RAISING VOICES & HOPE
Gay chorus stirs many in tour of the Deep South
When the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus toured the American South in late 2017, the group expected to change people’s perceptions about the LGBT community by bringing them a message of love and acceptance through their music.
What they didn’t expect was how the experience would end up changing them.
Joined by the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, some 300 singers packed three vans and six buses — often filled with pink wigs — to stage a series of concerts in red states in response to anti-LGBT sentiment after the 2016 election.
Their journey was captured on film in the award-winning documentary “Gay Chorus Deep South,” which premieres Sunday.
Directed by Brazilian-American filmmaker David Charles Rodrigues, the movie set out to show how the choir’s Lavender Pen Tour could help unite a divided country in a time of heightened differences. The tour was named after the pen used to sign a San Francisco gay rights bill in 1977, which was a gift from Harvey Milk. a member of the Board of Supervisors who was assassinated in 1978.
“That was a moment in time that could bring some hope and hopefully become a blueprint to how we can interact and bridge the divisiveness that the country was going to face in the next four years,” Rodrigues told the Daily News.
At that time, the states visited by the chorus had just enacted, or were in the process of passing, some of the most discriminatory laws in the nation.
Mississippi granted residents the right to use “religious exemptions” to legally deny services to LGBT people. North Carolina’s now-repealed “bathroom bill” prohibited transgender individuals from using rest rooms that aligned with their gender identity.
Through the heart-wrenching personal stories of some of the singers — who left the South for a more inclusive life away from the Bible Belt — “Gay Chorus Deep South” sends a powerful message that change is indeed possible.
Tim Seelig, the choir’s artistic director and conductor, told The News about the “profound, earth-shattering experience” of singing in Alabama.
“One day we got on our bus and went from Jackson, Miss., to Selma, Ala., and we settled into
the Brown AME church and began singing for ourselves [with] no audience. We had people speak to us who had been at the march in 1965 and everyone was profoundly moved. We were in a place where a revolution was born,” he said.
It was at that moment that the group “realized, probably for the first time, that we are part of a revolution,” Seelig added.
Terrence Kelly, the Oakland
Interfaith Gospel Choir’s conductor, agreed. “It became a ‘Let’s do this’ [moment]. It changed people in a way that they were able to see themselves effect change. ... Usually you don’t get to see [that change]. You hear about it, or later get it acknowledged, but rarely you get to see it happen, right in front of you.”
Seelig, who lost family and his job as a music minister at the
First Baptist Church of Houston, after he came out as gay in 1986, faced his own painful past by singing at a Baptist church for the first time in decades.
Halfway through the tour, he was a guest on a conservative radio talk show.
He was ready for an epic ideological fight, in which he planned to explain why the 2016 election was so painful for the LGBT community.
“We’re hurting, we’re scared, we’re frightened,” he told the hosts of the “best conservative talk show in Knoxville,” one of whom was wearing a red “Make Radio Great Again” hat.
But their reaction disarmed Seelig.
“Anybody out there using art to spread the message of unity and peace,”said David Thompson, one of the hosts, “that’s probably more important than politics at the moment.”
“We can’t have political discussions, rational ones, if people are swinging baseball bats at one another, or even angry epithets,” Thompson added.
“Gay Chorus Deep South,” the winner of the 2019 Documentary Audience Award at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, will premiere on Sunday, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Pop, Logo, and Pluto TV.