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

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.

My First

The very first concert I ever attended was at the Marriott Center in Provo, Utah, in September 1981. I saw Barry Manilow.

I’d arrived as a clueless freshman at Brigham Young University three weeks before. During my time at BYU, I was confused about my own sexual orientation. I was also oblivious to the fact that most of my college friends were gay, too. And the fact that Barry Manilow is gay.

Years later, a friend who had been part of BYU’s secret gay underground told me a story about the Barry Manilow concert. Apparently afterwards an unmarked car full of BYU security officers followed Manilow and his posse forty-five mile north to the Sun Tavern, Salt Lake City’s gay bar.

Last week I drove with my daughter Eleanor for seven hours so we could see singer-songwriter Noah Kahan at The Gorge Amphitheater. I waited for five hours in the desert, mostly in arbitrary lines fueling monopolistic profit. It was too hot, too muggy, and then too cold. We got home at 3:30 am the next morning. It was amazing.

I’ve been to other classic outdoor concert venues, like Red Rocks and Ravinia. I saw Sting play Park City, with Stewart Copeland sitting in on drums. Seattle used to host concerts on a waterfront pier where I saw artists like Indigo Girls and Lyle Lovett sing as sailboats passed by.  

I’d heard of the Gorge, of course, and its reputation as a concert venue. I’d had opportunities to attend shows before. My inevitable response: “All that driving just to sit in the desert?”

I’ve always been more into theater than music performances anyway, except for eras when I’ve gone to concerts with the handful of partners whose musical taste I absorbed. With my mother I’ve seen Great American Songbook masters like Barbara Cook and Kristin Chenoweth. My boyfriend in Chicago was a lesbian, at least musically, so he dragged me to Ani DiFranco, Tori Amos, Alanis Morrisette, and Natalie Merchant. My ex in Seattle was more twee – we saw Belle & Sebastian twice. 

Now Eleanor is my go-to concert date. Our first show after covid was Harry Styles at the Tacoma Dome.

Eleanor went to her first concert with a friend. It was also Eleanor’s first outdoor concert, at the Muckleshoot Tribe’s Wind River Amphitheater near Seattle. She saw the Jonas Brothers. As we drove to the Gorge, I asked Eleanor which Jonas brother is “the cute one.” She picked Joe. (Wrong – the correct answer is Nick.) 

According to Eleanor, the highlight of the Jonas Brothers concert was their opening act, a rising country star named Kelsea Ballerini. On the same day we went to the Gorge, Noah Kahan released a new duet with Kelsea:  “Cowboys Cry Too.”

Noah Kahan’s concert at the Gorge sold out long ago. Thirty thousand people stood on the darkening hillside for his entire two hour set. We watched a talented and suddenly successful young musician connect with the crowd for a one-night-only performance on the day his breakthrough single “Stick Season” hit a billion Spotify streams.

Kahan writes openly about living with anxiety and depression. His charity benefits mental illness programs. As an extra encore at the Gorge, Kahan performed “Young Blood.” He introduced it as the first song he ever wrote. Looking out at the vast crowd, he told us “I remember feeling really lost. I wrote this song so that when I got older and if I had a music career, I could remember where I came from and what it was like to feel alone.”

It Gets Better and Better. If I were a little smarter, I would have recognized fatherhood was my destiny a little sooner. But then I wouldn’t be going to amazing concerts with Eleanor.

Let the World be Kind

The annual Sehome High School yearbook displays free “advertisements” where parents salute their graduating seniors with embarrassing baby pictures and a short message. My daughter Eleanor is on the yearbook staff. She chose our photos, nagged me about submitting my advertisements before the deadline, and lent me a couple of old yearbooks to see examples of previous contributions from parents.

 

“We are so proud of you” and “We love you” were the most common messages. Quotations came from Maya Angelou, Shel Silverstein, Led Zeppelin, John Quincy Adams, and the Old Testament. Several parents loved their children to the moon and back, while others chose to signal their affection with a dense forest of exclamation marks.

