“Gay Chorus Forming”: How Jon Sims Started It All

The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus began with one man’s idea. Looking back years later, the Bay Area Reporter and the chorus’s first conductor, Dick Kramer, told how it started.

A band, then a chorus

In 1978, music teacher and French horn player Jon Sims formed the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band for that year’s Gay Freedom Day Parade. As Kramer told the Bay Area Reporter in 1995, people began urging Sims to start a chorus within two months of the band’s debut. Sims was not a singer or a choral director, but he put the word out. About 100 men showed up to the first rehearsal, and Sims asked Kramer to lead them.

The timing mattered. Harvey Milk had just been elected, and Anita Bryant’s campaign against gay rights was in full force. In 1996 the BAR described the group as the world’s first self-identified gay chorus.

Dick Kramer, SFGMC’s first conductor, circa 1981. Courtesy GLBT Historical Society.

The first rehearsals

The men rehearsed on Monday nights. They were preparing a Christmas debut when the city was shaken on November 27, 1978, by the murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. That evening, Kramer later recalled, was the night he fully committed to the chorus and came out completely. Sims named him the first permanent conductor soon after.

On December 20, 1978, the chorus gave its first formal concert at Everett Middle School. Veteran member Bob Emery described the moment to the BAR: about 120 singers ran down the aisle onto an empty stage and sang “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” and older men in the audience, many still closeted, wept.