Positive Liberty

Note: This is the last post of what’s proved to be a trilogy. Here are parts one and two. With any luck, I will post pictures from the GALA festival tonight, giving many of you your first glimpse of what I actually look like. And then I will promptly change the subject.

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Gospel may have been king at the GALA Choruses festival, but it just wouldn’t be gay music without show tunes, and one musical rose to the top: John Waters’ cheerfully sardonic mock-epic Hairspray.

Waters is the Oscar Wilde of our time: He perfectly skewers every cultural myth we hold dear, and yet there’s virtually no bitterness. All is levity; all is sick, twisted fun. Much like Oscar Wilde, appreciating John Waters is like eating a giant puff pastry–decadent, sinful, apparently devoid of value–and then feeling afterward that you’ve had a good, wholesome meal, much to your own surprise.

No fewer than eight different choruses did selections from Hairspray, with nearly all of them performing the musical’s irrepressibly cheerful finale, “You Can’t Stop the Beat.”

You can’t stop an avalanche
As it races down the hill
You can try to stop the seasons, girl
But ya know you never will
And you can try to stop my dancin’ feet

But I just cannot stand still
‘Cause the world keeps spinning
‘Round and ’round
And my heart’s keeping time
To the speed of sound
I was lost til I heard the drums
Then I found my way

‘Cause you can’t stop the beat

Ever since this old world began
A woman found out if she shook it
She could shake up a man
And so I’m gonna shake and shimmy it
The best that I can today

‘Cause you cant stop
The motion of the ocean
Or the sun in the sky
You can wonder if you wanna
But I never ask why

And if you try to hold me down
I’m gonna spit in your eye and say
That you cant stop the beat!

[...]

Ever since we first saw the light
A man and woman liked to shake it
On a Saturday night
And so I’m gonna shake and shimmy it
With all my might today
‘Cause you cant stop
The motion of the ocean
Or the rain from above
They can try to stop the paradise
We’re dreaming of
But they cannot stop the rhythm
Of two hearts in love to stay
‘Cause you cant stop the beat!

[And, still more improbably,]

You can’t stop my happiness
‘Cause I like the way I am
And you just can’t stop my knife and fork
When I see a Christmas ham
So if you don’t like the way I look
Well, I just don’t give a damn!

[Fill with choruses. Shake well. Serve.]

Even in Montreal, the New Wave Singers of Baltimore had the home-team advantage. Their act included a number of great character solos, with period costumes to match. But the Columbus Gay Men’s Chorus stole the show. They turned “You Can’t Stop the Beat” into a swing extravaganza that had to be seen to be believed. With some 150 performers on stage, not a single one of them missed a step.

My friend Kyle Jordan did a solo and a dance routine that made the audience scream like they’d just seen the Beatles. Kyle is wonderfully talented, almost done with his Ph.D., and he’s drop-dead gorgeous. (Memo to the Columbus guys: Why on earth is he still single?)

By halfway through the week, “You Can’t Stop the Beat” had become the unofficial theme song of the festival. Every morning I sang “You Can’t Stop the Beat” in the shower. Badly, because I’m just on stage crew and not an actual singer. Every evening, “You Can’t Stop the Beat” helped dance me back to sleep, whether I wanted it to or not. I got so sick of hearing it in my head that I started referring to it as “THAT SONG.”

“You know,” said Scott in one of his usual bursts of insight, “‘that song’ is SO heterosexual.”

It is. It’s straight, idealistic, and one of the most utterly normal parts of the entire John Waters oeuvre–even counting the part about the Christmas ham, it’s on the whole pretty normal. It’s about first love, and when a boy meets… a girl, and when a girl falls for… a boy. It’s about the way things are supposed to be, and how natural they all are.

And remarkably, we feel all those things too, in our own way.

Our performances of that song–and indeed, the original song itself–These things were emphatically not parodies. They were not subversions. Much like our re-appropriation of gospel, these songs were entirely real, entirely sincere. They weren’t a plea for legitimacy so much as they were simply a natural expression of legitimacy itself.

So it was with the lesbians singing about their children, and with the gay men singing about their parents, and with practically everyone singing about God, and family, and patriotism. But no, I’ll spare you the patriotism…

It was not to say, “See how normal we are.” Instead it was, “Welcome to our lives.”

“Welcome to our lives” was also the theme of Diverse Harmony’s introductory multimedia presentation. Diverse Harmony is more than just a gay chorus: Based in Seattle, they are a group of young people, aged 14-22, who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender–plus their friends and family. As if that weren’t enough, they also happen to sing.

Diverse Harmony not only sang well, but they showed us the future. They did so not merely in their youth, but in the very fact of gay youth itself: For far too long, others–and even we ourselves–have identified the gay community as a group of adults, detached, rootless, childless, estranged even from our parents. Diverse Harmony challenges all of that–And more power to them.

In our case, integration isn’t about crossing a color line. It’s about returning to our families–the families that, truth be told, we never really wanted to leave in the first place.

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