Positive Liberty

Two themes emerged unmistakably from the GALA choruses festival: religion and family.

No, really.

It’s not parody. It’s not subversion. It’s real. The gay community has got religion, and may God help us all.

It showed in the ubiquitous gospel music. Gospel is different from the classical religious music that many GALA Choruses also sing, because gospel is Good Old American Church. It’s the church that so many of us grew up in; it’s also the church down the street whose politics make us increasingly uncomfortable. Classical music is Latin, and German, and abstract mathematical ratios.

Like it or not, gospel is the here and now, the participatory, and the emotive. We can love or even hate classical music from afar–but gospel cuts to the bone.

There was the Lavender Light Gospel Choir, the Transcendence Gospel Choir; and the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, who performed a set of gospel and gospel-inspired music. Other choruses liberally peppered their own sets with gospel, too.

The performances ranged from incredible to inaudible. Transcendence was among the former: An all-transgender choir, they delivered a set that has won them a permanent place in the heart of the GLB–and T–chorus movement. We’ll not soon forget their presence.

Lavender Light fell into the second category: They were inaudible, at least for those of us in the balconies. Someone really should have turned down the amplifiers on their electric backup band. The error is particularly inexcusable given that the band had monitors right there with them on stage. Between the guitars and the handclaps, many of us could barely hear the singers.

And then there was the Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir. This last apparently isn’t gay, but they dropped by anyway, just in case we hadn’t gotten enough gospel.

In theory we’re a secular movement, but you might never have guessed it from last week’s festival, which danced all over the line between the sacred and the profane.

“Are you ready for some Church?” asked one choral director before her toe-tapping set.

Frankly, I wasn’t. But I’m a tolerant soul, and I can play along. I understand the value of this music, even if I don’t subscribe to the mysticism at its heart. I put that mysticism in brackets, and I never fail to point out that while I may believe in the GLBT choral movement, I do not happen to believe in God.

Still, I understand gospel’s appeal. It’s a music by, for, and about the oppressed. It speaks of liberation like nothing else. Whenever someone spouts off about jazz being the only original American art form, you need merely remind them of gospel to prove him wrong. At its best, it’s inspiring, and participatory, and patriotic in the grandest sense of the word. I make room for gospel.

I wish it were always so simple. One man sitting next to us grumbled his way through half of San Francisco’s performance–then got up and left in the middle of a song. It was an unparalleled insult to the granddaddy of the movement.

I frankly enjoyed San Francisco’s set, and yet I understand the man who walked out, and I know why he did what he did.

Mainstream religions have lately done to gay people all those nasty things that they used to save for, well, other mainstream religions. In a larger sense, organized religion has almost never championed a tolerant, open, or diverse society, and heaven knows they haven’t done it in our case. While there have been a few bright spots along the way–like gospel music–still, the overall record has been abysmal, and nowhere has it been worse than for us.

When gay people sing the songs of mainstream religion, the untrained ear hears nothing but surrender. The man who walked out didn’t see himself in all that religious music coming from the stage: Instead, he saw the face of his oppressors. He saw a smiling, jubilant, hand-clapping bigotry. And he walked out, bless his heart.

No doubt he wanted a clean break with religion and with all the intolerance that religion so often brings. I agree with him, and if I’d had my way, I’d make a clean break as well. Trouble is, deciding what constitutes “a clean break” just isn’t that easy.

There’s an awful lot I’d like to keep. Surrounded by religion, both in my work and among my friends, I’ve gradually become a mellow atheist, one who picks his battles and only fights the ones that he can win. My atheism does not make me such a philistine that I cannot abide religious art. Anyone who felt nothing but dread at such art would occupy a small cultural universe indeed.

I’d no more walk out of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus than I would paint over the Sistine Chapel. The considered, thoughtful secularist will recognize the achievements of religion throughout history, make his peace with it, and move on. Intolerance is unbecoming, and emulating our enemies gives the intolerant far more credit than they deserve.

Family, too, got a lot of credit at the GALA festival. In this case, it was unquestionably well-deserved. But family will be the subject of another essay.

Trackback URI |