In March, 2023, when I headed West on the USRail pass, I was hoping to visit the cities I used to live in and see if I could reconnect to people I knew back in the day but hadn’t seen in decades. To this end, when I arrived in Long Beach CA, I went to the LGBT Community Center assuming they would be the repository of the Gay History of Long Beach, and, having worked and known many of the movers and shakers back then, this would be the place to start.
The people at the front desk of the umbrella LGBTQ Community Center, which should be aware of Community history, were unaware that from 1985-1996 their own city had a very well respected Gay Men’s Chorus that, among other things, had been the first non-Disney entity to be allowed by them to perform songs from Little Mermaid for which they gave approval at the opening performance which allowed us to continue that section of the show in later performances. Being under 30, the people at the reception desk had no idea that the chorus had existed and only knew of the one that took its place in another city when a large number of the members of the original chorus, who had been very active when it came to all the AIDS business of the time, succumbed to the virus and are now unknown. They were aware of the new chorus and assumed it had been the only one.
I spoke with the young people at the desk and to the person in charge of the Center at the time who also had no knowledge of the chorus.
I next asked about the newspaper that had existed in the 1980s and which also faded away with AIDS. They only knew about a recently begun one that claims on its website to be the first such Gay paper in the city.
I was in the chorus. I drew cartoons for the newspaper. I know these existed and I recognized the erasure due either to a grotesque lack of interest in the Gay Community History in Long Beach, or, as was in my case with the revision and rewording had been expunged from the record because, with AIDS, a lot of the history of those days was unpleasant without glitter and it was just ordinary people dying not idols and myths.
I wrote to the Center’s leadership pointing out this hole in the Community’s history and was assured it would be looked into after the Pride Month activities were completed and there would be time. The matter died as the correspondence ceased.
And so it was that when I decided to take the train trip again in 2024, I would go to the Center allowing for more time to follow up on this erasure.
The two people at the desk this time were a young person and a middle aged woman who should know something of the Community’s past. Again neither had any knowledge of the paper or the chorus and, to be honest, showed little interest in either.
I asked to use one of the community room computers to look some things up that might be helpful, including links to the local newspaper that had advertised and reviewed the Gay Mens’ Chorus of Long Beach concerts and in whose social pages covered our doings. While I was doing my “research”, the people at the desk changed and when I reported back to the desk the two new people showed much more interest than those the year before and those they had just replaced. They asked many questions, had connections made to things they had heard about that now made sense, and were quite surprised the information about the chorus was nonexistent. They gave me the name of a person to contact.
With this encouragement and when I was at the Silver Fox that evening waxing eloquent on Gay History to a group of interested people, I was further encouraged as one of the people with whom I was speaking was on the Board of the Center and a little disturbed that the chorus, some of whose concerts he had attended, seems not to matter in the Community’s History.
With this need to restore history and in light of the reaction of those with whom I spoke that night, I sent the director of the Center the following letter.
“Having been a member of the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus, upon moving to Long Beach it did not take much for a friend already there to have me audition with him for the Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus, something he wanted to do, but not alone. From the fall of 1985 until the following spring, I was able to participate in major performances, the usual trial period of rehearsals and dress rehearsals before a person’s first actual appearance in a concert was waived for the very practical and very sad reason that in the mid 1980s membership in the chorus suffered some attrition from AIDS. I sang at Elizabeth Taylor’s AIDS Benefit at the Bonaventure Hotel, attended by anyone who was anyone in Hollywood. That would not have happened under better circumstances. I had only been there a short while.
During the spring of 1986, the chorus director suggested we attend the first concert of the newly formed Gay Men’s Chorus of Long Beach. It was a small chorus performing in a small venue, but it was important to show solidarity with those willing to be public faces of the community and, at the time, a possible bright spot during some dark times. A walk around the corner from my apartment was a much more convenient trip than that from Long Beach to West Hollywood for rehearsals and the more spread out distances on the days of concerts or one of the many funerals of members and friends of the chorus.
