Before taking its music across the country, the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus played it for its hometown.
“A triumph of talent and pride”
A Sunday Examiner & Chronicle ad announced the National Tour Premiere Concert at the Warfield Theatre on Thursday, June 4, 1981, with seats from $6 to $50. It quoted the city’s critics. The Examiner’s Allan Ulrich asked how good the chorus really was, and answered “exceptionally.” The Chronicle’s Heuwell Tircuit called it “a major addition to the local concert scene.”
The Bay Area Reporter previewed the program: a Gershwin medley, “We Kiss in a Shadow,” music from “The Wiz,” works by Schubert, Bruckner and Brahms, “I Understood” with words by Harvey Milk, and, from Men About Town, “All That Jazz” and “Puttin’ On the Ritz.” The Bay Area Women’s Brass Quartet would join the chorus. The concert closed with Randall Thompson’s “Testament of Freedom,” set to words by Thomas Jefferson.
Up, up and away
The BAR mapped every stop and every party, from a Western hoedown hosted by Dallas’s Turtle Creek Chorale to a Kennedy Center concert to be broadcast by KRON-TV. On Saturday, June 6, the Chronicle reported, 155 singers, stagehands and musicians left for Dallas on United Flight 126, carrying a proclamation from Mayor Dianne Feinstein.
“We are non-political. We are an arts organization.”
— tour co-chair Steve Prokasky, as quoted by the Chronicle
The same page of that day’s Chronicle carried one of the paper’s first reports of a mysterious pneumonia striking gay men, an early sign of the AIDS epidemic that would soon reshape the chorus.
From the archives: this post retells reporting by the Bay Area Reporter, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle. 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
- San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, “Tours America ’81: National Tour Premiere Concert (advertisement)”, May 31, 1981. sfchronicle.com
- Bay Area Reporter, “Gay Chorus Makes Final Plans” by Allen White, May 21, 1981. ebar.com
- Bay Area Reporter, ““Bon Voyage” Men’s Chorus Sees the USA” by Allen White, June 4, 1981. ebar.com
- San Francisco Chronicle, “Gay Men’s Chorus Goes on the Road” by Erica Goode, June 6, 1981. sfchronicle.com
