Today marks the anniversary of the assassination of Harvey Milk. Please take some time to learn a bit about his life and what he did to make yours better. Here is a link to a now famous speech given by Milk: Harvey Milk speech.
I am thinking of Harvey today. To celebrate the man and his spirit, I wrote a piece of music using Harvey's words, based on parts of this speech and other speeches that Harvey gave. The piece is entitled "You Gotta Give 'Em Hope," and will be premiered next June in Madison, WI, by Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus.
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This is icon painter Robert Lentz' beautiful icon of Harvey Milk of San Francisco.
Lentz writes in his luminous book, Christ in the Margins:
Harvey Milk was the first openly gay person to be elected to high public office in the United States. . . As supervisor he fought consistently for the rights of all of those without a voice. These people included blue-collar workers, the elderly, racial minorities, and gay men and women. . . .
The day of his election, Harvey tape recorded his last testament, in which he acknowledged that he would most probably die violently. The last words of that message were, "You gotta give them hope." On November 27, 1978, he was shot five times at close range by another politician who was infuriated by his defense of gay and lesbian people. That night 40,000 people, men and women, old and young, gay and straight, kept candlelight vigil outside City Hall.
In this icon he holds a candle, keeping vigil himself for the oppressed of the world. He wears a black armband with a pink triangle. This was a Nazi symbol for homosexuals, and it represents all those who have been tortured or killed because of cultural fears regarding human sexuality. Their number continues to grow with each passing year, and the compassionate Christ continues to say, "Whatever you did to the least of my brothers and sisters, you did to me."
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Blessings to all, from Harvey to everyone who is still fighting the same fights. Amen.
A band I turn to when I'm really pissed off, or frustrated, or upset. Their music helps me re-energize anger into action. Rick Boston, guitar and voices. The great Dave Allen on bass. Various drummers, the late Jeff Ward being the starting line-up drummer who kicked ass.
Low Pop Suicide, "Your God Can't Feel My Pain"
Which is what I want to say to every right-leaning fundamentalist fag-bashing bullying women-hating asshole splinter fringe Christian shithead on the religious right who is wholly owned by the ideologically-correct so-called Tea Party.
Your God can't feel my pain.
And as for you, my fellow LGBTQ folk, especially those who vote with the right against your own best interests, against your own civil rights: Their God can't feel YOUR pain, either.
Their God doesn't want to. Their God is a vengeful fucking desert-mountain jealous unevolved unloving angry God. They are angry fascist authoritarian shitheads with no compassion even for themselves, and they have remade God in their image, their angry judgmental jealous hateful image.
Their God can't feel your pain.
So why the fuck are you voting the way they tell you to?
Seriously. People seem to be so fucking stupid. They drink the koolaid and do what they're told. I guess it's easier than thinking for yourself, much less actually taking responsibility for your own life, rather than just giving it lip service. Lots of folks are full of talk, but few walk their talk.
I'm overdue to announce that I have been commissioned to write a new piece of music: for Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, of Madison, WI. Perfect Harmony is celebrating its 15th year next season, and the commission is both a celebration of that anniversary, and to be presented at the next GALA Festival in 2012.
I've been involved with PHMC now since 2007, when I joined after my Dad died, to find some social contact with other gay men, and to get back into choral music. I needed both musical and social reconnections, at that time. I am an alumnus of two other GALA choruses, the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus, and the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. Perfect Harmony is a much smaller chorus than either of those, but it is full of men deeply committed to making music together, and to supporting each other. I knew from my previous experience with other choruses that I would find what I needed, in singing together with other gay men.
TTBB male chorus repertoire (tenor, tenor, baritone, bass) is my preferred choral configuration purely for matters of personal taste. I just like the sound of massed male voices. I sang in the Michigan Men's Glee Club when I was in college, a male chorus of some distinction at that time, and found many rewards there. I fell in love with male choral music, both the social and musical aspects, and for me, that changed my life. I'm a lifelong musician, singer, composer, etc. I've sung in every kind of chorus configuration that there is, and male chorus is still my favorite.
San Francisco is the flagship gay men's chorus. it was formed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the first phase of the gay rights movement. They did a concert tour of the USA in 1981, spending a long time on the road, giving concerts in city after city, town after town, after which LGBT choruses sprang up all over the place in their wake. Now the GALA movement has become international, with several hundred choruses around the USA and the world. Every four years there is a GALA conference held in a large city, where several thousand singers gather with their choruses to perform for each other, to share their stories, to enjoy life, to party, to gather together in music that binds us all together. I attended the last GALA conference, in Miami in 2008, with PHMC, and it was for me, as it is for many other people, a life-changing and life-affirming experience.