When I joined the chorus it was still small enough that the pianist was also the conductor. As the chorus grew so did the need for these to be separate positions. Just prior to this happening the GMCLB was asked by the Los Angeles Chorus to assist them in singing at the 1986 exposition of the full AIDS Quilt at the Pauley Pavilion at UCLA attended, again, and participated in by many Hollywood personalities. Our task was to fill in the voices that might be lost to emotion, such as the moment the quilt dedicated to the recently deceased music director of the Los Angeles chorus was lowered from the rafters by accident or design, one among many, in front of the risers where the combined choruses stood with members overcome with grief.
Members of the GMCLB are present in the official video of the event and are clearly visible.
Until this time, all work, other than that of the accompanist/conductor, was shared work with each member contributing in all aspects of concert production and promotion. Performance spaces are expensive and getting the use of them can be competitive, so the accompanist made arrangements with the Ebell Club that in exchange for refurbishing the pipe organ in the theater at great saving to the organization and a potential money maker as organists would perhaps begin concerts there again, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Long beach had a standing arrangement for use of the rehearsal and performance space.
The arrangement was mutually beneficial. This would be in the Ebell clubs records.
As with any organization, especially where people and money are concerned, eventually a board had to be formed and its first task was to find a conductor. As the chorus was structured, the musical director would work with members of the board to design each show and members would have some input about upcoming concerts as it was a group structure that grew organically and not a situation of people joining an already existing and highly structured organization. Concerts were collaborative efforts.
The new conductor had ideas of his own as it would become clear over time. He seemed to be under the impression that everyone, board members and rank and file members, worked for him and, therefore had little input just as his soon to be Ex had structured the chorus he had founded and of which the GMCLB’s new conductor had been a member. This caused tensions as the chorus members were being treated like employees in a non union shop. The tension this created led to a parting of the ways which was another mutually beneficial arrangement as the conductor went off and began his own chorus of which he was in full control.
Like other such choruses at the time, the chorus sang at many funerals.
Every Friday night, as many members of the chorus as were able to show up would begin their Friday evenings at the Broadway on Broadway in Long beach, a piano bar where Eddie held court. The evening would begin with Eddie accompanying those members who showed up singing Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Java Jive in four part harmony. Toasts would be made, those chorus members present would leave, and Eddie would return to his evening’s planned repertoire.
Eddie passed away and, being a seemingly devout Baptist, had arranged for a very Baptist funeral complete with the usual hymns, the exceptions being the songs the Gay Man’s Chorus of Long Beach sang as his remains entered and then exited the church, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Java Jive respectively much to the surprise of the Baptists and a delight to the rest present.
When the conductor departed, the chorus returned to its roots, producing entertaining concerts with both light and serious elements as opposed the more formal black tie only concerts.
The Ebell theater could be more creatively used and was.
By 1990 a new member of the chorus who was employed in Disney’s music department and was one of the people responsible for arranging music for, among other things, Disney On Ice, wanted to show the company he would be as good with choral arranging as instrumental, struck a deal with his supervisors. As the movie had just been released and there was no four part arrangement for male voices, he was given the Disney blessing to produce such an arrangement of songs from the recently released Little Mermaid and have it performed for their approval, or disapproval as the case might be, by a male chorus which was to be the Gay Men’s Chorus of Long Beach.
On the night of the concert with the Disney portion opening the show and being easy to excise from future concerts that season if the Mouse did not approve, sitting in the front row, clearly visible as the curtains opened, were five men in similar suits, wearing their Mickey lapel pins. They approved as the arrangements were good and the chorus treatment of it respectful.
The chorus member had proven himself and the Long Beach Gay Men’s Chorus became the first non-Disney entity to perform music from Little Mermaid and retained the permission of the Mouse to perform whatever four part all male choral arrangement the chorus member and promoted Disney employee might create. Disney, of course, retained the rights to his work.
In subsequent concerts the chorus performed Carmina Burana, Les Miserables, Little Shop of Horrors with sets, props, costumes, and projected chorus generated art and featured a soloist from the San Francisco Opera for selections from the Student Prince.
