From here
In harmony with my father
An Advocate.com exclusive posted June 12, 2003
My father and I have dinner at a little place on Bank Street before walking to rehearsal. It’s a rather temperate June night for this New York City spring that has been engulfed in a teeming monsoon, and the growing nearness of the Pride Concert is on both our minds. It seems that so much of our lives has been like this, finding moments of tranquility in the barrage of rain.
My father has been singing Tenor 2 with the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus since 1997, a little more than a year after he came out. My earliest memories of the chorus are intrinsically knotted in my search for identity: as the daughter of a gay man, as a young woman whose straight mother and straight siblings were now thrust into a new and unfamiliar closet, and as a junior in high school who was just beginning to understand that she too was queer.
Being the daughter of a man who came out when his children were half grown was exceptional, and exceptionally difficult. My entire family was forced to ask new questions and fight new battles. Would we all have holidays together? (Yes. My mother, an incredibly strong woman, has always made her children’s happiness and comfort her first priority, and our holidays include my dad’s partner and my mother’s fiancé.) Would we feel comfortable telling our friends? (Somewhat, and this has come with time).
Would we feel comfortable “coming out” in our affluent Jewish community? (No.)
Desperate to keep in everyone’s good graces (I describe myself in my poetry as “the child who went willingly”) I often glossed over the moments that I should have struggled with and subsequently found myself 20 years old in a small and snowy Ohio town without the strength my parents had tried so hard to instill.
After a turbulent second year of college, I moved in with my father and his partner in New Jersey, a situation that was often rocky but gave me a stability that saved me in many ways. It was there that I was allowed to work out my feelings of anger and frustration, to begin to confront my assumptions about what had happened to us, or—in my youthful view—what had happened to me.
I began attending chorus rehearsals on Monday nights, taking advantage of the long drives home with my dad, spending the time together that I felt I had missed when he moved out of our home three years before. I’ve been an associate member of the chorus since 1999, helping out at chorus and dance rehearsals, turning pages for the pianist, and finding a incredible group of friends who would bring me immeasurable confidence, inspiration, and enlightenment.
When the artistic director, Jeffrey Maynard, told me that he had to speak to me at break one rehearsal a year and a half ago, I was more than intrigued. Jeffrey is an idealist with the voice of an angel, as well as a dedicated, effective teacher, and has worked with youth for much of his career. He invited me to be a part of a task force that would, in a year’s time, be responsible for the creation of a Youth Pride Chorus, one of the first of its kind in the world, to premiere at Carnegie Hall with the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus on June 18, 2003—at the Pride Concert coincidentally scheduled just three days after Father’s Day.
The committee meetings that took place, targeting the need and benefits of the project, along with the endless details involved in planning and recruiting, were exhausting and enthralling all at once. At the same time, I was finishing my last semesters of college, writing my thesis, working, and commuting between my dorm, the home my father shares with his partner, and the city, twice a week, for rehearsal.
Finally April arrived, and with it, the first rehearsal. Many of the founding members of the Youth Pride Chorus come from the Youth Enrichment Services program of New York’s LGBT Community Center, which partnered with the chorus in the creation of this new vocal group and has been the backbone of our support. I looked around the room, anxiously trying to remember the myriad names that were flying at me.
The beauty of my fellow singers’ courage, as I told my father on the phone later that night, astounded me. I see in them the natural light of youth, but also with the exuberance and unique energy of a group of gay teens, many of them out—something my father never had the opportunity to be at our age. I have spent the past two months getting to know these new friends, expanding my definitions of “gender” and “freedom,” and seeing the possibilities that come when members of the queer youth community are given the time and the opportunity to let their voices be heard.
I have found my own voice, and most importantly, I have learned what it is to sing in a chorus of individuals, supporting and teaching each other through the arduous rehearsal process. I understand the warmth that my father must have felt through his first concert, finding himself through the music and held by the austere spirit that comes when a song is brought through the heart.
The title of Wednesday’s concert, named for the commissioned piece that the two choruses will sing together, is “Pride for All Ages.”
As my father and I walked to rehearsal that Monday night, thinking of music to be memorized in the week ahead, I couldn’t help but think about the clarity of our message. Singing on the stage of Carnegie Hall with the man who taught me pride by example seems the ultimate way for me to pay tribute to him and the ultimate way to pay tribute to myself.