 

As a parent and a writer, I had two favorites. The first example was exquisitely succinct:  “Well done – the whole world awaits!” 

 

The second parental advertisement sent a different message: 

 

You came into our lives, and you’ve almost been a son to us. While you may not be our number one child, you at least rate in the top three. When you return home from receiving your diploma, your stuff will be packed up for you to take away to be someone else’s problem. Please don’t try to find us. 

Love, Mom and Dad

 

Here’s what I wrote to Eleanor in the Sehome High School yearbook:

 

You are messy, passionate, determined, curious, sensitive, creative, and kind – all mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie. You’ll be gone, but you’ll always be mine.

Love Papa

 

And my message to Rosalind:

 

You are completely yourself:  brave, loyal, artistic, and kind, with a unique sense of style. Raising you has been the greatest accomplishment of my life. I will always be proud to be your father.

Love Papa

I wrote Eleanor’s yearbook message first. It’s a shout out to Waitress, her favorite musical. Before covid, I took Eleanor to a performance of Waitress at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver. In “She Used to Be Mine,” our inconveniently pregnant waitress lets go of the person she hoped she would become. Like many of the parental advertisements in the yearbook, the song involves a series of revealing adjectives baked together. In Waitress, the list opens with “She is messy” – which happens to fit my daughter.

 

Songwriter Sara Bareilles told the New York Times “the chasm between who we are, and who we thought we would be, is always something we’re negotiating.” New York Magazine offers its “definitive ranking” of YouTube versions of the song. (Bareilles herself only reached Number 6.) For her high school performance competitions, Eleanor chose the accompanying monologue the waitress speaks to her unborn baby. 

 

Other than my decision to describe Eleanor as “creative” and Rosalind as “artistic,” by the time I finished writing my message to Rosalind I’d forgotten which adjectives I used for Eleanor besides “messy” (which Rosalind emphatically is not). After forwarding my messages to the yearbook editors, I was struck to see the repeated adjective in both descriptions:  “kind.” 

 

When Bareilles composed “She Used to be Mine,” “kind” provided a convenient near-rhyme for “mine.” In my yearbook messages, the unconscious repetition is a reminder that my second greatest accomplishment may be raising children who aren’t lawyers.

First year law students are taught to “think like a lawyer.” Legal scholar Anne-Marie Slaughter provides an excellent summary of the concept in “On Thinking Like a Lawyer,” a short essay addressed to new law students. The phrase means, “in the first instance, thinking with care and precision.” But “thinking like a lawyer also means that you can make arguments on any side of any question”:  

 

Many of you resist that teaching, thinking that we are stripping you of your personal principles and convictions, transforming you into a hired gun. On the contrary, learning how to make arguments on different sides of a question is learning that there are arguments on both sides, and learning how to hear them. That is the core of the liberal value of tolerance, but also the precondition for order in a society that chooses to engage in conflict with words rather than guns. It is our best hope for rational deliberation, for solving problems together not based on eradicating conflict, but for channeling it productively and cooperating where possible. 

 

Professor Slaughter ends her essay with optimism about the contribution that lawyers and legal thinking can make to society: 

 

One of my colleagues at Chicago ends her first year civil procedure class by saying: “Sometimes in the first year of law school, people learn to think like lawyers, but to be a little less like people. You’ve learned the first of those things. You shouldn’t let us teach you the second.” I disagree. There is no dichotomy here. Thinking like a lawyer is thinking like a human being, a human being who is tolerant, sophisticated, pragmatic, critical, and engaged. It means combining passion and principle, reason and judgment. 

 

I absorbed a similar idealism about the legal profession when I was at Yale Law School. For me, thinking like a Lawyer or like a Writer means using words to explore and share ideas with other people, including your future self. It turns out that’s the only way I can think clearly. 

