My woke Facebook friends have been fulminating about evil President Trump causing the cancellation of a “Pride” performance at the Kennedy Center by the D.C. Gay Men’s Chorus because he fired most of the D.C. venue’s woke board and assumed the post of chairman himself. It turned out that the performance had been cancelled before the President turned his sites on the Center, which, as I noted here earlier, asked for its slap-down after its partisan and disrespectful treatment of Trump during his first term.
Never mind: some talking heads on CNN and MSNBC have been trying to blame that Toronto air crash on Trump, so this kerfuffle is just more Trump Derangement in action.
The Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C, reacted to the cancellation by saying in a statement: “We believe in the power of music to educate and uplift, to foster love, understanding, and community, and we regret that this opportunity has been taken away. While we are saddened by the decision, we are committed to this work and to our mission of raising our voices for equality for all. We will continue to advocate for artistic expression that reflects the depth and diversity of our community and country. We will continue to sing and raise our voices for equality.”
Fine, although I must point out that if there is any field of endeavor where gay Americans are not lacking in participation, it is the performing arts. But this episode raised a question that I had somehow never thought about before. To wit: How can an organization called The Gay Men’s Chorus claim to represent diversity? How can there be a performing organization with a membership restricted to those of a particular sexual orientation? Would an organization called the Heterosexual Men’s Chorus be anything but reviled as a symbol of exclusion and bigotry? And how does what one chooses to do with one’s naughty bits have anything to do with singing?
I have friends who sing or have sung with the chorus; I’d ask them these questions, but I’m afraid they wouldn’t take it well. How do you, ah, audition for that chorus? Is it on the honor system? Is saying you’re gay enough? If one of the gay members starts identifying as female while maintaining her sexual attraction to men, is she out? Would her exit be because she is no longer a man, or because she is no longer gay?
I derive no answers from the organization’s website, which is full of rhetoric like this…
“The Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC (GMCW) sings to inspire equality and inclusion with musical performances and education promoting justice and dignity for all. GMCW is a renowned performance group. Since 1981, we’ve performed shows nationally, internationally, and at-home in Washington, DC. To date, we have 250+ singing members. Four select ensembles. Five hundred donors. One youth chorus. And an annual audience of 10,000+. Our mission is to use music to promote equality, achieve justice, and overcome our differences. That — and put on one hell of a show in the process. Our core values reflect deeply held principles shared among our members, staff, and Board of Directors, guiding how we advocate and engage on issues of critical relevance to our queer community and social justice mission. These include our Passion for artistic excellence and to be the nation’s voice for queer representation in art; Respect for those within GMCW and those with whom we interact and collaborate; commitment to have a meaningful Impact on our audiences, our intersectional community, and the world; continually striving for and honoring Diversity within the organization, seeking out and valuing a variety of voices and experiences; and showing Empathy for those within the LGBTQ+ community and other marginalized groups most in need of support and advocacy….We strive daily for a representative, equitable, and inclusive community by ensuring our membership, staff, and audiences can be their authentic selves and express their voices and experiences; we actively hear and include these voices and experiences in our organization and our performances.”
Yes, but is the Gay Chorus really gay, and if it is, how can it claim to champion “inclusion”?
Ethics Alarms 
Under wokespeak, any organization made up of gay people is, by definition, inclusive, even if it is made of up solely gay people. Inclusion doesn’t mean everybody is welcome.
Correct. The NBA and NFL are diverse because they are essentially all black save a few foreigners and token whites in the case of the NBA, and a sprinkling of whites in the case of the NFL.
I have a family member who is a long-time member of a similar chorus in the Baltimore area (it’s a gay-and-lesbian chorus rather than a gay men’s chorus) which says all the same boiler-plate platitudes about the Arts, Inclusion, Empathy, “Love is Love”, etc.
They welcome straight members to join, and there definitely have been some in the past–and probably currently as well. In practice, there are very few.
I’ll allow the fact that the “Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC” has “Gay Men” right there in the name, so maybe that’s a material distinction. But assuming that it’s not, I’d expect that GMCW would welcome straight “Allies” with open arms.
–Dwayne
P.S. In their Christmas concert this past December, one the members made an allusion to how things have gotten so much worse for them recently, to which I thought to myself: “Yes, . . . under the Biden Administration.” since Trump hadn’t even been sworn in yet.
Wait—if they have straight members, then it’s not a gay men’s chorus, and that’s false advertising.
Not if they’re in good spirits! Then it’s just deceptively misleading.
I do not have a problem with a choir that exclusively consists of gay men. For me this falls under the freedom of association clause in the Bill of Rights.
Just for full disclosure, I sing in a church choir and attend a Men’s Bible Study. I hope I do not have to reevaluate that due to diversity concerns I do not care about.
A voluntary organization may not be diverse in it’s membership in order to contribute to the diversity of society in general.
Except that an exclusive organization based on arbitrary group characteristics like skin color, religion, ethnicity or sexual activities is by definition discriminatory. Again: would the Boy Scouts have been able to declare themselves the Heterosexual Boy Scouts of America? We’re talking ethics here, not law.
(And of course it would not surprised me at all to find that the Gay Men’s Chorus receives federal funds…)
Jack: “And how does what one chooses to do with one’s naughty bits have anything to do with singing?”
This guy could tell you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farinelli
-Jut
You’re right, obviously, but this is neither new nor surprising. I remember back in 2017 having multiple conversations with Chris about diversity in media, and how it had pushed into some of the limits of reason even then. I’m certain that it was in 2017 because we were talking about Netflix’s Iron Fist series.
