On June 12, 2016, 49 LGBT people were killed at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida. That night I was enjoying a drag show at Oz, a queer nightclub in downtown Cincinnati, with a dozen members of the cast and crew of Fellow Travelers, the opera I was directing that was scheduled to premiere six days later. The next morning, as news of the tragedy spread through the Cincinnati Opera company, we felt a sense of collective mourning and reflection: What if some of us hadn’t survived our trip to Oz the previous night?
The Fellow Travelers opera is based on Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel, a powerful gay love story set against the backdrop of the McCarthy-era Lavender Scare, which banned homosexuals and other “sexual deviants” from working for the United States government, leading to humiliating investigations and the purging of thousands of LGBT people from government service.
My dear friend, producer G. Sterling Zinsmeyer, handed me Tom’s novel a few months after it was published, proclaiming: “This must be an opera, and you need to direct it.” I tore through the book and fell in love with the protagonists, Timothy and Hawkins, while learning about a painful chapter of LGBT history for the first time. Sterling was right. It needed to be an opera.
We got right to work, securing the rights from Tom and bringing on a brilliant writing team: composer Gregory Spears and librettist Greg Pierce. Cincinnati Opera offered to host a workshop in 2013 and, after experiencing the finished work, the company offered to present the world premiere. Cincinnati Opera’s support of Fellow Travelers was unwavering and courageous, especially since Cincinnati was perhaps best known in queer circles for the force with which it censored Robert Mapplethorpe’s “obscene” gay photographs in 1990. The thought of premiering an opera that featured two gay men singing an achingly beautiful love duet while simulating sex onstage felt like cosmic restitution.
In 1996—my senior year of high school—I wrote a thesis on Mapplethorpe, the National Endowment for the Arts, obscenity law, and queer art-making at the height of the AIDS crisis. Our assignment was to write about someone who had shaped culture. My first instinct was to write about Madonna, but my English teacher, Mrs. Ackerman, suggested that my knowledge of Madonna’s trajectory was, perhaps, already encyclopedic. Was there another subject that might really challenge me? While writing about Mapplethorpe and the 1990s culture wars, I was simultaneously terrified that I would die of AIDS if I came out of the closet and grateful that the public library in my hometown of Auburn, Maine, had the catalog of the Mapplethorpe exhibition The Perfect Moment on its shelves—flowers, phalluses, and all. I must have renewed that book at least three times.
As a closeted teenager, I never could have imagined that I would forge a career directing LGBT stories, especially an opera.
In the decade since our premiere, Fellow Travelers has been produced sixteen times, from America’s biggest cities to her heartland. It’s become part of the operatic canon and served as a catalyst for connecting thousands of audience members from disparate backgrounds, across many generations. Without fail, dozens congregate in the lobby after each performance, hugging, crying, and sharing their stories until the theater’s curfew.
We are launching the tenth anniversary national tour of Fellow Travelers at Seattle Opera this month before traveling to nearly a dozen American cities over the next two years. The Fellow Travelers Project coincides with our nation’s semiquincentennial, and the work has become a symbol of resistance to the moment we are in, as we see a dramatic rise in systemic attacks on the rights of LGBT people in the United States and deliberate attempts to erase our history.
Conservative federal and local governments are policing gender expression and free speech, abandoning HIV research, challenging the ban on conversion therapy, and hijacking our cultural institutions in Washington D.C. Last March we made the heartbreaking decision to withdraw from a scheduled presentation of Fellow Travelers at the Kennedy Center rather than cooperate with the administration’s ideological takeover of a historically bipartisan venue.
Alongside the national tour we’re launching The Lavender Names Project, a collaboration with the new American LGBTQ+ Museum, which officially opens in New York City in fall 2027, in a collaboration with The New York Historical. The Lavender Names Project is a grassroots archival research/community outreach initiative that will uncover and collect photos and stories of LGBT people who were systematically discriminated against, fired, and mistreated by federal and local governments from the beginning of the Lavender Scare in 1953, to “Don’t ask, don’t tell” in the 1990s, and all the way to today. The photos will become part of an ever-growing visual archive that appears onstage at the end of each performance as a living memorial to the many queer people who suffered—and are suffering—the decades-long persecution. The Lavender Names archives will eventually find a home in the American LGBTQ+ Museum.
Despite our government’s efforts to erase LGBT history, our legacy is everywhere I look, especially in New York, the city I’ve called home for 25 years. That legacy is a groundswell. I feel driven to honor the generations of queer folks who came before us, and I look to them for guidance, for blueprints.
Last August I took part in a theatrical experiment that called on me to become one of these mentors. “Fight Back” is an immersive, role-playing reenactment of an ACT UP meeting at the LGBT Center in New York City. Created and curated by my new friend David Wise, “Fight Back” charges all attendees to assume the role of a participant in the March 12, 1989, ACT UP meeting, after researching their backstory and their contributions to the meeting.
I attended the event with my partner, Brandon. As we walked into Room 101 at the Center—the same room where the actual ACT UP meetings were held—we both took a deep breath and crossed the threshold, pretending not to know each other, imagining it was 1989, that we had already lost many friends to AIDS and would likely lose many more. In our preparatory research handbook, one of the suggested topics for the March 12, 1989, discussion was Mapplethorpe’s death six days earlier.
I channeled my assigned role: Alan Klein, who was one of the leaders and facilitators of “Fight Back City Hall,” then the largest ACT UP action to date, scheduled for March 28, 1989. I was nervous because I was slated to lead a good portion of the meeting and because David had alerted me that the real Alan Klein was planning to attend.
At the beginning of the meeting, Alan approached me and saw his own name on my nametag. I introduced myself as “Alan.” We both broke character for a moment: “I’m Alan!” he said, laughing. We hugged each other tightly. Clocking his earrings, I touched them and whispered: “I took mine off because I wasn’t sure.” “I can’t remember if I had my ears pierced back then, but I do now,” he replied. “So you should put them back on.”
After the event, Brandon and I joined the ACT UP veterans on the West 13th Street sidewalk. Alan complimented my “performance” and I felt enveloped by the love and support of friends and mentors, both old and new. I told them about Fellow Travelers, and it felt like a ritual changing of the guard, like I was preparing to report for duty.
On my subway ride to and from the “Fight Back” event, I was reading the final chapter of Tom Mallon’s new book, The Very Heart of It, a volume of his diaries written between 1983 and 1994 as Tom was building his career in New York City and searching for love. The fear of AIDS permeates every page.
One week later, I unearthed my Mapplethorpe thesis in a filing box in my parents’ basement labeled “Kevin: High School.” Reading it for the first time in almost thirty years, I felt that the 1990s culture wars were a mere harbinger of much worse things to come. The next day, Florida officials, under the cover of night, painted over the rainbow crosswalk memorial in Orlando honoring the Pulse nightclub victims.
But no one is going to erase us. And no one is going to erase the living, singing memorial that is the Fellow Travelers opera. We will be performing—which is to say “acting up”—all over this country, our country, through next year and beyond. Come see this love story in a city near you. And please find me in the lobby after the show to share your own story.
Kevin Newbury is a theater, opera, film, and television director based in New York City. Kevin has directed more than 100 original productions across all mediums and genres, including both the 2016 world premiere of the opera Fellow Travelers and the opera’s upcoming 10th anniversary national tour. Fellow Travelers will be produced at Seattle Opera (February 21-March 1) and Portland Opera (March 7-15), then will travel to San Diego Opera (July 10-12) and New York’s Glimmerglass Festival (July 18-Aug. 16). The submission portal for The Lavender Names Project is available here.
