I’ve sung at the Royal Albert Hall, made friends with people I would otherwise never have met and felt the power of being seen and heard for who I really am
I
t is April 2022 and I am standing in the middle of the stage at Cadogan Hall in London. As the pianist plays a plucky staccato intro, it dawns on me that I am about to sing the West Side Story classic I Feel Pretty, with choreography, in front of a packed audience, alongside 200 gay men.
This was my first time performing with the London Gay Men’s Chorus (LGMC) – Europe’s largest gay choir. I first saw them perform years earlier in Soho, where they sang Bridge Over Troubled Water at a vigil for the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida in 2016. After making it through the pandemic, the chorus’s years-long waiting list and months of rehearsals, I was under the bright stage lights, trying to remember the first line of the song and thinking: “what have I got myself into?”
In some ways, the LGMC came into my life at the perfect time. I had recently gone freelance and I missed the upsides of having colleagues: gossip, after-work drinks and trivial office grudges. Looking back to my first rehearsal, when I had to wear a name tag to identify myself, I couldn’t have predicted how many friends I would make, often with people I wouldn’t have encountered in my social circle. One of my choir besties, Bradley, was raised as a Mormon in Utah. Our upbringings were different, but being two gay guys who love to sing the high notes transcends cultural barriers. On the gossip front, there were petty rivalries and microscandals worthy of a Ryan Murphy TV drama – it’s a gay choir, after all.
