The Whiffenpoofs of 2025

 

As I waited for my mother in the lobby of the Bellingham High School auditorium last fall, Facebook reminded me we’ve been going to musical performances together for a long time. Mom and I started by seeing shows like Saturday’s Warrior and Anne of Green Gables at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in 1970s Vancouver.

According to Facebook, my mother and I saw the Broadway musical Wicked on tour in Seattle exactly twelve years earlier. To celebrate her 70th birthday, I’d bought tickets to a special performance benefiting the marriage equality campaign. When Mom turned 80, we saw Kristin Chenoweth at the Mount Baker Theater. For her 60th birthday, I got tickets to see the incomparable Barbara Cook sing Sondheim at Benaroya Hall.

At Bellingham High, I was waiting to share another unique musical event with my mother: the opening concert of the Whiffenpoofs of 2025’s World Tour.

The Whiffenpoofs are North America’s oldest collegiate a capella singing group. Fourteen tenors, baritones, and basses are tapped from each Yale graduating class. They sing a repertoire of elegantly arranged standards along with contemporary songs, all in tight harmonies. In addition to their concert tour, each year’s crop of Whiffenpoofs makes an album showcasing their talents. Together with my ancient vinyl and CDs, iTunes can fill an entire weekend with a guilty pleasure playlist. It’s my favourite kind of music. 

The reason the Whiffenpoofs of 2025 started their World Tour at Bellingham High School is Logan Foy. He’s the student chosen as this year’s music director (called the “pitchpipe”). Logan graduated from BHS, where he was the star of its music and theatre programs. He was also a proudly out member of the high school’s Gender/Sexuality Alliance. Each Whiffenpoof got a solo during the concert. Logan assigned himself the group’s classic arrangement of “Midnight Train to Georgia,” with he/him pronouns.

The Whiffenpoofs sounded great, and Logan basked in the hometown crowd’s love. As my mother and I walked out of the auditorium, I overheard a middle-aged man tell someone that Logan began studying with an opera coach while he was still in elementary school. It was Logan’s beaming father. I usually don’t talk to strangers. But I went over to Mr. Foy and introduced myself as a gay PFLAG dad. I said I’ve been going to Whiffenpoof concerts for 37 years, and told him he should be proud to hear and see what his son has accomplished.

The Whiffenpoofs of 2018 - L.W.W.B.

The last time I saw the Whiffenpoofs perform live was in 2018, when their tour included a stop in Seattle.

In 1975, President Ford signed legislation opening the service academies to women. Four years later, the Air Force Academy Class of 1979 adopted the motto “Loyalty, Courage, Wisdom, Bravery.” However, the Commandant cancelled their order for class rings engraved with the initials “L.C.W.B.” when he discovered the letters actually stood for “Last Class With Balls.” (At best – according to a Congressional report cataloging misconduct at the academy, the Class of 1979’s real motto was either “Last Class Without Bitches” or “Last Class Without Broads.”)

Yale College was founded in 1701, but women weren’t admitted until 1968. Similarly, after a 110-year wait, the gentlemen I saw perform in Seattle selected the group’s first female singer as a member of the Whiffenpoofs of 2019.

This year’s tenor section includes four women. It was my first time attending a co-ed Whiffenpoof concert. As someone who generally prefers his harmonies in the bass clef, I expected to be a curmudgeon. But the inclusion of a few women was not enough to tip the overall balance, and did not spoil the familiar arrangements. Instead, their voices added to the power, range, and variety of the performances.

Still, the concert sounded different. Our brains process male and female voices differently. Hearing a woman’s voice “triggers the auditory section of an audience’s brain,” which is “the area that’s used to analyze.” Because female voices are “more easily decoded,” they seem “clearer than their male counterparts.” Sure enough, this was my first time at a Whiffenpoof concert where I felt like Cole Porter’s lyrics were being beamed directly into my head.

“Singing Can Be a Drag” is Vancouver Men’s Chorus’s biggest annual fundraiser. Talented and extroverted members of the chorus don spectacular drag outfits and sing show-stopping numbers. No lip synching allowed.

