SOCIAL CHANGE does not come easily. We can pass laws, win court battles, and even gain greater social recognition, but for every gain there is an anti-LGBT backlash from a still sizable segment of the population that feels threatened by these changes. Laws can be undermined if not overturned altogether. Sustainable change requires that the larger culture accept a new set of foundational stories about what it means to be human. Achieving a society in which social justice for all is a shared value in law and in practice requires a long game. It is a multi-generational effort. Such work requires cultural interventions that heal and sustain those fighting for justice even as we push for change in the larger culture.
LGBT choral musicking—a term used by anthropologists to include the cultural contexts of different musical practices and the relationships they produce—can be a social justice practice that serves this purpose well. Singing in a chorus is not for everyone, nor is listening to choral music everyone’s cup of tea. In fact, I have always found my own love of it a bit perverse given the religious foundations of so much choral music. Yet, as I have been studying this form of activity as a force for queer social justice, I often mention my research to random people in my travels, and many respond by telling me that they have an LGBT chorus in their town, or that they have a friend or relative who belongs to one.
After more than twenty years of studying queer choral musicking as a practice for social justice, I argue in my recent book, A Queerly Joyful Noise: Choral Musicking for Social Change, that choruses at their best offer a space of what I call sacredly erotic communing. Each of these elements is important to healing identities damaged daily in varying degrees by a culture that continues to deny us full personhood. Sacredly erotic communing of this sort also creatively challenges the larger cultural narratives that deny us community and fail to honor our many-gendered erotics.
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Queer choral musicking began to develop in the early 1970s, at around the same time as civil rights and affirmative action were taking serious legal hold. Feminism was inspiring everything from the more mainstream work for the Equal Rights Amendment to developing local community rape crisis centers and shelters for battered women. Lesbian feminist music festivals and separatist women’s communes and other intentional communities blossomed. After Stonewall, gay liberation was just beginning to get a foothold. Change was in the air as far back as 1965, the year in which the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) began holding their “Annual Reminder” protest on July 4th at Liberty Hall in Philadelphia, proclaiming the rights of homosexuals to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Four years later, the Stonewall Riots ushered in a new era of more in-your-face protesting for gay and lesbian rights along with grassroots organizing efforts in large cities across the U.S., notably in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago, in addition to New York. Choruses were one of several forms of organizing that burst forth to play an important cultural role.
Queer choral musicking might best be seen as one of several new lesbian and gay institutions that emerged in the wake of Stonewall in the 1970s. Others that have endured would include the annual Pride celebrations that are held in cities large and small around the world; LGBT community centers as meeting places and organizing locales; the Gay Games, which first opened in 1982; and the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (ufmcc), now the MCC, whose origins date back to 1968. The choruses evolved alongside these institutions and continue to interact with all of them. Typically queer choruses produce shows for a city’s annual Pride festivities, but most groups appear at a wide array of community events, from local festivals to highly polished concerts for the holidays, the Gay Games, and even presidential inaugural events.
With a conservative estimate of 500 choruses worldwide, ranging in size from four to around 400 participants meeting weekly (typically), each producing on average two or three concerts a year, the sheer amount of time spent and the number of people involved in queer choral musicking are impressive. Three major umbrella organizations in the U.S. and Europe—the Gay & Lesbian Association of Choruses (GALA), Legato, and Sister Singers Network (SSN)—each with international connections, support LGBT choral group development by offering regional, national, and international conferences and guidance materials on everything from musical techniques, CD production, and touring tips to political and social activism through music. They each offer quadrennial choral festivals (in alternating cycles), award grants for commissioning new works and chorus development (among others), and provide a variety of networking support.
The first such choruses began forming in the early 1970s as part of a larger women’s music movement. The power of women’s music movement and its form of musicking deserve much fuller study in their own right, as the movement spawned festivals, recording companies, and tours for feminist musicians of all sorts, but with a distinctly lesbian flavor, some of which continue today. Choral groups like New York City’s Women Like Me in 1971 were part of this cultural boom. As choral conductor Dr. Catherine Roma, founding director of the grandmother chorus Anna Crusis, has noted: “[Their] members were involved in reproduction health issues, abortion rights, equal pay and workplace issues, the ERA, the post-Stonewall movement for gay/lesbian civil rights, and/or the international peace movement.”*
Once mostly identified as women’s choruses and now more commonly referred to by the vocal parts they sing, “SSAA” (Sopranos 1 and 2, Altos 1 and 2) choruses have generally had more complex identities as feminist as well as lesbian organizations than either mixed or men’s choruses; often SSAA choruses have mission statements that challenge both sexism and heterosexism. For this reason, SSAA choruses have historically had straight as well as bisexual, lesbian, and more recently trans members.
