“I was singing with the Portland Lesbian Choir at the time, and remember tours that we did to small towns in southern Oregon. We went with the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus. We were instructed not to walk around the towns after dark, or to go out by ourselves at any time of day,” Reid Vanderburgh recalls.
“We were picketed in Coos Bay. The picketers came in to the concert and sat as far from the stage as they possibly could. They held up Yes on 9 signs. They were trying to disrupt us and disrupt our cohesion as a chorus, but it didn’t work. By the end of the concert, some of them had put their signs down, and they didn’t pick them up again when we left,” says Reid. “I believe we changed some hearts and minds through our music.”
Gary Coleman, a founding member of Portland Gay Men’s Chorus, says of that Coos Bay performance, “I saw people put down their signs during the concert. I saw some people leave during the concert, I saw some people stay, and some who were in tears, and actually thanked us for the concert.”
“You can’t expect everyone to be instantly transformed. It’s not about that, but it’s about that visibility that’s consistent, and the message of love – which is what we always sing about – that cuts through. The power of music in itself cuts through. It resonates in here [the heart], not just the words, but the impact of the music, of the sound.”
Gary Coleman, Founding Member, Portland Gay Men’s Chorus
We Sing Out!
The trip to Coos Bay was part of the We Sing Out! tour performed jointly by the Portland Lesbian Choir (PLC) and Portland Gay Men’s Chorus (PGMC), visiting Southern Oregon towns and other communities not known for being gay friendly. “We had threats along the way, and had police follow us several places and escort us around,” Gary says.
While PGMC had done outreach performances before, for PLC, these road trips in protest of the ballot measures were the first time they had performed outside of Portland. Reid says, “the group cohesiveness in the Choir and in PGMC at that time was so powerful that people weren’t afraid for their individual safety, because we were a powerful group. Yes, we had those people picketing in Coos Bay, but we way outnumbered them. We weren’t afraid of them.”
“We were on buses on that particular tour,” Reid remembers. “We were given instructions that I imagine matched what the Freedom Riders were told back in the ‘60s: Don’t walk around by yourself. Don’t go out after dark. Don’t do anything in groups smaller than about four. Be really careful, be really vigilant; pay attention to your surroundings and who’s around you. We were given that instruction very explicitly. I have a feeling that it was a similar instruction that would be given to the Freedom Riders, because the danger is from similar kinds of people – people who have these ideas of what certain kinds of people are like. They want nothing to do with those people; they want to restrict those people. In this case, it was the gay community that was targeted.”
Visibility! Visibility! Visibility!
Gary provides some historical context for the timeframe around the Sing Out tour: “In January of ‘92 we were given the Metropolitan Human Relations Commission award for our work in diversity throughout the state. Then in March of ‘92 we did a mid-Valley tour to Corvallis and Eugene, then we sang at Artquake, and then we sang at the National Community Policing Convention in Portland. And then, right after we came back from the Sing Out tour, we sang at the Anne Frank World Exhibit, and then we sang in the Meier & Frank parade.
“What that says is that no matter where we sing, we are who we are. The impact is that simple. It’s much like Harvey Milk said: Come out, come out, come out so they know who you are. If they don’t know who you are, you’re this thing they’ll make up,” says Gary. “But at that time, when we’re being attacked and called pedophiles, and sadomasochists, and all the other stuff they attached to us at the time – it really required courage to continue to do that.”
Gary Coleman
“I just wanted to let everybody know that I was just a normal human being, that I didn’t have horns, that I didn’t chase all the boys – you know all those perceptions,” says longtime PGMC member Greg Friesen. “I’m just a normal man who loves to sing in a chorus. My family are rightwing conservatives. But they look at me and see a normal man doing normal things like singing in a choir. I also do some square dancing; as a teacher, I got awards – all of that sort of stuff. That’s really primary for me – that humanizing function that the Chorus helps with – at a time when there was all that talk that we’re all demon pedophiles.”
“It was one of the reasons we chose putting Gay in our name – whether they came to our concert or not, they were going to see the word,” says Gary. Quoting longtime PGMC leader Steve Fulmer – “As Fulmer used to say: Who could be afraid of a bunch of singers?”
PGMC established a practice of inviting those who protested and picketed their shows to “Come in and listen!” as Greg says. “As long as they didn’t make a stir, we didn’t shy away from that, or make them wrong per se, even though we might disagree with their position,” says Gary.