I’m not the kind of guy who sings solos or wears drag. Instead, every year I volunteer at the event as an usher. This year a woman came up to me as I guided patrons to their seats. She said “You've shaved your beard since the holiday concert, but I recognized you. I wanted to let you know you have the best smile in the chorus. Whenever I watch you sing, the word I think of is ‘joyous.’”

In the classic fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling,” the hero of the story is the supportive duck mother – not the awkward swan who was lucky to find himself in the most affirming of nests. No parent expects a Whiffenpoof. But I will be eternally grateful for a PFLAG mom who raised me with the joy of music.

Happy Mother's Day

Overheard at the border last weekend....

Canada Customs:  Where do you live?

Roger: Bellingham.

Canada Customs:  What’s the purpose of your visit?

Roger:  I sing in Vancouver Men’s Chorus… 

(Usually my response continues “… and we rehearse on Wednesdays.” But this was a Saturday.)

Roger:  … and I’m going up for the Tenor Section potluck.

Canada Customs:  (Incredulously)  You’re a Tenor?

(I use my “butch voice” with authority figures, even nice Canadian ones.)

Roger:  We have First Tenors, Second Tenors, Baritones, and Basses. I’m a Second Tenor.

Canada Customs:  Did you bring anything?

Roger:  Treats from Trader Joe’s.

Canada Customs:  Are you carrying any firearms?

(Apparently my “butch voice” is extra butch.)

Tickets for our June concerts are on sale at vancouvermenschorus.ca

Un Canadien Errant

The Boys Who Lived

Vancouver Men’s Chorus is busy rehearsing for our June concerts. (Tickets are on sale at the chorus website.) This year’s theme is Totally Awesome ’80s. We will be singing songs by Cyndy Lauper, George Michael, Eurythmics, Madonna, Tina Turner, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, Whitney Houston, and more. There will be synthesizers, dancing boys, and big hair. 

I spent the 1980s as a clueless high school student in small town Utah; as an earnest Mormon missionary in Korea; as an overachieving student at Brigham Young University; and as a liberated law student at Yale. I’m like an episode of Stranger Things – 80s music is the soundtrack of my youth. 

More than music and mullets, my relationship with the 80s is defined by one essential fact: I came out of the closet in the middle of the AIDS epidemic. 

I recently read a collection of essays with the title Between Certain Death and a Possible Future:  Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis. These writers speak for my generation:

Every queer person lives with the trauma of AIDS, and this plays out intergenerationally. Usually we hear about two generations - the first, coming of age in the era of gay liberation, and then watching entire circles of friends die of a mysterious illness as the government did nothing to intervene. And now we hear about younger people growing up with effective treatment and prevention available, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the loss. But there is another generation between these two, one that came of age in the midst of the epidemic with the belief that desire intrinsically led to death, and internalized this trauma as part of becoming queer.

I arrived too late for the fun. Instead, I threw myself into activism. I joined the ACLU of Illinois as Director of the LGBT Rights/AIDS Project at the height of the AIDS epidemic. The Project’s founder, John Hammell, had recently died. Many other pioneering Baby Boomer gay activists were dead, dying, and/or burnt out. Stalwart lesbians and unprepared young gay men filled their empty shoes. 

Some people see personality types through the prism of birth order. As the first of four brothers, I exhibit many “eldest child” behaviors. But when it comes to my gay tribe, I’m part of very specific cohort:  the traumatized gay boys of Generation X, stumbling through life as perpetual younger brothers to the men of the Stonewall Generation. 

This photo of San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus was taken in 1993, twelve years into the AIDS epidemic. The seven men in white are the original members of the chorus. The 115 men in black represent those who had already died. 

Trauma warps memory. As I learn to live with complex PTSD, I’ve discovered a handful of revealin gaps and glitches in my recollection of past events.   