Known as “TTBB” (Tenors 1 and 2, Baritone, and Bass), men’s choruses developed in the late 1970s, but many more came into being at the time of the AIDS crisis and its aftermath. The first two were New York’s Gotham Male Chorus in 1977, which became the Stonewall Chorale, a mixed chorus, in 1980, and the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, which came into being in 1978. In 1979, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, the Seattle Men’s Chorus, and the Windy City Gay Chorus were all founded. Many more across the country were inspired by the San Francisco group’s 1981 national tour. Given the developing AIDS crisis, these choruses soon served a pressing need for community in a time of profound loss and cultural backlash against civil rights, feminism, and gay liberation. It is impossible to say what role the gay men’s choruses may have played had AIDS never happened, but their importance for gay men through the worst years of the epidemic and even today cannot be overstated.
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Singing together is an act of communing that is more intimate than most people want to admit. One need only look to religious texts warning against the danger of its passions for evidence. But as one participant in my research stated succinctly: “It’s the best group sex there is.” With the voice alone as an instrument, singers are arguably more naked in performance than other musicians. This vulnerability is also part of its draw and its beauty. A colleague recently confided to me: “I never listen to music—not in my car, not at home. But I love live choral music. It makes me cry every time.”
Queer choruses come together with the shared purpose of creating social safe spaces for voicing identities that are otherwise disdained if not denied. Doing so offers healing beyond what we already know singing can do. It is a lived practice that heals those damaged by hate even as it renders hating more difficult. One of the more common stories among choruses are those of people who invited family members or co-workers to concerts as a way of coming out to them. This practice always astonished me in my own choruses, and I searched for examples of this going badly but was unable to unearth one. There is plenty of evidence that music touches us in ways other forms of communication cannot. As one interviewee put it, “It’s pretty hard to demonize a group of people when you had that group of people in an experience that has really moved you emotionally. It’s hard to demonize people after that.”
Choral musicking as a practice seems to open people to each other and, as any with other social practice, it can also serve our communal or tribal tendencies. The fact that this movement is overwhelmingly white and male probably has as much to do with white male privilege in the larger social structure as it does with any inherent bias in the individual choruses. The fact that gospel choruses in the movement are the most likely to be predominantly African-American and the few Latin American groups generally perform in more popular Latin styles suggests that an important part of the draw is the ways in which certain types of music feed different groups differently. All of these groups need healing and need it in different ways.
We might think of this as a type of caucusing. But as we look to advance social justice more broadly, it is incumbent upon those groups with relative privilege to use our advantage to offer support and even serve as back-up singers of sorts for those groups with less privilege. We have seen this happening in small ways in the L.A. Gay Men’s Chorus’ support for Trans Chorus Los Angeles, serving as their “training wheels” to get up and running, and in the growing number of choruses that work to improve the lives of those in prison or homeless. Increasingly, choruses are stepping up to bring their voices to bear on social issues from bullying to sexism and racial violence.
Case in point: the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus’ recent Lavender Pen Tour was an effort developed in direct response to the increasingly regressive backlash against all sorts of people in the U.S. South. Partnering with the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, they honored the work of Civil Rights activists, building bridges to support changes of hearts and minds with our natural allies. They raised their voices together in love to challenge the increasingly virulent hate being spewed in the communities they visited. It is a sort of naked resistance that calls people in. When the choruses come together across our differences, we not only affirm each others’ identities, but we potentially open ourselves to new ways of being. We need to take such naked resistance creatively to confront hate of all kinds.
* Catherine Roma, “Women’s Choral Communities: Singing for Our Lives,” in Hot Wire, vol. 8, no. 1, 1992.
Julia “Jules” Balén, a professor English at California State University, Channel Islands in Camarillo, is the author of A Queerly Joyful Noise: Choral Musicking for Social Justice (Rutgers, 2017). The second section of this essay was excerpted and adapted from this book.