GALA is one of the most positive faces of the national and international LGBT communities in our time, in our culture—which remain oppressed communities: politically, socially, financially, in terms of civil rights, and in many other ways. Singing together, we function as ambassadors of culture to the world, spreading positive messages of acceptance, diversity and inclusion.
Before some cynic points out how my last statement here sounds like the "politically correct party line," let me state for the record that I genuinely know all of the above to be true. It is based on my experience, and on years of observation.
I have been singing in choruses, first in church, then in high school and college, since I was 7 or 8 years old. I've been playing piano since I was 6. I've played every instrument in the symphony orchestra except the brass instruments, which I have no ability for. I'm a composer, a lifelong musician, a performer, a creative. Music is central to my life.
I have seen the same story time and time again: Making music together, in LGBT choruses, singing together, has changed peoples' lives for the better. It's given people a reason to go on living when life has become hard and difficult for them. Lesbian and gay people often have to fight for their lives, for their very right to exist; the GALA choral movement has given many a sense of community, of life, of affirmation and validation, beyond anything they'd ever had before. I've seen people choose to live, rather than give into the pressure to remove themselves from daily life, go off into a corner, and die.
And that is source and purpose of the new music commission I am undertaking.
The nature of this 15th anniversary commission for PHMC is to tell the stories of the members of the Chorus. Through interviews, writings, and other means, I have been gathering their stories, to turn into a suite of songs that will be premiered in Madison in spring of 2012, then performed at GALA 2012 in Denver, CO. The nature of the commission is to tell the stories of the men of Perfect Harmony: what it is like to live gay in the Midwest; what it was like to group up gay in the Midwest; and how we, as Midwesterners, with our own unique culture, are different from the usual gay stereotypes, which are based on the urban gay ghettoes of New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the other big cities of the two coasts. Our culture here in the heartlands, what some of the urbanities of the coast call the "flyover zone," is indeed from that of the coasts. Calling the Midwest the heartlands is accurate on so many levels. The music will in the end reflect its sources, and reflect, I hope, some aspects of what living gay in the heartlands is like.
As for my personal feelings about this new music commission:
I am gratified, grateful, and pleased beyond what words can say to have won this commission. I was not the only candidate for doing this commission, and it was not a sure thing that I'd be offered the work. My gratitude extends to the point where I want to do the very best job that I can do. I will go far beyond the usual requirements to make this new work be the best that it can be.
I am doubly, triply pleased to be working as a composer, actually being paid to write music. It's what I've always wanted to do, ever since music school. And I hope this is only the first commission of many, in the future. This is how I want to spend the rest of my career: earning my living from my creativity. Writing music. Writing choral music, for that matter. If this commission leads to other GALA choral commissions, well, nothing would make me happier.
More on this project at it develops. I'll keep you posted. I've already started writing, but it's still early in the process.
There is a challenge in that I still have a major chronic illness I am dealing with. That will be resolved by some pretty big surgery this summer, which I am doing my best to prepare for without letting it freak me out. (Don't ever let some asshole tell you to "Think positive" when they don't know what the fuck they're talking about it.) I have a lot of work to do. I will be writing music and preparing for surgery at the same time. I plan to get as much done as I can beforehand, because the recovery time will be at least a couple of months.
So I'm working hard on the lyrics and music already. I'm writing the lyrics as well as the music. I recently picked up Stephen Sondheim's marvelous book of collected lyrics, Finishing the Hat, not because I want to be influenced by Sondheim's lyrics but because this is a graduate school level textbook on how to do it. His commentaries are what I'm focusing on, and his principles, all of which are being very useful to me so far.
I have a lot of work to do. This is a really great opportunity for me, personally and in terms of my creative career. I am going to do my very best with it. And then we'll see what happens next.
Why do I sing in gay men's choruses? Why do I like to sing in male choruses? Why do I sing with Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, in Madison, WI, the chorus I currently sing with, and have written a new piece for, that will be premiered in December 2009?
Short answer: Because I love singing in male choruses, I'm gay, I love singing in gay men's choruses with other gay men, and most importantly, we are musical ambassadors to the world. We give back to our communities, and at the same time raise the general community's consciousness about the social issues and concerns of our gay lives by celebrating them, singing about them, and sharing them. We reach out with music to heal and give hope and beauty to the lives of others.