For example, the quietest moment in our 80s concert occurs during “Eulogy.” Seattle Men’s Chorus commissioned this song in 1985. I have sung and heard “Eulogy” countless times since I joined my first gay chorus three decades ago, including at various memorial services. I’ve repeatedly listened to SMC perform “Eulogy” on their classic Pink Album. 

Nevertheless, I have no memory of the song. All I can tell you is that it repeates the word “Onward.” Every time VMC rehearses “Eulogy,” I feel like I’m sight-reading a shocking new testament of grief. By the end of the song I’m silently weeping.

Many of the boys died.

The theme of VMC’s June 2018 concert was Gays of Our Lives. As we read through “I Shall Miss Loving You” at our first rehearsal, I realized the last time I’d sung the song was eighteen years before, at my friend Jim Palmer’s memorial. We sang together in Windy City Gay Chorus during the 90s. The miraculous new HIV/AIDS medications came along too late to stop the disease’s progress through Jim’s body. Still, he wanted to see the new millennium. He barely made it. 

I was thirty-five years old. Jim was thirty. I weep every time I try to sing these words:

I shall miss loving you.

I shall miss the comfort of your embrace….

I shall miss the joy of your comings,

And pain of your goings, and, 

After a time,

I shall miss loving you.

Boys like Jim died from AIDS, suicide, drugs, and other causes. Somehow, some of us survived to tell the stories. 

In September 1914, soon after Britain suffered the first casualties of the Great War, Lawrence Binyon published “For the Fallen.” The poem’s fourth stanza has become known as the “Ode to Remembrance”:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: 

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

Some of the men lived.

In 1981, a pioneering national tour by San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus inspired gay choruses to form in cities including Chicago, New York, Seattle, and Vancouver. Forty-four years later, our founder Willi Zwozdesky still conducts Vancouver Men’s Chorus. Willi is the senior conductor in the LGBT choral movement.

VMC has never sounded better. We continue to attract talented new singers. At our recent rustic retreat, Millennials and Gen Y gay boys joined in the skits, rehearsals, and comradery. We listened to our elders around the campfire, and serenaded our conductor with his favourite song.  Along with Willi, a handful of other survivors have held the chorus and the community together through five extraordinary decades.

I am growing old. But the men of the Stonewall generation will always be older than me.

Children's Hospital

The first piggy bank I remember was shaped like the old Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City. “Primary” is the Mormon program for children under age twelve. The LDS church founded Primary Children’s Hospital in 1922. 

When I was a child growing up in Vancouver, we participated in “Pennies By The Inch,” which has been described as “the nation’s oldest grassroots fundraiser.” Each year all the kids in Primary received our own cardboard hospital piggy bank. We were supposed to save enough money by our birthday to donate a penny for each inch of our height. It didn’t seem weird to send pennies a thousand miles away to another country. We knew Children’s Hospital is a special place for kids with special health challenges, wherever they are. 

I never met anyone who was treated at Primary Children’s Hospital. But it felt good to send my pennies to Salt Lake, just in case. As Marlo Thomas says about St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, “Give thanks for the healthy kids in your life, and give to those who are not.”

As a parent, my faith in Children’s Hospital has grown even more fervent. My first paternal vigil was at Seattle Children’s Hospital in 2005. When Eleanor was a month old, her infant gastric reflux spiked. Whole bottles of formula ended up on her fathers, and she stopped being her happy self. Our pediatrician assured us this was perfectly normal reflux. But it kept getting worse. Eventually we took her to the walk-in clinic. They immediately sent us across town to the emergency room at Seattle Children’s Hospital, where Eleanor was diagnosed with pyloric stenosis.

 

The pylorus muscle connects your stomach to your intestines. Sometimes the valve gets stuck a few weeks after birth. Anything you try to put into the stomach just comes back up. In the old days, infants with pyloric stenosis soon died. Fortunately, surgeons figured out how snip the pylorus and get things flowing again.