 

However, in the last few years I’ve discovered that “thinking like a lawyer” is corrosive when an attorney’s duty to vigorously advocate for the client becomes an excuse to selfishly twist the truth beyond recognition. Since my PTSD diagnosis, I’ve completed an extensive reading list in psychology and neuroscience. In the field of evolutionary biology, “thinking like a lawyer” has a much darker meaning than the ideal celebrated in Professor Slaughter’s essay. 

Humans are profoundly social animals. In particular, we’re deeply concerned about social status within our tribe. Evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright argues consciousness arose in human brains not to promote effective decision making but rather for “image management” – the “hoarding of credit and sharing of blame.” Like Trump University, evolution taught us “shady accounting,” resulting in “a deep sense of justice slightly slanted toward the self.” 

As Wright puts it, the “human brain is, in large part, a machine for winning arguments.” Evolution could have designed us to prioritize finding the right answer. Instead, “like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth.”

Is selfishness a bug or a feature of humanity? Is kindness?

 

Many atypical traits persist in the gene pool despite their lack of any obvious benefit to survival and reproduction, such as homosexuality, left-handedness, introversion, blue eyes, schizophrenia, and country music. In his recent book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry, neuroscientist and clinician Randolph Nesse examines how evolutionary processes can explain various quirks of the human brain, including the persistence and power of altruism: 

 

For most species, close social partners other than relatives are either nonexistent or nearly interchangeable. That was probably the case for our human ancestors until some tipping point in the past hundred thousand years, when selecting especially capable, generous partners began to give advantages. The benefits of having relationships with the best possible partners shaped tendencies to generosity and loyalty.... The resulting prosocial traits are as expensive and dramatic as a peacock’s tail.

 

Common decency makes civilization possible. But no community can be healthy when it reaches the opposite tipping point, with too many individuals defaulting to lawyerly selfishness. 

David Browning, one of the second tenors in Vancouver Men’s Chorus, is a talented singer-songwriter. (In real life he’s just a doctor.) This year David set himself the personal challenge of writing a Christmas song. As any musician besides Mariah Carey will attest, composing a catchy holiday pop song presents a daunting assignment. 

 

David did an excellent job, and VMC was proud to premiere “Merry Christmas” at our recent concerts. The song’s bridge ends with the lyric “Let the anger and the tension unwind – let the world be kind.”

As Bear and I were walking through Boulevard Park last month, we met a young woman who was making a documentary for a college class. She asked if she could film me with Bear as I answered a few questions. After pointing her iPhone at us, the student asked “Are you happy?” 

 

Life has been extra frustrating lately. My family and I are beset with mounting health, personal, financial, and legal challenges. The road ahead is uncertain and confusing. Nevertheless, I am enjoying the best mental health of my life, and The Kids Are Alright. I found myself answering “yes.”

 

After I responded to a few more questions, the student filmmaker asked if I had any concluding message. I said “Be kind. And you’ll be happy.” 

Merry Christmas

I'd Rather Be Sailing

S/V Stella Maris, Deception Pass - 2000

The last time I was at showtunes night in Canada, here’s how our piano player Kerry O’Donovan introduced the song “I’d Rather Be Sailing”:

 

“This is one of Roger’s favourite songs. And in the show the song comes from, it’s sung by a character named Roger.”

S/V Reachfar, Elliott Bay - 2007

My recent blog essay “Roger, Roger” described two of the three characters from Broadway musicals who are named “Roger”:  (1) Roger Davis, the rocker bro half of Rent’s straight tragic couple; and (2) Roger DeBris, the fabulous gay auteur who directs and stars in the terrible musical at the center of Mel Brooks’ The Producers, “Springtime for Hitler.” 

 

The third Broadway “Roger” is another gay supporting character. Roger Delli-Bovi is the romantic partner of the protagonist in A New Brain, the 1998 musical William Finn wrote with James Lapine. The show is loosely based on Finn’s own experience at age forty when he was rushed to the hospital for emergency brain surgery, almost died, and slowly recovered.