These are all generalities, but they're true for me nonetheless. I've known for a long time that my personal form of social activism happens most effectively through my music, my writing, and my artwork. I used to be an activist who marched in the streets. I participated in the very first LGBT Pride March ever organized in Madison, WI. I did outreach to both the LGBT and straight communities in Madison; I sat on discussion panels; I participated in speaker's visits to schools and corporate offices. We had fun, and we had strength, and we knew we were helping to make the world a finer place for everyone.
We were right—and we were wrong. We did catalyze change, and yet the world stubbornly refuses to improve faster than a snail's pace. It's true that the Tribe can only evolve at the rate of its slowest members—a truth I learned later, after I had left my overt activist years behind.
So here's my really long, personal memoir answer:
I've always been a choral singer. I loved singing in church choirs, starting about age 7 or 8. I graduated from my church's youth choir to the adult choir in my mid-teens; they needed tenors, and I was gifted musically. I sang in the Michigan Men's Glee Club from my first semester in college. It's probably destiny that has led me to sing in not one, but three or four gay men's choruses over the years. I view it as part of my social outreach, my activism, and also a way to stay musically active, which for me is as necessary as breathing.
As a boy, I was a soloist, a boy soprano, and for awhile an alto. My middle choral teacher, Hunter March, trained me in the techniques of the English choral tradition, the pinnacle of which in many opinions (including mine) is King's College, Cambridge. I still listen to that group's annual broadcast of lessons and carols at Christmastide. But most boy sopranos don't have adult voices as good as their boy voices, once their voices have changed and stabilized. That was my fate. Yet I had all this training. I was recruited right out of middle school by the choral teacher of the high school I would be attending. I remember a meeting in the middle offices, before the end of my last year there—my voice had just broken, spectacularly and embarassingly, during a solo in a choral performance—in which I sat down with my current choral teacher and my future choral teacher, and we talked about my future. Plans were made. I was a little intimidated and overwhelmed by the attention of these highly musical, highly trained teachers; but I also liked it. I already knew I had some musical talent beyond the ordinary; I was already writing music, and I had already been given the chance to play with a suitcase-sized Moog synthesizer, and make a little tape music. I remember my two choral teachers discussing my situation, and what to do to make sure I continued to improve as a singer.
My voice had just changed. The long hot summer between the last year of middle school and my first year of high school was also the summer of my sexual awakening. We lived in what was at the time the outermost northeastern corner of Ann Arbor. Our subdivision was the edge of town. Behind our house was open, empty fields—fields which had been nothing but wheat for several years after my family bought that house, but which by this summer had begun to be filled in with row-house condo construction. The construction moved slowly, and took several years to cross the field from its opposite to end to behind our fence. During this long hot summer, I spent many hours in naked play with two or three of the neighbor boys. We explored how our bodies could bring us pleasure, and how to pleasure each other. It was always exciting, too, because it was forbidden and risky to get caught at it. I wrote about it, even then, as a teenage boy (my parents had given me my first typewriter for Christmas). I wrote about my fantasies, and I wrote about my memories and dreams. I'll write about that some more, here, at a later date. There's a lot of memory material from that time of my life that I want to reconsider and reinvent. Later.
There is a classic question: are you a gay artist, or an artist who happens to be gay? Does your sexuality inform your art-making? A lot of gay artists get hung up on this question, going in circles while never answering it definitely. Of course, asking the question is a matter of identity politics for many: of discovering and identifying who you are. It's an essentialist question, and an existential one.
I find it irrelevant and uninteresting. Perhaps a couple of decades ago I might have debated it. The fact is, I'm an artist who happens to be gay, and I'm also a gay artist. I'm a gay man who makes gay art and non-gay-themed art; I'm a man who makes art; I'm a man who makes gay art and non-gay art. If indeed these are separable modes, which is debatable, I work in them all. I don't make a distinction, because I don't believe it important to make a distinction. My sexual orientation is part of who I am—not all of who I am, but an important part of the whole—and as a man who makes art, all the parts of who I am are present when I'm making art, to a greater or lesser degree. Not all of my art is overtly homoerotic, or even sexual, or sensual. And some of it is.
My first year in high school was the year my voice was settling. My choir teacher, Miss Ruth Datz, who became over time one of my important mentors in life, guided me carefully through the change. For a few months I sang baritone rather than tenor, so as not to strain my newly-changed voice. (I still have that lower range.) But I was also trained in barbershop quartet, and as a countertenor. My head voice, or falsetto, proved to be very useful. I have never had the soloist's voice as an adult: neither the power, or the range, or the quality of openness prized in opera, or the projection prized in musical theater. But thanks to my choral mentors at this time in my life, I have a tremendous amount of vocal training. I am rarely picked for solo parts in the choruses I have sung in: I don't have that kind of voice. But I have three times the training of most of those who I sing in chorus with.