Gary describes one of these experiences in the Southern Oregon Rogue Valley Community College: “They had a new chorus there, and we were going to go support it. There was somebody with flyers, passing them out to people about us burning in hell and all that sort of stuff. We invited them to come in, and they came in and sat at the back. As we sang and as we listened to the other chorus sing, we saw this person moved – to tears. At the end they left their stack of pamphlets there, left without them and did not distribute them any further, didn’t have any after-protest.”
What Kept Us Going
“The Chorus was a place that just kept us going through all of those years,” says Gary, reflecting over the AIDS crisis and the years of ballot measure attacks.
“Our first death was in 1983,” Gary remembers. And then we started singing memorial services. We sang The Rose, service after service after service after service. I cry every time I sing it; even today, I still do.
“Two other things happened at the same time. We started seeing our friends die in front of us in ways that I will never forget. We were at Benson High School and [a Chorus member] came in. We hadn’t seen him in a few months and he was just shriveled away, and I barely recognized him. At the same time there were protesters at the front door, bible thumping and telling us we were going to hell. And we were confronting that.
“As our friends continued to die, we got bomb threats. We were picketed at many locations. All of that was going on. The thing that kept me sane during that time was the Chorus. It was the place I could rejuvenate for the work that we had ahead of us. It was just a place that just kept us going.”
For Greg, who had grown up in a conservative evangelical home in Southern Oregon and had to be closeted, working as an elementary school teacher, the Chorus “was my way to let myself be me. I could never be myself when I was home – I had nobody to relate to. But with the Chorus, I could always count on friends being there on Monday night. You could let your hair down. I could drop all of my little defenses and shields. It was so different than going out on Saturday night to a gay bar, because that was always, you know, a little drinking, a little sniffing – party, party, party! This was just a normal, everyday, walk in, see your friends, say hi – nothing fabricated. It was just friends getting together to sing. The singing was so cathartic.”
That was especially true during the OCA ballot measures. Greg says, “As soon as I saw that this stuff was coming out, all of a sudden, I got this gut wrenching feeling in my stomach. I’d been used to prejudice, but this was the first time that I had ever experienced a highly organized absolute hate campaign against me. It put knots into my stomach.”
“It just really helped going to the Chorus. I was with my species, you know, my kind. We could commiserate together, and oh, not laugh about it, but make our jokes, and do whatever it took to make us feel like we were not spit on the bottom of somebody’s shoe.”
Greg Friesen
The same was true for members of the Portland Lesbian Choir. “Being part of the PLC was incredibly powerful,” Reid says. “Incredibly powerful. I found a journal entry of mine from 1986, in early October, where I was just beside myself, having found PLC. I thought, this day I did something extremely important for myself. That group gave me a reason to exist for the next nine years, until I finally realized I was trans. The center of my life was that organization.
“It was the center of a lot of our lives. It was just the most important thing – because there’s something about choral singing. There’s a reason why it originated in churches in spiritual traditions, because there’s a huge power in converging on a single note in unison. It makes really overt, the interconnection between people. It’s so powerful. So to do that within a gay or a lesbian context, it just creates this huge sense of community that I’ve never found equaled in any other aspect of gay and lesbian community that I’ve participated in. And it spills over into the audience experience. So it brings the audience a glimpse of that same interconnection.
“With the OCA attack on our community, the choir members drew even closer together, if that’s possible,” says Reid.
Read more of Reid’s recollections as the only member of PLC to go on to sing with PGMC and of Gary and Greg’s conversation with No on 9 Remembered.
More Tales from the Road
Originally, the Sing Out tour was scheduled to perform in Medford, with a Catholic Church offering to host them. Then, Reid says, “the folks associated with that space wanted to look at the lyrics of the songs we were going to perform; they took exception to the lyrics of ‘Everything Possible’ – ‘You can be anybody that you want to be, you can love whomever you will. You can travel any country where your heart leads and know I will love you still. You can live by yourself, you can gather friends around, you can choose one special one. And the only measure of your words and your deeds is the love you leave behind when you’re done.’
“Basically it’s reassuring a small child you can be whoever you are. They thought that was a terrible message to send to a child.”
