In the summer of 1995, the chorus went camp.
Monday night
The Bay Area Reporter’s Robert Firpo-Cappiello visited a Monday rehearsal. Some members practiced dance steps, others chatted, and some, shy or ill, sat quietly in the long rows of seats. When Artistic Director Stan Hill sat down at the piano for warmups, the room snapped to attention. Chorus president Luke Sheridan likened the weekly rehearsal to church.
An ensemble of brothers
The chorus had lost more than 170 members to AIDS in a decade. Member John McLeod, the chorus’s liaison to GALA Choruses, said that among what he called “an ensemble of brothers” he did not feel like a pariah because of his HIV status. Hill said that if all they did was bewail their fate, they would lose to the disease.
“At this one place in time we’re a family.”
— John McLeod, as quoted by the Bay Area Reporter
The show
“KGAY FM: Sounds of the Sixties” played July 8 and 9, 1995, at the Masonic Auditorium, with guest Florence Henderson, television’s Carol Brady. The rehearsal ran from a send-up of the Four Seasons’ “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” with dozens of falsettos, to Jule Styne’s “Make Someone Happy,” which the writer said hit hard knowing some men might be performing for the last time.
From the archives: this post retells reporting by the Bay Area Reporter. The original articles survive only in newspaper archives, so we have told the story here in our own words. Details attributed to those outlets are their reporting; see the sources below.
Sources
- Bay Area Reporter, ““KGAY FM” Mines Gay Chorus’ Camp Sensibility” by Robert Firpo-Cappiello, July 6, 1995. ebar.com