I also have a very good ear, and a very trained ear, for pitch. I am very good at blending. I discovered that I can control the timbre and pitch of my voice so well that I can blend with anyone. I make other voices sound better. Put me in the middle of the first tenor section, which is where you'll usually find me anyway, and I make the whole section sound more like one voice, than a group of individuals. It's a knack, an instinct. I just seem to do it, and it's not always conscious.
In college, I sang in the Michigan Men's Glee Club. I was not yet fully out to myself as a gay man, but it was clear to me that most of us in the first tenor section were either queer, bisexual, or at least open-minded. There’s an old joke on the choral circuit, that there are three kinds of people in the world: men, women, and tenors. There's some insight and truth in that, after all. Anyway, I began to get a sense of a gay sensibility, a homoerotic gathering of sensibility, a sense of male comradeship, of Whitman's "adhesiveness," during those years singing in the Men’s Glee Club. We toured Europe and many regions of the USA together during, those years; staying in a hotel, staying in homes of alumnae, being hosted and feted wherever we went. I learned things about myself, and my colleagues, on many occasions.
After graduating college, I largely turned my back on Western music for about a decade. Surviving after music school meant a period of unlearning: being a composition major, mostly what they could teach us was music theory and history, and they crammed so much theory done our throats that I was compositionally constipated for a few years, and could write nothing. (I eventually began over with Western music by learning jazz improvisation, improvised music, the arts of spontaneous composition.) But at the same time, I had discovered Javanese gamelan, and played that music for many years. One element of certain pieces of Javanese gamelan is the unison male chorus, or gérong, which sings traditional texts as one layer of the music. For example, here is a performance of Ketawang Puspawarna, a traditional opening piece for concert performances, used by many ensembles.
Listen to how the male chorus, which is members of the gamelan group, some playing instruments as well as singing, do punctuated calls at key moments in the form, as well as performing the sung unison text. Puspawarna, a classical Javanese poem, means “kinds of flowers.”
Thus I kept my vocal chops up, albeit in music from another culture. I learned I had an ear for precise pitch, for being able to match different tuning systems, for being able to sing correct intervals in more than one tuning system. I played and studied Javanese gamelan for many years. I lived in Indonesia for a year, as a Fulbright student on a grant, studying traditional gamelan. I taught gamelan as a graduate student teaching assistant, later, at the University of Wisconsin. This music has left a permanent mark on my own music, the way I write music now, even the way I improvise when playing in jazz and rock music settings.
My coming out process as a gay man was long and late and slow. I wasn't exactly in the closet, I wasn’t exactly pretending to be something I wasn’t, but it takes time to learn self-acceptance and self-esteem. I came out fully sometime in my late 20s and early 30s. That's another long story, which like my sexual awakening as a teenage boy, I have written about extensively, in my journals and in my poetry. I'll be writing more about that, later, as well.
Living in Madison, WI, playing gamelan, discovering the Radical Faeries and going to annual gatherings, being involved in the Rendezvous Reenactment circuit, being an LGBT activist, coming out to my family, taking my first long-term male love relationships, discovering what I liked about sex and what I didn't, being in grad school, becoming a serious photographer, writer, and Photoshop user. These were all happening at the same time, form my late 20s through my late 30s.
Some years later, I found myself living in the Twin Cities, in Minnesota. There are long stories in the interim, some of them related to both music and sexuality, and if I were to tell them all now, all at once, this would be a novel-length memoir, pull me far off the topic of choral music. So I’ll save some of those for another day.
I was living in St. Paul, and having a difficult time of life. I felt the need to connect with the larger gay community, as I was feeling very isolated. Just to be around gay men socially, in ways that were positive. So it occurred to me to revive my interest in singing in male choruses. I have always loved the sound and timbre of massed male voices, singing in chorus, and my years in the Glee Club had cemented that preference, musically and socially.
Here’s where why we sing begins to matter.
Singing in a gay men’s chorus is about presenting a face of the gay community to the general community: an artistic face, an ambassadorial face, a face of unity and empowerment, of reaching out with music to heal both gays and their friends and families. It’s about entertainment and having a good time, but for me it’s only secondarily about entertainment. Primarily, it’s about letting people see that we are human, ordinary, serious, fun, and genuinely part of the community. Every chorus in a community has its following. Every chorus does outreach, of one form or another. It’s about reaching out to the community, but also about reminding the community that we are already there, already people you know, already a part of it all. We are your brothers and sisters, your children, your family, your coworkers, your friends.