 

William Finn’s surrogate in A New Brain, Gordon Schwinn, is a frustrated songwriter. Gordon composes songs for children’s television host “Mr. Bungee,” but he’s blocked in his efforts to finish both Mr. Bungee’s frog songs and his own creative projects. Gordon’s long-suffering boyfriend Roger is the one who loves sailing more than anything else in the world. Roger arrives late to the hospital because he had to wait for wind on Long Island Sound.

Gordon hates sailing. Roger still loves Gordon.

 

In the most recent revival of A New Brain, Jonathan Groff played Gordon, not Roger. But here is a link to Groff singing “I’d Rather Be Sailing” on YouTube. 

S/V Reachfar, Admiralty Inlet - 2005

Once upon a time I had a sailboat, a convertible, and a beach house. Seventeen years later, I’m an unemployed disabled gay single dad with three teenagers, two dogs, and an ancient minivan.

 

As Bear and I walk along the Boardwalk, we admire the boats out on Bellingham Bay. I miss my sailboat. It was a beautiful thirty-seven-foot Jeanneau, which I named “Reachfar.” What gets lost in the telling is that I actually bought my boat while we were pregnant with Eleanor.

S/V Stella Maris, Sidney Spit BC - 1995

During the 1990s, one of my gay lawyer friends lived on his sailboat at Shilshole Marina in Seattle. Many of my happiest memories involved the times I spent with friends on S/V Stella Maris. We explored Manzanilla Bay, Lake Union, and the Hiram Chittenden locks. We introduced my roommate Geoff to his husband Mike at a party on Jim’s boat. Even after I moved to Chicago to be a gay rights lawyer with the ACLU, I would regularly return to Seattle and the water, like a homesick salmon.

 

For several years I joined Jim on his annual spring sailing trip from Seattle north to the San Juan and Gulf Islands. We would arrive in Victoria’s Inner Harbour in time to watch our more intense sailor buddies compete in the annual Swiftsure Yacht Race. After a fun weekend in Victoria fraternizing with friendly Canadians, our group would sail off to explore otherwise inaccessible gems like Sidney Spit and Wallace, Prevost, Sucia, and Patos Islands, before returning home to the drudgery of legal practice.

S/V Reachfar - Puget Sound, 2007

Sailing is naturally mellowing.  

For decades, I found every aspect of being a lawyer crushingly stressful, even before I was diagnosed with complex PTSD and codependency. Nevertheless, I could always escape my miserable life by surrounding myself with waves and forests. Sailing offered instant relief. Although I found a similar Zen on chartered sailboats in Belize, California, and Tahiti, I always felt particularly at home on the waters of the Pacific Northwest. 

 

Eventually I became convinced I needed a boat of my own to sustain the magic. So in 2005, I bought a used sailboat. In a rare twist, the economics of boat ownership made sense for me. When I moved back from Chicago, I’d chosen to buy a weekend cabin on Whidbey Island rather than an overpriced condo in the city. Mooring a sailboat at Elliott Bay Marina as a crashpad turned out to be cheaper than renting an apartment in Seattle.

 

As the cliché goes, the two happiest days of a boat owner’s life are the day they buy the boat, and the day they sell it. By 2008, I recognized sailing was not going to be my priority for the foreseeable future. I was happy to find a willing buyer for S/V Reachfar, for two reasons. First, I discovered being in charge of my own boat diminished sailing’s relaxing effects. Being the captain was a buzz kill. Second, I needed a place in the city that would fit my growing family, rather than a lonely pied-à-mer.

One of the poetic epitaphs in Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters (1915)

We started the laborious adoption process in Fall 2004 by signing up with an agency and taking thirty hours of parenting classes. A few weeks later, I got a telephone call out of the blue and learned the cousin of a friend of a friend was pregnant. They were looking for a gay couple to adopt the baby, and chose us. 