The host church also asked the choruses to drop the words “Lesbian” and “Gay” from their names. Choir member Mary Larsen told Pat Young this went “against every reason why we were going down there. We were going down there to be a presence and to be out and honest and open… and they wanted us to be something we weren’t, so we had to decline going down there.”
Two years later, in the next statewide OCA ballot measure fight, No on 13, “a small church stepped up and offered to host the concert; congregants hosted many of the singers,” Reid remembers. “Our host family told us, ‘We’re mostly Republicans in this parish, and we don’t believe in what the OCA stands for, so we wanted to do something to show our support.’ It was attitudes like that among the mainstream congregations that caused those ballot measures to fail; Portland by itself can’t carry the state in an election.”
Two years later, in the next statewide OCA ballot measure fight, No on 13, “a small church stepped up and offered to host the concert; congregants hosted many of the singers,” Reid remembers. “Our host family told us, ‘We’re mostly Republicans in this parish, and we don’t believe in what the OCA stands for, so we wanted to do something to show our support.’ It was attitudes like that among the mainstream congregations that caused those ballot measures to fail; Portland by itself can’t carry the state in an election.”
Despite the 1992 cancellation in Medford, the choruses were invited to Klamath Falls, where they were well received by about 200 people with no trouble – despite the harassment directed against other No on 9 activists locally during the course of the campaign.
“We went to Springfield on a separate excursion,” Gary remembers. “We were at the downtown theater. There were bomb threats; the police dealt with that behind the scenes, so we didn’t really have to deal with it. But most of us had driven down in our own cars. When we came out from the venue, someone had put gay porno with little things, like ‘Fags go home’ or whatever other messages on them, on the windshields of the cars all around the theater. I looked at it and thought: Well, this is kind of hot! [laughs] It was just: Go home! But look at this on your way! It was funny, ironic, weird, strange, and it was a sign of the times. I laugh at it now. But it was kind of hateful at the time.”
“I remember at the time [of Measure 9] we really felt a call to action,” says Gary. “We thought, this is a threat, and we can sing to this, especially in places that are outside of Portland, which we really need to support.”
PGMC and PLC have continued to play a transformative role through visibility and outreach.
“We went to Pendleton, probably in the late ‘90s,” Gary says. “Initially, the entire city did not support it; we wanted to put up posters and nobody would do it. The mayor didn’t support it but we went there and we had a great audience. They loved us. Several years later we came back. Most buildings now wanted us in their building, and advertised for us, and we had a bigger audience, and that just built and built.”
Reid remembers those trips to Pendleton with the Chorus, too. The second time, Reid says, “I went a day early, and was staying with a family who took us out to dinner that evening. Upon finding out I was with the Chorus, our waiter said, ‘I sure wish I could go, but I have to work!’ This time around, only one business refused to put up a flyer and we performed to a standing-room-only cheering crowd. Our director asked the PFLAG chair what made the difference in community reception between our two visits, and she simply said, ‘You did.’”
The most recent time PGMC was picketed was 2019 in Grants Pass. “We had gone there in 2017, says Gary. “We never raise money for ourselves when we go on outreach. It’s always for a local community agency of their choosing. They chose a local organization called Hearts with a Mission that worked with street kids. It was a wonderful crowd – they loved us, and we raised $3,000. But the Hearts with a Mission board wouldn’t take the money because we’re gay. However, they went to the City Council a month or two later and asked for money! And somebody who was in our audience at that concert said, Hey, you just turn down money! They got rid of part of their board and their executive director, and they changed their mission.
“So back to our return in 2019, they were once again the organization that got the money we raised, and they were sitting on the front row with their kids. A huge change! However, we went outside with our host and greeted the dozen or so protesters. So it doesn’t go away.
“But I think it is representative of our courage to be authentic. It’s just – this is who I am. Here we are. We’re singing. I’m sorry that’s a threat to you. We’re just doing it, in the face of their desire to legislate exclusion.”
Read Reid Vanderburgh’s memories as a founding member of the Portland Lesbian Choir, who has sung with the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus since 2008.
Read Gary Coleman and Greg Friesen’s recollections about starting and finding the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus, surviving the ‘80s and ‘90s, partnering with the Portland Lesbian Choir, their tour to China, and navigating generational change.
As they say on The Moth Radio Hour, “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storyteller.” Read more about the benefits and challenges of historical memory.