I sing in a gay men’s chorus because I love singing in a male chorus. I sing in a gay men’s chorus because I need to be with gay men, and making music provides me a way to be with a community of gay men in a way that I’m comfortable with, that supports me positively, that makes me feel a part of something important. I got none of that from the bar scene. I got a little of it from being an activist.
Singing in a gay men’s chorus is a quiet, artistic form of activism. For me, it’s about being part of something larger, something that is gradually, gently, slowly, almost invisibly changing the world.
I joined the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus, which was my reintroduction to singing in a male chorus, but it also provided me with opportunities to make new friends, to reach out to my community, to invite my other friends to part of something. When I moved out West, I joined the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. The same opportunities in a different place. With the exception that the SFGMC is the original gay men’s chorus in the USA; they were the first, for all intents and purposes. When they did they first national tour across the US, they sowed the seeds in their wake in many cities they visited for the LGBT choral movement to spread. Now there are hundreds of LGBT choruses of all sorts of configurations and styles and memberships and missions. The LGBT choral movement has gone worldwide. It’s mostly based in cities, but just in large cities; choruses are present in many mid-size cities, and some smaller cities. My personal preference is for a male chorus, because I like to sing in that style, and within that repertoire. And I am now contributing, as a composer, to that repertoire. Now I sing with Perfect Harmony Men’s Chorus, in Madison, WI. It’s a smaller but growing chorus. It gives me what I want, musically, and I give back to the local community via our music. We work together to make music into our message of peace, hope, and love.
And for me that is my best, most satisfying form of activism. To make art that feeds a movement towards greater unity, greater community, and outreach. We invisibly, gradually change the world by just being ourselves. We don’t always march in the streets, and we don’t always engage in political activism; although almost every LGBT chorus does engage in some form of social justice work. We use our art to educate. One of the most important ways we educate is to show how your sons and daughters are not so Other, not so alien, are regular folks who can have fun, make music, have a good time, and not be so alien to your life that we have nothing in common. If we start by having music in common, that opens the door to having hearts in common. Music is the way to the heart that bypasses the mind and all its prejudices. I’ve heard story after story about how some person who thought they hated gays and lesbians changed their minds, after actually encountering us, as singers, as people, and not as stereotypes.
And that’s how you make the world a finer place. By changing one heart at a time. That’s why we sing.
A lesbian pop classic, k.d. lang's "Constant Craving." There was a period for awhile when you couldn't go into a lesbian bar without hearing this track at least once an hour. I suppose some got tired of it. I never have. This is an almost perfect piece of music: brilliant hook, brilliant melody, great lyrics, the entire mood of longing and loss, of unfulfilled yearning and desire. It's an erotic masterpiece, in a way most pop love songs try to be but few ever achieve.
But what also interests me about this video is that it's based on a reconstruction of the French premiere in the 1950s of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. There are several scenes from the play in the video, which Beckett fans will recognize. There is also in the video an allusion to Krapp's Last Tape, with k.d. sitting next to a reel-to-reel tape recorder, reels in motion, playing back sounds—whether the Beckett diary tapes from the play, or k.d. singing to herself, is delightfully ambiguous.
Longing.
The song is about loneliness and desperation, about yearning and longing. It's also an anthem: I want you, I want you constantly, I can't get enough of you. It's a call out into the darkness. But it's also got some humor, and some hope to it.
Rather like Beckett's play. So that's a good match.
An ongoing discussion, regarding a new opera about the life of Colin McPhee, the Canadian composer who spent several years living in Bali, who built a house there, and who is known to be gay. There are several problems with this opera's assumptions, and its portrayal, of McPhee.
The discussion speaks for itself, as the opera should.
However, this discussion also highlights how cultural asymmetries (to use Michael Tenzer's phrase) can come into play at any moment. The asymmetries in question here can be summarized as: imposing Western morals onto Balinese behavior; imposing current attitudes about homosexuality onto the past, and onto the past in another culture; the question of consensuality in sexuality between someone who is perceived as local to a culture and someone who is perceived as an outsider with wealth and power and status (after all, he did come to visit us)—in other words, perceived inequalities in socioeconomic and social power relationships.
Such perceptions are built upon assumptions, and conflict often arises in such situations precisely because different players have different assumptions about the nature of reality. In some ways, imposing our current ideas about sexuality onto the past, much less onto those in a foreign country, is a form of intellectual imperialism. Intentional or otherwise, the assumptions in play about what's appropriate, sexually, in a given time and culture, cannot be subject to our current moralizing, if we are to be fair and objective in our assessment, or our fieldwork.
