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Michael Dunne: I'm Michael Dunne. Today's show is going to be a little different. Interspersed with interviews will be music. As we celebrate Pride Month, today's show is going to feature conversation and songs from the Eugene Gay Men's Chorus. You'll hear from their leadership about the chorus' history and mission, and you'll also hear about why their music and just existence is so important. The chorus has upcoming performances in Eugene and Corvallis during Pride month, with a show called Out Loud featuring some of the most important pop ballads in LGBTQ plus culture, and we were invited to record some of their songs during rehearsal, so sit back and listen to a chorus that is nearing a decade of song and celebration and bringing together a much needed sense of community.
Eugene Gay Men’s Chorus: “Where have all the good men gone, and where are all the ghosts? Where's the street wise Hercules survive the rising lost in the to Me…”
Dunne: The music you're hearing, holding out for a hero, is one of the pop ballads that the Eugene Gay Men's Chorus will be singing at their upcoming show in Eugene on June 20, called Out Loud. This concert will be a celebration of gay pride during Pride month. The chorus invited us into a recent rehearsal, and today's show will feature several of their songs to get a sense of what the Eugene Gay Men's Chorus means to the community. We sat down during rehearsal with its president, Chris Swires, to talk about the chorus' history and evolution. Chris, really appreciate you coming on the show and chatting, you know. Why don't you give us a history lesson of the Eugene Gay Men's Choir? How did it start? How long have you been doing this?
Chris Swires: Well, the Eugene Gay Men's Chorus officially started in 2018. It started with a small group of people asking a question, why doesn't Eugene have huge gay men's chorus, and one of our founders, Richard Daniels, sent an email to the University of Oregon, going, is anybody interested in maybe leading the gay men's chorus in Eugene, and that email got to Evan Miles, our founding artistic director. He was just literally finishing up his degree, master's degree in conducting, and they met for coffee, and it went from there, and here we are today, so it started with five people in a living room, and it's now over 50 singers, plus another 10 or 15 people who are non-singing members who help out with the chorus.
Dunne: Talk about the importance of forming the choir for the LGBTQ+ community, but for the community in general, you talk about the importance of having a UG Eugene gay men's course and what it can do.
Swires: Well, the original gay men's courses were founded in the 80s and some from the early 70s surrounding gay liberation and with then the beginning of the AIDS crisis, which was back then called GRID, gay immune deficiency, and they, they're, they were, they're a voice for people, for those of us who are, you know, on the margins, it gives us a community to do that, and you know, from that small history. Be long history of the the legacy of the gay men's courses here in Eugene. When we were founding a chorus, we, we wanted to be more broad, because here in Eugene, we say you don't have to be a man, you don't have, you don't have to be gay, you don't even have to be from Eugene, you just have to be able to sing in the tenor bear baritone range, is what, which is our voiced chorus, and you have to want to be a part of our mission, which is to provide that community and that visibility of what it means to be an LG LGBTQIA individual here in the greater Eugene area and in the world/
Dunne: And I wanted to talk about that, because do you also sort of liaise with other choirs, you know, talk about partnerships that you do, I believe you just did something with the Soromundi choir fairly recently, right?
Swires: Yeah, about a year ago, we did something with Sora Mundi. Actually, we also did something on Valentine's Day too. I forgot about that one, but we are so in Eugene, we are blessed with multiple choirs who identify on the LGBTQ IA spectrum. We have Sora Mundi lesbian chorus of Eugene, we've got the Queer Choir of Eugene, we've got Eugene Gay Men's Chorus, and we do things together, the Valentine's Day concert, we sang with them, we had the Portland Gay Men's Chorus down here at the end of February, where we did a concert called Legacies, which was talking so much about the history of, of, of gay and lesbian choruses, and why they're so important. We did a big joint concert with them, so yeah, we, and we're also part of something called Gala, Gala courses are a United States, Canada, Mexico, the world course made up of queer identifying courses, and we get together every four years. It's a way to to be part of this greater community, and we, we went to Minneapolis back in the summer of 2024 for that. 170 choruses, 6000 plus people from all over the world flew in just for a week of music and a celebration of who we are as a community.
Dunne: talk about the importance just of music itself in sort of bringing people together. Talk about how important a performance is in talking about your mission, but also just talking about inclusivity.
