Inspired by the courage and the music of SFGMC, Pearson distributed flyers announcing a meeting to organize a gay men’s chorus. The effort to form a chorus was led primarily by Marsha Pearson, a “straight” woman and friend of Washington’s gay community.
The Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC (GMCW) was founded in 1981 following that performance by SFGMC at the Kennedy Center. Their first concert was a month later, and two-and-a-half years later, SFGMC launched a national tour that brought them to the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC in 1981. And so, instead of an audition, the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus (SFGMC) ended up making their “debut” at an impromptu memorial service for the slain men on the steps of the City Hall. Auditions for this new, “out” chorus were held the evening of November 27, 1978, a day of grieving in San Francisco as earlier that day, an assassin’s bullets ended the lives of the city’s mayor and its first openly gay supervisor, Harvey Milk.
The LGBTQ+ choral movement began when a group of musicians considered forming a gay men’s chorus in San Francisco in the late ‘70s, as the gay civil rights movement grew. And the song of GMCW could not have been written without first understanding the background and cultural context that motivated its birth.