Where I have difficulty in this discussion is the way threads of homophobia are woven in, almost unconsciously.
It reminds me very much of discussions—cultural assumptions, cultural asymmetries—about sexuality in the urban gay ghettoes regarding the way gay men connect with each other in the non-urban areas. It reminds me very much of the assumptions that many city gay men make about living in the rural areas.
They need to remember: The cities protect us. They give us a place to be ourselves, in numbers, in mutual support.
Much of that remains unavailable to those who live outside the big cities, and their active, activist, gay ghettoes.
In the same way, being an ethnographic fieldworker—a participant-observer among the people whose culture and lives one is studying, and writing about—can be a protected status. It can provide a cocoon of (judgmental?) distance, a field of observation that attempts to be objective. But we all carry our prejudices, and the assumptions about life we learned at our parents' knees, with us wherever we go. Half of the fieldwork experience, if we're being honest, is about stripping away our own assumptions, and learning to blend in, to be accepted, to "go native" at least part way. To "go native" enough to be able to empathize with and understand the local customs, cultural assumptions, and belief-systems; and yet to not lose oneself into one's adopted culture completely, but to retain a core of individual self. Finding the balance between Self and Other is precisely what happens to the engaged fieldworker.
Also, we seem to judge McPhee now by the standards of contemporary fieldwork. If he slept with some of the native boys, we seem to want to judge him for that. (The definition of "boy" is problematic at best in this context, as it doesn't really imply an age difference so much as that power imbalance inherent to relationships between the visiting outsider and the locals.) We have an ideal, as ethnographers, that it's never okay to "sleep with the natives." (And because our own culture is so interlaced with homophobia on such a deep level, in its rooted assumptions, many of us aren't even self-aware enough to know why we squirm more when it's boys rather than girls.) And yet we, as fieldworkers, are also human beings, engaged with other human beings. Sometimes the enchantment of the Other, whether its exoticism or intoxication at finding oneself on another planet, can be overpowering. Sometimes we fixate on an individual we ought not to interact with, as fieldworker, or as sexual being. And yet we do.
Is this a situation in which we are judging McPhee for what we ourselves have done? Is this a situation of "judge not, lest ye be judged"?
And then there is the question of gender roles, gender construction, and gender fluidity, in which the "rules" of gender performance are not so fixed, especially between cultures. North American culture is particularly puritanical in its rule-set about gender, and gender performance—even relative to Europe. (But then, the religious heretics of Europe, from the 16th Century onwards, were often exiled, sometimes by choice, to North America; and several of these, from the the Puritans to the Shakers, were particularly potent influences on overall North American culture, in its attitudes about sexuality.)
if we persist in judging McPhee as wrong in his actions, we must at least be aware that we are judging him by our standards, rightly or wrongly, and perhaps inappropriately to the time and place in which he lived, and loved. That McPhee himself was equivocal about all this must also be remembered. Sometimes the body acts before the mind can answer all these questions. It's the compulsion of desire, and it is capable of overruling the most sanguine of mortal souls.
And we also must remember: McPhee wasn't primarily an academic researcher, a fieldworker, an ethnographer first and foremost. His purpose for living in Bali was to learn about the music, and the musical influences eventually went in both directions. (So much for objective reporting.) He was there as an artist, not as an intellectual; a composer rather than an ethnomusicologist. (Although McPhee was neither the first, nor the last, to blend those two roles.) His intentions were not the same as ethnographic fieldworkers who go to a foreign culture nowadays. So we judge him, once again, by our own standards, appropriately or otherwise.
If we must judge McPhee, let's at least try to judge him fairly.
Still finding it difficult to re-engage, or to want to re-engage. Still listening to silences found. Yesterday, the day after returning from the woods, I spent the afternoon at Madison Pride, which was entirely too loud by comparison. Today I'm being forced by inner forces to Do Nothing, take a day off, whatever. I'm just a little numb.
After arriving back home near midnight, the next day was spent driving again up to Madison, to spend the afternoon at Madison Pride, a late entry in the annual Pride season. Arriving on a dust-swept island next to the convention center, covered with colored tents and rainbow flag banners, not too many people about, my first feeling was, It's good to see Madison doing a Pride again, but it's so tiny next to the last few Prides I've attended, notably San Francisco's. Matters of scale, location, and economics. One thing noticed: fewer LGBTs here advertise themselves loudly. Perhaps it's a local cultural effect on branding, to make it more discreet. Nonetheless, the rainbow or HRC bumper stickers are more discreet, less noticeable. You only realize you're parking in the right space after seeing a small, almost hidden rainbow flag on a parked SUV, so you park next to it.
