that they can learn more about themselves through it and grow to be the men that they want to become.

It's still not easy for a young gay person to come out of the closet. Once they are out, there is no guidebook as to how to live and many get caught up, as I did, in the world of partying and meaningless encounters. That's why organizations like SFGMC are so vital to the health of our community. They provide a community space where men young, old, fat, skinny, handsome, and not so can be together with one goal and one goal only, to make music as a family. My four years in SFGMC have been among the most rewarding of my long life eternally grateful

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I BELONG

Pride means I’m not alone.

It gives me hope, joy, and security, and it acknowledges my being in my community.

My being is not merely about me.

It’s about our voice when we sing as SFGMC.

It’s about our sturdy stance when we face backlash from religion, racism, and all phobia.

It’s about us being a community.

Pride is knowing we always stand together, cis, non-binary and trans

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 What Does Pride Mean to Me?

I grew up in conservative north Texas. What that means is that I grew up not seeing positive images of gay people everywhere. We didn’t yet have an influx of queer-positive content like we do now. Not in the mainstream culture anyway. That kind of thing existed on the fringes and thus remained unknown to me for many years. Needless to say, this meant that I grew up with only one idea in my head of what a gay person was: unhappy and alone. Pride? That was something sinful, not something to be celebrated. 

So of course when I came of age and realized that I was gay, I knew that it meant I could never tell anyone. I would be ostracized from my community and condemned to a life of loneliness. Or so I thought anyway. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-20s that I was able to finally come out even though I still thought I would end up lonely and ostracized. I just couldn’t pretend anymore. I was done with living a lie. 

And I admit, those first few months could be lonely at times. There wasn’t exactly a huge gay community in my hometown. There was a gay bar so that was someplace I could go on weekends to meet gay men for a drink or whatever else the night might entail. But I still didn’t really have a community. I didn’t have a social life. I still felt lonely and afraid. I remember when I finally got my first boyfriend and how nervous I was to hold his hand in a public place. I was worried about getting gay-bashed and that someone I knew might see us and my secret would be out. I was out but I wasn’t quite ready to be that out.

About a year after coming out, I left Texas finally. It was partly because of a job opportunity and partly because I needed to make a fresh start somewhere else. I moved to Chicago, a land that allowed me to first start to see that being gay didn’t need to mean you were condemned to loneliness. I saw gay people thriving in Chicago. Living as their full, authentic selves and having relationships and community. This wasn’t at all what I had experienced before. This was new and different and fun. I marched in the Pride parade that year which opened my eyes to what society could be. 

What stuck out to me about the Pride parade is how many people were there to celebrate being queer. People of all ethnicities, genders, ages etc. were there to celebrate Pride, something that I had previously associated with sin. There was nothing sinful about this celebration though. It was joyful and celebratory. It was everything that Pride should be about. I loved it and it really transformed my own view of my queerness and my relationship to it.

I still go back to Texas on occasion. And while I’m fully out now, there’s still a part of me that doesn’t feel completely safe even in my hometown. I probably never will. I’ve come to realize that there is a reason I left and that’s ok. I’ve found a new community in San Francisco, one where I don’t ever have to feel unsafe to be my authentic self. 

So what does Pride mean to me? It means not being afraid of who I am. It means learning to be comfortable in my own skin. It means having a community that supports and loves me for all of who I am. It means being willing to challenge the status quo and protest against injustice. All those things are Pride and all those things are just an aspect of Pride. 9 year old me couldn’t even begin to understand all of that. And even now, almost 30 years later, I still struggle with. But I am willing to try and I am willing to work every day to make a more queer community. 

WRITTEN BY:

Harvey, Jerry, and Me

The choice was not a choice at all, or so I concluded.  I separated myself from my dear friend Carl, found myself a high school girlfriend, and stayed by her side for the next twenty-five years, as my girlfriend, fiancée, wife, and the mother of my three children.  The irony, of course, is that the only thing that was not a choice was my sexual orientation.  It was what it will always be.  I am gay.  

It would be another thirteen years before the evening came when I was having dinner with a new friend, complaining about the stress in my life and my marriage, and he looked me straight in my eyes and asked, “Are you sure you wouldn’t be happier in a relationship with another man?”  I hadn’t known he was the son of a gay man who’d come out to his wife and family – and he had a strong sense of what was causing my stress.  I knew in that moment I’d waited my entire life for someone to give me permission to answer that question.  To feel pride in who I was and what I am.  Two weeks later I’d come out to my wife, my children, and my brothers.  Six months later I told my parents I was gay, and I moved out of my family’s home.  I moved into Greenwich Village and found a room to live in, through the Rainbow Roommate Service.  None of that was easy.  All of it was painful.  And it was liberating.  And it was joyful, in a way I’d never-before experienced.  I began to live an authentic life, at age 41, for the very first time.

I joined the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, and the very first concert I participated in was a salute to Jerry Herman at Carnegie Hall.  Jerry was there.  Lee Roy Reams performed “I Am What I Am.”  My father had passed away a few months earlier; my mom flew up from Florida to hear the gay son, who she swore she never knew was gay, sing at Carnegie Hall.  She met my new boyfriend, a younger law student from Kentucky I’d met in an AOL chatroom.  I felt, even for a moment, pride in who I was and what I am.  At the after-party, we sat next to Carol Channing and her gay husband. There are moments you don’t forget. The Pride concert that year was the New York premier of “Naked Man,” which had been commissioned by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus.  It was hard to get through rehearsals, crying as I sang.  How does one sing the lyric, “There is no loneliness like this,” without falling apart?

Two seasons later, Harvey Fierstein and Kristin Chenoweth were the guest artists at our NYCGMC concert.  They each had private dressing rooms at Carnegie, but Harvey chose to dress with the rest of us.  I stopped to say hi to him.  “Hi Cookie,” he responded, in that oh-so-gravelly voice.  I was in heaven.  Harvey and Jerry helped me learn what it meant to have pride in who I was and what I am.  The concert was a joy.  I’ve had other opportunities to perform with Harvey and see him perform, and I’m about to begin reading his new memoir, I Was Better Last Night.  Jerry Herman’s songs, which I adore, have been a part of many of my concerts. I was honored to attend his memorial service in 2020.  

I’ve had the privilege to sing with six GALA choruses around the country since coming out.  My oldest child, my daughter Amy, sang with me in a few of those concerts.  She was a founding member of the Youth Pride Chorus in New York City, and she, too, sang with the NYCGMC.  How’s that for pride?  I’m pretty sure she knows every word of Naked Man by heart, and I was thrilled when she came to San Francisco to see our performance of Andrew Lippa’s Unbreakable.

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