I bought my sailboat at the beginning of May 2005. All those years of sailing, research, and trips to the Boat Show intersected with the miraculous surprise of parenthood. In hindsight, I think I grasped at the familiar comfort of sailing rather than face the terror of desiring something completely beyond my control. After the ultrasound, I realized our birthmother was just as terrified about us walking away from the adoption as I was worried about her changing her mind. Fortunately, my partner and her boyfriend were able to calm both of us down.  

 

At home on Whidbey Island late one night in June, I got the call saying our birth mother had gone into labor. We caught the last ferry to the mainland and raced to the hospital in Puyallup. Everyone spent the night watching movies in the lovely birthing suite. Shortly before 9 am, the doctor and the baby arrived. 

I watched Eleanor being born. Then we walked out of the room with our daughter, and the world has never been the same.

Bear, Buster, and Schooner Zodiac

“I’d Rather Be Sailing” is the simplest of songs. Gordon’s lover Roger celebrates the joy of sun, wind, and waves. Then he lists some of the things that aren’t as good as sailing, like food, sex, and other people. However, as Roger sings to Gordon, what he loves best about going out sailing is afterwards he can “come home to you.” 

 

Near the end of A New Brain, Gordon and Roger reprise “I’d Rather Be Sailing” as a duet. Gordon will never be a sailor. Instead, he sings “I feel like I’m sailing – holding on for life.” With the right craft and crew, sailing offers the exhilaration of the second-greatest roller coaster in the world. 

 

Sailing [Vancouver, chorus, writing, Bear, whatever] could be the one thing in the world I love almost as much as my children. But the point is I love my children even more. That’s the kind of Roger I am.

S/V Reachfar, Port Townsend - 2006

Roger, Roger

Bohemian roommates Mark (Anthony Rapp) and Roger (Adam Pascal)

Only three major characters in Broadway musicals are named “Roger.” Two of them are gay.

 

The most famous Roger is my least favourite of the three roles:  Roger Davis, the heterosexual romantic lead in 1996’s Rent. Jonathan Larson moved Puccini’s 1896 opera La Bohème from the garrets of Paris to the lofts of New York’s East Village. Bohème’s earnest poet Rodolfo is now Roger, an uninspired rocker who meets a neighbour carrying a candle. Rodolfo’s roommate Marcello, formerly a starving painter, becomes Mark Cohen, a neurotic videographer. Mimi remains Mimi – but as the parodist says in Forbidden Broadway Strikes Back, “in Bohème, she’s a sweet, shy seamstress. Now, she’s a CRACK-HEAD, NYMPHOMANIAC PROSTITUTE! YEAH!”

 

In his Act I solo “One Song Glory,” Roger describes himself as a “pretty boy front man who wasted opportunity.” That pretty much captures the role. Not what folks look for in a Roger.

 

My ACLU colleague Lauren and I saw the original cast of Rent on Broadway, with Adam Pascal as Roger. But I’ve always related more to his roommate Mark, the observant loner. Openly gay actor Anthony Rapp originated the role. Nowadays Rapp plays an openly gay Star Fleet officer on Star Trek Discovery, except when he’s busy in court speaking out as an early victim of Kevin Spacey’s lechery.

 

Whenever I’m introduced to other Generation X showtune fanatics, they invariably chant “RoGER, this is your moTHER.” They’re mimicking the message Roger’s mom leaves on the Boho Boys’ answering machine in Rent. It’s the scene transition labeled “Lyric #5” on the original cast recording:  

 

[MARK/ROGER VOICEMAIL]

Speak...