Swires: Well, music, why we're a chorus is because music is a way to be inclusive, even when we're singing more pop anthems, like we are for this concert coming up, it still has a message. I mean, the, you know, we've done protest songs, we've talked about, we've sung about the struggles of being a queer-identified youth and suicide, and those things. Music allows you to to speak truths in a way that that just reaches the soul, and it builds community. It builds community with these, the chorus members on the on the stage, and also community with the audience. I mean, when you are touched by that, you know that that human drive of music, you know the tears, the joys, the laughter, they're all of a piece, and you know humanity is blessed with the ability to make music, and through music makes community.
Dunne: Of course, this is Pride Month, June. You know, talk about the importance of that month, but also what it means to you personally, but also to the chorus as well.
Swires: Well, Pride Month is very important to not just myself, I, you know, to me, I, you know, I was a grew up in a very conservative religious household, and finding this community, and to be able to sing on stage with, you know, 50 other singers, and look out in the audience, and know that most of the audience is made up of LGBTQ individuals and their families. Families and their friends and their allies, just, you know, touches the heart, and Pride month is the chance to just say, I, I'm important, and, and, and my life is important, and just, and, you know, and so that's what, what I look for in as Pride.
Dunne: Okay, talk about the upcoming concert.
Swires Well, Out Loud is the celebration of the gay anthems throughout the decades, when, and the divas that made it, made, made those songs so popular, because I mean, if you look at what, what are the gate anthems, you know, I will survive Vogue, express yourself, I'm born this way from Lady Gaga, you know, these disco beats that, yes, you're dancing to, but also were latched on to by the gay community because it, it had a message of who we are and that we are important, we're here and we're going to be okay,
Dunne: Chris. My last question for you, what's your favorite part about performing?
Swires: My favorite part about performing, I just, you know, after all the hard work of all the rehearsals, is just standing up there and for an hour and a half, just being part of that music as the group, and you know, I enjoy the applause, I enjoy, I mean, I have an ego, we all do, but I mean, I, I enjoy knowing that for that 90 minutes or that, though, two hours, I made something special in that room that's not going to happen again the exact same way, even if we sang do that concert again the next day or the next week or whatever, it's a unique event that happened.
Dunne: Chris Swires, the president of the Eugene Gay Men's Chorus. Thank you so much for talking with us.
Swires: Thank you.
Dunne: Let's listen to one of the chorus' selections, I am what I am, that will be part of their upcoming Pride Month show.
Eugene Gay Men’s Chorus: “Come take a look, at me. Little pride in my world is not a place I have to hide in lies not worth a damn till you can say hey world I am what I am...”
Dunne: Now bring in the founding artistic director of the chorus to talk about how he and the group creates the vision for their performances. Evan Miles, the founding artistic director for the Eugene Gay Men's Chorus. Evan, thanks so much for coming on and talking to us.
Evan Miles: My pleasure. Happy to be here. Thank you.
Dunne: My first question for you is, How do you come up with your vision for show. How do you sort of workshop it, and how does it all sort of come together?
Miles: Yeah, it's a very involved process that starts many, many months before we start rehearsing in a given term. Oftentimes I'm thinking about what themes and concepts are really resonating with the people within the group, what's going on in our world, and what kinds of community projects that we can do with other ensembles, and I'm sort of developing an idea based off of these, and a lot of other factors that go into programming, and what programming is, is basically, you know, I go through a large library, and I do lots of searching for music that speaks to these themes, and I start piecing together a narrative and a vision based off of a couple of those individual songs, and start weaving together a show out of those ideas that hopefully tell a story and tell a narrative that is welcoming, but. Also, inclusive of the message that we're trying to bring to the concert,
Dunne: What's more of a challenge, finding enough material or having to edit and cut things out?
Miles: That is a great question. It is way more challenging to edit and cut things out. I find that I have three or four concerts worth of material, but then narrowing it down into one concert is always the most challenging.
Dunne: Talk about your process too, in terms of collaboration with the with the performance, the performers. How do you sort of all work together towards a common theme?
Miles: Well, I look at the music ahead of time, and I see what - what are the requirements here? What kinds of visual aids do we need? What kind of solos are we going to be looking for? What kind of instrumentation does this lend itself to what kind of genre are we doing right, and I sit down with my team, my artistic team, which is Ryan De Lieu and Bruce Haynes, and we talk, we kind of talk through the program ahead of time, and we sit down and we sort of envision the idea as it comes about, and then as we go through, we audition people for certain solos for the instrumentalists that we bring in. We usually hire professionals that we've worked with before that we really love, who love playing with us. And then we out of that, both volunteers and professionals, we create the end product.
