By 1981 the chorus had become part of San Francisco’s imagination. On May 13, 1981, the Chronicle’s serialized fiction put it on the page.
“The Gay Men’s Chorus in the Wild, Wild West”
In that day’s installment of Armistead Maupin’s serial, Michael Tolliver and his friend Ned Lockwood spend a weekend at the chorus’s twice-yearly rehearsal retreat, held at a Jewish teen summer camp leased for the off-season. The theme is “Spring Roundup.” Name tags are cowboy bandanas color-coded by section: red for first tenors, tan for second tenors, dark blue for baritones, dark brown for basses and royal blue for the non-singing partners. The men spend the morning on Liszt’s Requiem and Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody, eat bologna sandwiches for lunch and stage an Andrews Sisters skit in crinolines and platinum wigs.
Michael jokes that the chorus’s upcoming nine-city summer tour will knock them dead in Nebraska. In real life, it did.
Maupin was also a real-life champion of the tour. The chorus’s January 1981 planning memo credits him with promoting it at a national gay media conference in New York.
From the archives: this post retells reporting by the San Francisco 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 Chronicle, “The Gay Men’s Chorus in the Wild, Wild West (serial fiction installment)” by Armistead Maupin, May 13, 1981. sfchronicle.com
- SFGMC Archives, GLBT Historical Society, “San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus Tours America (tour committee memo)”, January 19, 1981.