Meanwhile the founder of the Orange County Choral was working separately with his own chorus during this time.
Also in 1985 upon moving to Southern California, I contacted the two men who ran the Gay Community newspaper hoping to be able to continue the political cartoon work I had been regularly doing in Boston for the Dorchester Community News and occasionally for Bay Windows. They took me on and for the next several years until health made continued publication difficult, I produced cartoons and other work for the publication. Although there were a number of informational resources during the opening years of AIDS, this paper was more localized and, therefore, more relevant to the Long Beach Gay Community.
Because of my affiliation with this paper, I was able to attend a press banquet at the Ambassador Hotel, one of its last such events, where I was able to tell Patty Duke that her performance in Miracle Worker, which I had seen on film in high school, got me interested in Special Education as a career.
It is a shame that the existence of the chorus, the newspaper, and those fine men who gave of their time to the community, many as the last thing they were well enough to do before they became the next funeral have been erased and replaced as if these men did not exist or were so easily erased and knowledge of their existence and their work nonexistent to future generation who are being denied a true account of their Communal History.
The chorus once had standing as some form of tax status, perhaps a 501 (c), and should be traceable, and concerts were covered in the Press Telegram. It may take a quick search on the internet but the time spent researching is a service to those men and a service to the future that has a right to its true history.
In these instances alone, I have seen myself erased in both, as a chorus member and a community political cartoonist whose work was known and who also was the cartoonist for the United Teacher, the newspaper of the Los Angeles Teachers Union (UTLA).
There has been entirely too much revision and rewriting of the past to make it more palpable for the youth when for those living and dealing with fighting against the conditions of the past it was anything but. When honored to have my art and legal papers related to my successful advocacy for the inclusion of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Oklahoma City Public Schools student policies catalogued at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmund, I was also quite shocked that in the official account of my work, taking out trigger words and making other edits to have the story of the advocacy and opposition less uncomfortable, the fact I had been fired for the advocacy and regained my job through a district court case upheld by the appellate court had been reduced to a mere series of strong discussions with the district embracing diversity in the end which it definitely did not in the real history.
When traveling the country I have found conscious acts that erase the real history and those who made it, replacing the people and facts with a mythic figure based on carefully chosen happy bits and selectively rejected unhappy ones in many cases replacing the real hero with a Dr. Frankenstein hybrid as real people who could serve as realistic role models are swept to the curb because, perhaps, they lack a sufficient amount of glitter.
These conversations were not in isolated places with certain opinions sought. Many came from casual conversations with strangers I would talk to in bars and in one case in a city I was in only because of a train cancellation due to dust storms in the desert, and too many older men would mention their feeling of being sent out to pasture by those who have come after them but lacking any respect for what they may have done or are, as has happened in my case few times.
It is unconscionable that an organization like the LGBT Center which has taken upon itself the task of ensuring the safety, wellbeing, education, and living conditions of the Community would deny the Community its true history.
I first broached this erasure in March of 2023 with the Center when I had traveled to Long Beach after the establishment of the Quigley Collection at UCO in Edmund OK and in follow up emails. I brought it up again in June of 2024. It had not been addressed during that time and the reaction to my inquiry at the Center was repeated surprise that such a chorus and paper existed showing there had been no interest in any restoration of the historical record.
Others used to erase us. Now it seems we erase ourselves for comfort.
These men deserve their place in the Community’s historical record.
The owner of Hot Stuff, having seen the ongoing erasure of history, the watering down the Broadway Strip’s real history, warts and all, and may be someone to work with as she expressed to me a desire to preserve the history of what was once a vibrant street. I lived there for a while and know the history is uneven but it is better to show the best and worst of the place than a fiction.
I look forward to hearing of any progress.
The only ones who will preserve our real history is us, and we need to repair the damage.
Joseph Quigley
Quigley Institute for Non-Heterosexual Archival Archaeology
History needs to be restored and these men remembered for who they were and what they did for a hurting community.
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