Dunne: And then, how do you blend sort of the esthetic, the visual elements that you want people to see with the music itself.
Miles: Well, I actually think music is very colorful, and so I see music and I hear music kind of at the same time, and luckily I work with some really beautiful, creative individuals who also feel that way, and so when you're really working with a partnership of people like that, you tend to land on things together, and it all kind of coalesces into something that makes sense, so if, like, there's a fast song, you know, something that's driving, you know, I might think I want my drummer to have a really kick-ass solo here, and where they can just go in and, and just go wild, and then it gives everybody a chance to let loose for a minute, and then we'll come back into, you know, more of a structured theme, and in that case, you know, we might have brighter colors, like red or something that sort of accompanies that.
Dunne: Okay, I know it's different for every show, but what do you want the audience to feel? What do you want them to experience from your creative vision?
Miles: Ideally, I want them to feel like they see themselves in what we do. I want to connect with the audience. I want them to feel like they're in a way a participant and they're inside of the experience with us. So we rehearse for months at a time and then we put it on stage, and at that point we're giving the gift back to the audience, and what we're hoping for is that you know it resonates with some part of the audience experience, and now people are coming to us from all different walks of life and different mental states, and so something different usually is resonating with every individual person. Some folks are coming to hear the really fun driving song with a drum solo, and some people are coming here, and they didn't really realize they needed to hear the song about the breakup that they just experienced and are sad about.
Dunne: Talk about the upcoming show, and talk about the elements that you're excited about, and again, what you want the audience to feel.
Miles: Yeah, this upcoming show, Out Loud, is a really special show, because we're really celebrating queer joy and gay joy and gay history with a lot of the big divas of gay music that we're so in love with, like Madonna, Lady Gaga, Diana Ross, and Gloria Gaynor, and so many other fabulous divas that have really celebrated us over the ages, and this is a unique show in that it's more just about that particular celebration, and that's something unique to us, because we usually try to diversify a lot, but now we get to really hone in and just create a sense of love and appreciation. Of course, there's going to be some surprises along the way. I won't spoil what those are, but if you know me and you know how I program, you know that I like to experience a broad range of human emotion in a concert, so you can expect some of that here as well.
Dunne: Okay, Evan, my last question is this: a lot of us may hear these anthems and they're very familiar to all of us, and when we think, "Oh, that's a great song, are they more than that to you as a creative director?
Miles: All music is more than the sum of its parts, and when we hear music, and when we can really relate to music, we hear it more than just with our ears, we can hear it with our full bodies, and we can experience them on a deeper level that speaks to our core, and that's the joy of music. So, when we hear music that identifies with our particular experience, it almost feels like we have befriended the artist. Themselves, and they see a part of us, and we see a part of them, and in that relationship, we're building vulnerability, we're building connection, we're building growth inside of ourselves, and I think that's one of the most powerful things you can experience with music.
Dunne: Evan Miles, the founding artistic director for the Eugene Gay Men's Chorus. Evan, thank you so much for joining us.
Miles: My pleasure. Thank you.
Dunne: And let's finish out the show by listening to another ballad classic that the chorus will feature.
Eugene Gay Men’s Chorus: “I'm coming out. Coming out, coming out, so you better get this party started. Get this party started on a Saturday night. Everybody's waiting for me to arrive. Sending out a message to all of my friends, we'll be looking flashy in my Mercedes Benz. I got lots of style check my gold diamond rings. I can go for miles if you know what I mean. I'm coming out. I want the world to know. Got to let it show. Got to let it show. Bumping up the volume, breaking down to the V. I'm coming out to through the west side, we'll be chucking and shining as a moon, and I'll be burning rubber, you'll be kissing, but you better get this car to help her get out of the car. Liza's place is under number one superstar.”
Dunne: That's the show for today. All episodes of Organ On The Record are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. Tomorrow on the show, you'll hear from Dan Froomkin, an extremely popular national media critic and columnist, who is one of the savviest voices today about how the media is struggling in the era of Trump. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon On The Record. Thanks for listening.