 

It took three days before Eleanor was hydrated enough for surgery. My parents came down from Bellingham, and my sainted ex-mother-in-law Judy flew in from Nebraska. Before the surgery, the nice Korean-American surgeon explained to us what was about to happen. Then he and Eleanor disappeared behind the ominous doors, and the rest of us went around to wait on the other side.

An hour later, Eleanor and the surgeon came out through the happy doors, and she began her swift and complete recovery. We went back to another eleven months of ordinary infant reflux and pediatrician visits, never again begrudging the vomit-stained clothes.

My next trip to Seattle Children’s came six years later, and involved mysterious bacterial pneumonia. I drove to the hospital. Eleanor took a helicopter.

Eleanor, Kamryn, and my ex had taken the train home after visiting Judy in the Midwest. After Oliver and I picked them up in Seattle, Eleanor began writhing in pain in the backseat. By the time we got to the Whidbey Island ferry she was burning up. We drove straight to the hospital on the island instead of going home. The doctors pumped Eleanor full of antibiotics, then put her on a helicopter to Seattle Children’s. 

It took a few days in the hospital to bring down Eleanor’s fever. We missed seeing the Broadway tour of “Aladdin.” I gave our tickets to a friend from Seattle Men’s Chorus; he gave Eleanor an oversized Tinker Bell balloon from the hospital gift shop. 

Here’s the key passage from the story of Eleanor’s pyloric stenosis surgery:

“Eventually we took her to the walk-in clinic. They immediately sent us across town to the emergency room at Seattle Children’s Hospital.”

Our upstairs neighbor in Seattle was an ER doctor at Seattle Children’s. When I complained about Eleanor’s melodramatic helicopter ride from Whidbey Island, she said “If you showed up in my Emergency Room with chest pains or a gunshot wound, I’d sent you straight to the grown-up doctors at Harborview.” Likewise, whenever a pediatrician or parent in the Pacific Northwest faces a life-or-death situation, they want their patient at Seattle Children’s.

Last spring my son Oliver started having weird stomach problems. Every four or five weeks he would develop symptoms resembling food poisoning – 24 hours of nausea and vomiting, but without a fever. We talked with our pediatrician and stayed in monitoring mode. 

When Oliver experienced more intense symptoms in November after just a two week break, we skipped school and went to the Urgent Care clinic. The doctor ordered an X-ray and labs. She described some of the potential causes, from stress to cancer to Crohn’s disease. Instead, the nurse called that afternoon to say the X-ray images showed alarming signs of intestinal blockage. CT imaging confirmed Oliver had a bowel obstruction.

The good news is a blocked intestine can be fixed with a one-time surgery. As I learned during Eleanor’s first visit to Seattle Children’s, the bad news is your child will die without surgery. The scary news is emergency abdomen surgery has only a fifty percent survival rate.

If Oliver needed surgery, we wanted it to happen at Seattle Children’s. Our pediatrician and I spent the next few weeks folding bureaucratic red tape into holiday bows. Oliver’s insurance approved a referral to the Seattle Children’s Gastrointestinal Clinic – but the first available appointment was in April. Meanwhile, we watched for a return of Oliver’s symptoms. My friend Dr. Ken did his pediatric residency at Seattle Children’s. When I described the test results, Dr. Ken echoed our local healthcare providers:  “it’s probably not an emergency emergency right now, but if symptoms return or pain he should go to the ER right away!” Not just any Emergency Room – everyone told us we should go directly to the ER at Seattle Children’s if Oliver’s fever spiked. 

Eventually someone looked at Oliver’s X-rays. On Friday, December 6, as I was heading up to Canada for Vancouver Men’s Chorus’s (and Taylor Swift’s) last three concerts, I got a call from Seattle Children’s. The told me Oliver could skip the Gastro Clinic. Instead they scheduled us for a surgery consultation in Seattle on Monday. 

Oliver and I met with Dr. Steven Lee, the Korean-American Chief of Seattle Children’s Surgery Division. Dr. Lee told us Oliver needed surgery as soon as possible. A week later, Seattle Children’s called to tell me Dr. Lee would be performing Oliver’s surgery on December 30. 

