By Yasmeen Mohiuddin
Imagine expressing pride in your sexuality while crooning “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” in front of a large audience. This Christmas, gay men around Ottawa will get to belt out a variety of tunes and affirm their identities at the same time.
Every Wednesday night, members of the Ottawa Gay Men’s Chorus (OGMC) meet to rehearse for their annual Christmas concert, featuring variations on traditional holiday tunes. The bilingual group also performs a spring concert at the National Arts Centre and during Gay Pride Week in July.
Currently there are around 18 members in the chorus. As they enter the choir room at St. John’s Church on the corner of Elgin and Somerset, musical director Leith Chu orders them to stand up and shake the kinks out of their system. They are a diverse group, with young and old men, and a few visible minorities.
The singers say the alphabet as fast as they can before warming up their vocal chords. “Ma moo mee moo ma, ta too tee too ta.”
“Christmas is our most traditional concert, our holiday concert,” says Chu. He explains this year’s concert will feature modern versions of Christmas classics as well as conventional carols.
The choir also plans to perform a new piece for Hanukkah. “It’s a combination of three different traditional Hanukkah melodies,” says Chu.
The OGMC is thinking of moving away from traditional Christmas music, according to George Lee, the production co-ordinator.
He says the group has been doing less traditional music of late and “may go to a seasonal concert as opposed to a holiday concert.”
Lee describes the group’s current Christmas catalogue as “quasi-religious.”
“[The songs are] technically not Christmas-related but they have very religious or spiritual words involved,” he says.
Chu says the group’s other concerts go farther out into broader musical genres.
“We’ve done jazz, we’ve done rock, we’ve done pop, we’ve done disco and country,” he says.
The theme for next year’s spring concert is music from television and movies, with “big choreographed dance numbers,” according to Chu.
The OGMC began as the Ottawa Men’s Chorus in 1986, at a time when discussing gay issues was considered taboo. It was formed by Gordon Johnston, a professional conductor, who was inspired by the Vancouver Men’s Chorus.
“The whole point was to bring together gay men to express in music the values we had in common, and the pride we had in being gay.”
Johnston says at the time the subject of a gay men’s choir was a touchy one. He recalls the first concert, when the program said the chorus was a member of the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses (GALA), an international association of gay,
lesbian, bisexual and transgendered choruses.
“One guy nearly had heart failure,” Johnston recalls.
Because of the sensitivity of the issue, the chorus only added the word “gay” in 1997. Johnston says some members were hesitant to be associated with gay causes in the eighties, so more would join an organization billed as a men’s chorus.
“If I called it the Ottawa Gay Men’s Chorus we’d have had to rename it the Ottawa Gay Men’s Duet,” says Johnston.
Chu says because the choir has a bilingual repertoire and membership, he established contacts this summer with other French language choruses from Paris to find appropriate music.
“There’s a lack of literature for a gay men’s chorus in French,” he says, referring to the available music.
“Most of it’s in English, some of it’s in Yiddish or Hebrew and some of it’s in Spanish, which of course reflects the United States.”
The OGMC acts as a support network for its members too.
“I was coming out in those days, and the choir was a way for me to come out,” says Gianluca Ragazzini, a former president of the group, speaking of when he joined in 1997.
He says he had friends in the choir, and he decided to join after seeing one of its concerts.
“My final decision to come out was when I decided that I was going to be on stage and singing in the choir.”
The OGMC’s Christmas concert, Lights – Lumière, will be held on Dec. 4 at 8 p.m. and Dec. 5 at 2 p.m. at the First Baptist Church at Elgin and Laurier West.