[ROGER’S MOTHER]

Roger, this is your mother
Roger, honey, I don’t get these postcards – 
“Moving to Santa Fe”
“Back in New York
Starting a rock band”
Roger, where are you?
Please call

Last week the online humour magazine McSweeney’s published an article titled “Financial Lessons from the Musical Rent.” It reminded me I’m not the Rent kind of Roger. Not because I’m gay – I just don’t live in his privileged world of self-absorbed magical thinking:  

 

Opening a restaurant in Santa Fe is a lucrative business venture requiring absolutely no hard work. Just overcharge the wealthy clientele.

 

A used car is comparable in price to a used guitar.

 

Supporting oneself and one’s artist friends by renting condos at the top of a building is a monstrous idea that could be hatched only by a sellout asshole, whereas having no jobs, ambitions, or means of paying for one’s life in the East Village is heroic.

 

Paying rent is optional.

Carmen Ghia (Roger Bart) and Roger DeBris (Gary Beach)

Five years after Rent opened, Mel Brook’s The Producers won twelve Tony awards – the most ever, even more than Hamilton. Openly gay Broadway veteran Gary Beach won the 2001 best supporting actor Tony for his portrayal of flamboyant auteur Roger DeBris. 

 

In The Producers, Max and Leo scheme to open a musical that’s guaranteed to immediately bomb, allowing them to keep their investors’ money. So they seek out the worst director in New York. Roger DeBris initially declines the invitation to direct the doomed “Springtime for Hitler” because of its downbeat subject matter: 

ROGER: The theatre’s so obsessed

With dramas so depressed

It’s hard to sell a ticket on Broadway

Shows should be more pretty

Shows should be more witty

Shows should be more...

What’s the word?

LEO: Gay?

ROGER: Exactly!

No matter what you do on the stage

Keep it light, keep it bright, keep it gay!

Whether it’s murder, mayhem or rage

Don't complain, it's a pain

Keep it gay!

 

But Roger agrees to direct once the producers tell him he’s destined to win a Tony for transforming World War II into a musical “just as gay as anyone could possibly want.” When the actor playing Hitler breaks a leg (after Leo unluckily wishes him “Good Luck!” rather than “Break a leg!”), Roger must step into the role. According to New York Times critic Ben Brantley, Beach’s performance was “an unqualified treat”:  

 

In the show’s high point, the “Springtime for Hitler” sequence of the musical-within-the-musical, Mr. Beach proves himself fluent in every idiom of vintage musical comedy, variously bringing to mind Al Jolson, Judy Garland, Robert Preston, Van Johnson and Eddie Cantor.

 

A Roger for the ages.

Carmen Ghia (Roger Bart)

In The Producers, Roger shares his apartment with the equally flamboyant Carmen Ghia – who is technically not a Broadway character named Roger, merely Roger DeBris’s “common-law assistant” played by the implausibly straight actor Roger Bart. Both Gary Beach and Roger Bart reprised their roles in the movie.

 

I didn’t see The Producers on Broadway. But I saw Roger Bart play Snoopy in the 1999 revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Anthony Rapp played Charlie Brown, the same role I played in Bellingham community theatre forty years ago. Roger Bart won his Tony award for Best Supporting Actor. Kristin Chenoweth won her Tony award originating the role of Charlie Brown’s little sister Sally. This year my mother and I saw Kristin sing in Bellingham at the Mount Baker Theatre’s 95th birthday celebration. 

Snoopy (Roger Bart) and Sally (Kristin Chenoweth)

Everything is connected. 

When Jonathan Larson wrote the musical that became Rent, the role corresponding to Rodolfo in La Bohème was originally named “Ralph.” Larson renamed the character “Roger,” after a struggling actor/waiter friend who helped record some of the original Rent demo tapes:  Roger Bart.

 

Doesn’t Adam Pascal look more like a Ralph anyway?

 

Next Roger:  “I’d Rather Be Sailing”

“This is one of Roger’s favourite songs. And in the show the song comes from, it’s sung by a character named Roger.” -Kerry O'Donovan 

Gordon (Jonathan Groff) and Roger (Aaron Lazar)