After thirty years in gay choirs, a handful of songs inevitably reduce me to tears whenever I try to sing them, such as the coming out anthem “Michael’s Letter to Mama”; the AIDS-era funeral staple “I Shall Miss Loving Him”; and the homesick ballad “Un Canadien Errant.”

This year Vancouver Men’s Chorus closed the first act of our holiday show with a Cher song: “DJ play a Christmas song, I wanna be dancing all night long.” The chorus repeats the words “that’s the only thing I want this year” as if in a trance. When we began rehearsals in September, Cher felt like a total bubble gum number, just like our Dolly Parton encore “Baby I’m Burnin.’” Then I saw Oliver’s x-ray report, and realized my son needed abdominal surgery to save his life. 

Since November, I’ve been unable to sing or hear “DJ Play a Christmas Song” without weeping. I don’t know what Cher is wishing for on the dance floor. But all I wanted for Christmas last year was a surgery appointment at Seattle Children’s. 

Oliver and Papa’s story continues in “Abdomen Whisperer”

Enabling Bullies

During his first two weeks back in office, Donald Trump and his collaborators identified their top priority targets:  trans individuals, immigrants, programs supporting diversity, and foreign aid. 

My brother Warren spent his career at the United States Agency for International Development. Warren and his wife Nadine raised their children overseas. Their plan was to return to the United States this summer after their youngest son graduated from the International High School in Frankfurt. Here is what Warren posted to Facebook this week:

Over 22 years ago I joined the General Counsel's Office at USAID - US Agency for International Development. After eight wonderful years litigating contract claims and protests, I had the opportunity of a lifetime to join the Foreign Service as a Regional Legal Officer. With my family gamely in tow we've had adventures serving our country in Ethiopia, Jordan, Ghana, and now Germany. I've worked with amazing people truly dedicated to helping make the world a better place for everyone. And those efforts have demonstrably made the United States stronger, more secure, and more prosperous.  

USAID has ceased to exist. Not after Congressional debate or due to studies and evidence showing it didn't work and offering a better alternative but because of the whims of the unelected billionaire who is running our country now. The immediate harm is to people in severe poverty across the world. Short term damage is to uprooted families like mine. Long term America will be a weaker, more isolated, less respected, and spiritually poorer nation as a result.

My nephew Fynn came out as trans while Warren’s family was living in Ghana. To facilitate his transition, Fynn moved to Bellingham to live with my parents while finishing high school. Now he lives with my kids and me. Warren and Nadine have been incredibly supportive of their trans child.

Our family checks all of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s black boxes:   USAID. Trans identity. As a lawyer I’ve advocated for members of marginalized communities, and for years I chaired the state’s nonprofit Initiative for Diversity in the legal profession. My brothers and I grew up as immigrants in Vancouver, although most of us immigrated back to the States. For now.

Several friends recently posted Pastor Martin Niemöller’s poem to Facebook: 

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

Pastor Niemöller uses the word “they” to refer to the German people, not to Adolf Hitler. The Führer corrupted his compatriots with propaganda that stoked their fear and hatred of the Other. School yard bullies never pick the popular kids as their initial victims. Instead, they target the kids who don’t fit in, because bullies know how to work a crowd.

 

When I became an LGBT rights lawyer three decades ago, the Republican Party was using anti-gay initiatives and “Defense of Marriage” acts to rile up their base and win close elections. Nowadays, open homophobia is no longer welcome in polite society. But the nation’s new leaders can count on visceral bathroom panic over trans folk, and prejudice based on the fiction of dirty Mexican rapist immigrants. Between 2021 and 2023, the percentage of Americans who believe transgender athletes should only be able to play on teams that match their birth gender rose from 62% to a whopping 69%. Foreign aid, immigrants, and diversity efforts are similarly unpopular and misunderstood punching bags. 

 

The Trump/Musk team’s priorities during their twisted honeymoon should come as no surprise. Sadly, their enthusiastic support from MAGA-world is no surprise either.

 

Stand up to bullies.