My purpose for going to Pride at all was to sing with Perfect Harmony, a short Pride concert of an hour's duration, excerpts from our last two shows. Think of it as a summer pops concert. Mostly our lighter material. Perfect Harmony is Madison's gay men's chorus (and gay-affirming, which means we've had non-gay members before), and so has a bit of an ambassadorial function. So it's good to sing at Pride events, or Pride-like events.
I drove up from Smalltown after shopping at the downtown farmer's market, then going home to make a real meal. The sweet corn is starting to be sold. This year has been a good one for corn, with early rains, then lots of heat and humidity in July. The fields of corn as you drive by on the country roads are deep grain, without that yellow fringe at the edges early in the season that indicates underwatering: signs of drought that have been present for over a decade, banished these past two or three years of high rains. We've had flooding at times, especially along the Rock River, but the high rains have also been replenishing our aquifer, so the groundwater reserves are back to full strength.
I wandered around Pride for awhile, visiting each of the booths, overly aware of the loud music coming from the main stage and the tent with a partial dancefloor, gritty with dust and grains of dirt, which was starting up an hour of country music line-dancing. Social dancing is big in some zones of the LGBT subculture: line-dancing, square dance, waltzing, swing, all these living archaic social dance styles. I grew up with isolate solitaire dance styles being the cultural avant-grade: punk mosh pits, rock & roll mutual touchless grooving. Being touch-starved, I always appreciated social dancing. When I was a shy boy, I was actually good at square-dancing. I remember going to some barns in small town Michigan for square dances, with some friends and co-workers, pre- and post-college. It was good fun, but it didn't set deeply into my soma. Contact improv and contemporary modern classes, which came later in my life, left deeper marks.
I shopped a little at a couple of the storefront booths. I bought two or three new LGBT lapel pins. I collect and wear lapel pins. Except for some necklaces, some of which I make myself, which are more tied to neo-pagan urges, I wear no jewelry except pins I can attach to clothing. No tattoos, no piercings, no jewelry, no rings, nothing. Wearing gold makes me crazy after a few days. I only wear silver or pewter, or non-conductive materials. It's something energetic. I found a few rainbow-patterned LGBT pins that I liked, including one that's a Taoist yin-yang, only the white side of the evolving spiral is rainbow-patterned. It's all branding, it's all advertising. We use these logs and markers to broadcast who we are, ever so subtly. How often do you find an Eastern religion icon being combined with LGBT patterning? It's very rare. I may have to design a Buddhist eight-spoked wheel with rainbow insets. The yin-yang-rainbow is unusual enough in context. You can find rainbow crosses, fishes, and other Christian icons all too readily. As usual, very little is available for us non-mainstream religious types, unless we make it ourselves. Actually, I'll have to make a rainbow medicine wheel, a rainbow pentagram, and other icons, to fully express my own inner spiritual diversity. I found at one store a pewter raven icon, which I gave to my Radical Faerie friend named SilverRaven; I gifted him with that name, and now with an iconic calling-card raven emblem: pattern recognition.
I had a snack of Jamiacan jerk chicken, and a bottle of water, from a food stand. I chatted with friends for awhile. I walked around some more. I took some candid photos of the crowd, and attractive bodies within the crowd. It was a hot day, and shirts were often off. Soon it was time to perform. we gathered near the stage, listening to a loud queer rock band doing mostly 70s rock covers. Why is it that so many lead singers in such bands play bass? Bass players seem more grounded than guitarists, and often compose and sing. At least four or five great singer-songwriters in pop music are bassists. (I admit to bias, being a bassist myself.) They were a loud band, but a good one. Rings of tough-looking women were in front of the stage, some dancing. A pair of gender-indeterminate swing dancers circled near the mixing board. We did our hour-long set, and several times made the crowd laugh, or nod and sing along with the music. We pulled them in, and joined all of us in the music.
When we were done, and offstage, I was so tired I could barely walk back to the truck. After a week of camping in the Northwoods, and the long drive home the day before (300 miles from campsite to front door), I found this entire Pride festival entirely too loud. It was great fun, and too loud for me. I love that Pride is a celebration; I don't always like that it's a party, and not always very political anymore. Our set onstage reminded us all of some of the politics, with songs about rights, about being who we are, about requiring more than mere tolerance from our culture.
I drove home in silence.