This was coming off the tail of some controversy… I think it was James Bond, but I can’t remember, but it was a race-swapped character idea being bandied about. And the normal progressive people were saying: Why not make James Bond black? We need more diversity.
And then the question becomes: How much more? More. More. Always more. Because X, Y, or Z people had been systemically disenfranchised, we needed to give them more. More roles, more screen time, more benefit of the doubt, more money, more more, more, more, more. And to that end, we should continue racial recasting and push for more racial recasting. Chris was particularly upset at the casting of Danny Rand: A white guy in the comics being played by a white guy in the series. Why? Because there was martial arts involved, and that role should obviously have gone to an Asian. I pointed out the obvious: Why not a black woman with one arm? Why did he say Asian? Because progressives don’t tend to see the racism past their good intentions, it doesn’t matter that he was employing tired stereotypes, he was going to bat for an ethnic dude.
So it doesn’t matter how absurd the “More” is. It doesn’t matter how absurd the situation is, it doesn’t matter how represented (or unrepresented) the people we’re talking about, there is no context that matters. What matters to these people really is as simple as their totem pole: Straight White Men need not Apply, and are never “diverse”, they are shunted directly to the bottom of the stack, and then there’s this ephemeral spectrum of people more highly ranked on vectors like gender, race, religion, orientation, and ability. What’s the eagle on the top? Probably a quadriplegic black trans-female Palestinian Muslim who speaks by blinking Morse code.
And if there were a thousand such quadriplegic black trans-female Palestinian Muslim blinking at each other in a room and a white man walked in, they would consider the room less diverse, and probably bitch about safety.
I identified a key question that I have not yet had an opportunity to ask in a serious setting, so if you want to try it out, let me know how it goes.
“If racism were to magically disappear tomorrow, how would you tell?” (As a followup, “Would you start doing anything differently?”)
A person’s answers to that question may be terrible and short-sighted, but just thinking about the question is a step forward. People will not get what they want if they can’t describe how the change they seek functionally impacts people.
Without knowing how to define the abstract in concrete terms, they’ll keep trying to invoke nebulous words and phrases through virtue-signaling. They will demand fiat changes to outcomes they don’t like rather than robust solutions based on generalizable principles. “I’m going to keep shouting until we restore democracy by getting rid of the winner of the election, who personifies fascism through their every action somehow!”
Being able to functionally define principles for a healthy society, and to identify concrete criteria for when those principles are violated, is crucial for holding government accountable.
“If racism were to magically disappear tomorrow, how would you tell?”
Have you heard of the relatively famous child-abuse experiment: blue-eyes-brown-eyes?
The premise there was that a teacher induced eye-colorism in kindergarteners by telling the kids that people with blue eyes were smarter than those with brown eyes, measuring the outcomes, then reversing the narrative, and measuring those outcomes. The results were predictable: The people in “privileged” and “disenfranchised” positions formed cliques, they were bitchy to eachother, there were group dynamics, and interestingly, it had a material effect on test scores.
But I don’t think that anyone is born eye-colorist. What this tapped into, I think, is a portion of humanity’s hard-coding that forms group identities and attachments. The teacher could probably induce any conceivable form of bigotry into her unwitting guinea pigs with basically the same methodology.
So the answer to the question is “I don’t think this is ever going to happen” because even if the entirety of humanity was brain-transplanted into robots and everyone was the same color of genderless chrome, we’d still figure out ways to group-identify, and while race is an obvious vector, I think we often confuse a bias against certain cultural artefacts with racism and that would probably be the obvious successor. And what would that look like? Well, we wouldn’t be arguing about race, we’d be arguing about the best computer language, or power supplies, or optics sensors, or whatever else asserts in the moment.
“As a followup, “Would you start doing anything differently?””
I don’t think I’d do anything purposefully differently… I don’t think most people consciously do a racism, and I think the average “experience” of racism is a kind of hammer-seeking-nail-ism from people who are overly sensitive. But I accept it’s possible that I have some level of implicit bias that might bleed into some measurable action that would stop. No idea what, exactly, but it’s possible.
HT and EC add excellent context to the debate. HT identified the underlying problem with diversity polices: The declared non-diverse need not apply. EC, then follows with real life questions: If racism disappeared, what would change, to which HT succinctly states, probably nothing because person/individuals/people tend to congregate in groups of like-minded communities, which is not unusual or wrong. It is a fact of life. For instance, I am a lawyer. I tend to have lawyer friends. My wife is a dentist; her group involves many healthcare providers. My next door neighbor is a Texas A&M graduate and Aggies tend to predominate in his circle of friends. None of that is nefarious or odd.
It is compelled diversity that is the problem, though. As a general rule, I like Spanish culture more than, say, Danish culture. I don’t dislike Danish culture, I just am more interested in Spain and its history.
jvb
The James Bond example is a bad one for this point. It is more like having black characters on Star Trek, rather than making James T. Kirk black. There is a fan theory that James Bond, 007 is not a person, but a position in Great Britain’s MI6. So, as one James Bond is killed or retires, another one is hired into the role, same with all the other characters (this would also make things easier for foreign intelligence agencies). An opening scene where the new ‘James Bond’ is briefed on his identity by the current ‘M’, would make such a move fit.
Sound a lot like “Doctor Who.”
“[To] be the nation’s voice for queer representation in art,” Wow! What a stupefyingly arrogant mission statement.
Uh, boys? All the arts are dominated by gays to the point they are almost hostile to heterosexuals.
This is, if not in all cases, true in many, many cases. And I’ve experienced that bias personally in the theater community.