On April 7, 1987, the San Francisco Examiner put the chorus on its front page under the headline “Gay chorus: Voices of life amid death.”
Twenty-six names
Elizabeth Fernandez wrote that death had become a painful litany for the chorus. Second tenor Perry George, a liquor salesman who had once auditioned for the Met and now had AIDS himself, had counted 26 members dead, with at least half a dozen more ill. A simple announcement during a rehearsal break now served as a eulogy. George compared it to living in Berlin in 1945.
The chorus was then about 120 men. The paper remembered many of the dead:
- Phil Graham, the first, in 1982.
- Frank LoBraico, the original set designer, memorialized with balloons on Mount Tamalpais.
- Jon Sims, the founder.
- Gerald Pearson, a former Mormon, father of four and co-producer of the 1981 tour, who wrote lyrics for the chorus.
- Gerry Lo Presti, a nurse, who relearned his part as a bass after radiation damaged his larynx and sang from a stool in Minneapolis weeks before he died.
“Mostly there is life, and what we must do is celebrate life.”
— general manager Tim Garner, as quoted by the Examiner
“The worse things get, the more important the singing gets”
Two days earlier, a Sunday Examiner & Chronicle column had made the same point. A member who had sung with the chorus since day one recalled the 1981 tour, when the singers joined hands at the Jefferson Memorial to sing “Testament of Freedom.” He said getting on stage now was an inspiration: the chorus once filled a need, and now it filled an essential one.
Bob Seeley’s song “You Are My Star” now drew tears, and a requiem was being considered.
From the archives: this post retells reporting by the San Francisco Examiner 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 Examiner, “Gay chorus: Voices of life amid death” by Elizabeth Fernandez, April 7, 1987. sfexaminer.com
- San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, “Column: Stouthearted Men”, April 5, 1987. sfchronicle.com
