“Music Triumphs Homophobia,” is a new documentary written and directed by Craig Coogan and Michael Willer that will probably make you rethink your opinion of Gay Men’s Choruses Until recently Coogan was the executive director of the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus and Willer has long served the chorus as its videographer and their film recounts how the chorus engages in outreach both local and global.
From performing at an area Catholic college once notorious for its institutional homophobia to challenging, joyful tours in LGBTQ+-unfriendly places like Poland, Turkey, and South Africa. By exemplifying its core message that music is a means to empathy and acceptance, they single-handedly do more to counter prejudice and outright hate than more conventional ‘missionary/religious” approaches.
It’s remarkable progress for the nation’s LGBTQ+ choruses – there are more than 200 at this point – that musical language has fostered understanding and helped drive change for more than four decades. We can see from the video that it is still an uphill battle in many areas, but there is hope and progress that now take center stage.
In press material for the film, current Executive Director Sarah Schoffner points to one of the film’s most moving passages: “As Matthews Motsoeneng of South Africa’s Mzansi Gay Choir says Homophobia makes you or breaks you,’” Schoffner notes, going on to complete the quote: “‘Don’t choose the breaking part, choose the making part.’”
Among the doc’s more dramatic moments is a concert in Istanbul that was hastily rescheduled by students at Bosphorus University after Turkey’s President Erdoǧan, facing re-election at the time and pandering to conservative elements, got the permit for the concert pulled. Instead of taking to the stage in a state-of-the-art concert hall, the BGMC sang and danced on an outdoor stage in a parking lot… and it made no difference to the audience that showed up to enjoy the music and demonstrate their support.
The film recounts how protestors and threats menaced the concert in Wroclaw, Poland, in 2005, yet the show drew a crowd of supporters who showed their good will and shared in the joy and pride that the group brought to the stage. In 2018, the chorus ventured to South Africa, a country where anti-LGBTQ+ animus and violence persist despite the rights of sexual minorities being enshrined in its constitution; audiences there literally danced in the aisles.
It is however not all smooth sailing as the BGMC intended to join a local group for a Pride march in Istanbul, only for police to show up moments before the start of the march and declare the event canceled. Many of those who’d planned to march took to the streets anyway, facing water hoses, tear gas, and arrests, as the doc shows in dramatic footage and interviews.
The BGMC recently sang at the inauguration of Massachusetts Governor Maura Healy…an out lesbian… (as they did for the inauguration of former governor Charlie Baker), but on a more profound level, the group gives concerts several times each year to local schools, demonstrating to vulnerable, often embattled, LGBTQ+ youth that authenticity does not mean unhappiness and failure in adulthood. At a time when right-wing politicians shamelessly treat LGBTQ+ children (especially transgender children) as little more than red meat, that visibility matters more than ever, as a few younger chorus members – themselves students at the schools the chorus has visited in years past – attest.
"Music Triumphs Homophobia" streams on Amazon starting Jan. 19.