I have spent all day today collapsed and exhausted. The days have been tiring. I've needed the downtime. Tomorrow is soon enough to listen to voicemails, to answer emails, to re-engage with those aspects of modern life I feel no desire to engage with today. Perhaps not even tomorrow, but the next day. After a long time camping in the relative quiet of the distant wilds, I'm reluctant to re-engage at all. Time changes: it slows down. Time becomes a daily cycle rather than clock-driven demand. Time stretches. When time changes, so does space, because they're inextricably linked. You can change one by changing the other: and their effects on you. Today, mostly tired, mostly silent, not even wanting to read very much, having reached the end of words, the limits of words, I find myself wanting to do no more now than watch the lingering dusk, listen to the small frogs and crickets out the window, and feel the cool breeze after another hot, dusty day. There is no need to fill this silence with noise; no need for any rush back to the Usual Stuff. Why rush? It will eventually catch you up. The trick is to make it work for it, to make it work hard to get you back, to postpone the inevitable re-engagement as long as possible.
This new documentary about rural British Columbian singer-songwriter Ferron looks wonderful. We look forward to seeing it, and probably owning the DVD eventually.
The nearest gay bar to me is an hour’s drive away, in the state capitol. In my small town there’s a bar that’s gay-friendly, and I hear it’s all-gay every so often. But I’m not big on bars.
When I was in my thirties, I lived in your typical cow-town-on-hormones, Madison, WI. It has a big state University with a heavy emphasis on agriculture, and is also the state capitol. Madison thinks it’s more progressive and hip than it actually is: scratch the surface, and underneath you find many layers of old-time agrarian attitudes.
While I lived there, I played bass guitar and Chapman Stick in several jazz, blues, rock, and avant-garde post-punk bands. I had my fill of bars then. Some gigs were in venues ranging from upper-crust jazz clubs just off Capitol Square, while others were in dark and smoky bars on the edges of town, or out in the country. A few times we drove down to Chicago to play.
A couple of things you learn from playing gigs in bars: It’s no fun being around drunks when you’re not. It’s not much fun being around smokers when you’re not, either.
I don’t mind if folks do, it’s just not much fun when you’re not part of their group. There are lots of ways we sit on the sideline. We’re sidelined in so many ways, all our lives, when we’re LGBT. When I play music, I need to stay clear-headed, so I don’t drink; and then there’s the long drive home after the gig, often pretty late at night.
After one of those jazz/blues gigs, my clothes often reeked of smoke stink for four days, give or take. I’d launder everything but the smell would still take days to fade. Then I’d go out the next weekend and play, and my clothes would reek all over again. Some friends thought I smoked myself, although I never have. Some of the jazz clubs in Madison were at that time already smoke-free, a trend that grew over time to include most venues in Wisconsin. But not many small-town bars, even just outside town. The further out you go, the more likely you are to find Life in the 1950s, or even Life in the 1930s.
In anthropology they had an idea called “the doctrine of marginal survival.” Basically, the idea was that cultural elements ripple out from the artistic and governmental centers of any civilization: the capitol city is where change and development are turning over fastest, where fashions thrive, where trends are born. The trends move outwards in waves from the center. So if you’re trying to study what a culture was like in its more agrarian, tribal, or ancient past, go to the hinterlands and look in the small towns farthest away from the center of things. There you will discover that things haven’t changed much at all, yet.
Out here there is a change going on that may give the lie to that idea, rich and provocative as it is. Even small towns, borderline villages, and hamlets far from anywhere, are now getting access to the World Wide Web. The fabulous Internet. Cyberspace with its cyberpunks and data cowboys. We connect now in ways my parents never imagined. And our children have never been un-connected. I can say truthfully that I was born as part of the last generation to not own personal computers as students. Even some members of the older generation have internet access now. I know a farmer west of town who is online every day, in between chores. I know a few people out West who I talk to regularly, over the virtual back fence, as though we were actual neighbors. Cyberspace collapses geography, making us less isolated, more likely to find people who share our ideas and interests.
So maybe we rural LGBTs are not cut off from each other anymore. The gay bar remains an hour’s drive away from me, but now there are online LGBT connections for community, gathering together in affinity, and meeting for social activities. Of course, also for sex hook-ups, making friends, making “friends with benefits,” etc. The point is, we’re not as isolated as we used to be. Nobody is.
It’s still no fun being around drunks when I’m not. And going to the gay bar an hour’s drive away isn’t very satisfying: who wants to get drunk before having to drive home? It’s not just the safety issue, it’s the stupidity issue. So I remain an outsider to those venues, wondering why so many LGBTs think they’re supposed to be so much fun, just as I was an outsider when was a musician playing gigs in them.
A wandering musician, artist, and writer, traveling across the face of the earth and sharing what is encountered. Has won awards for music composition, visual art, and creative writing.
