Oakland Gay Men’s Chorus artistic director Ben Riggs addressed the singers at Tuesday night’s rehearsal at a hall in downtown Oakland. “She took off to heaven,” Riggs told the singers. “How many heavens?” “One,” about 50 men answered in chorus. “She brought every angel,” he reminds them of what the lyrics of the 1980s classic It’s Raining Men by The Weather Girls say. What Mother Nature did to the angels is up for debate, depending on which lyrics website you look at.
The chorus, seemingly coordinated in short-sleeved collar shirts in various colorful patterns, is getting ready for this weekend’s series of shows celebrating its 25th anniversary at the Odell Johnson Performing Arts Center at Laney College. The shows are titled You Can’t Stop the Beat: A Pride Cabaret.
Ben Riggs has been the artistic director for the past five years. He joined in late 2019, quickly cobbled together a holiday concert, and was planning for the spring season when COVID arrived and everything shut down in March 2020.
“Singing got to be dangerous,” Riggs said. “I never expected that in my lifetime.”
In the summer of 2021, the chorus began rehearsing in person again and sang masked for the next eight months. Riggs recalls that about 25 people attended the first post-pandemic concert. Since then, audiences have gradually returned to the chorus’ energetic, inventive performances.
“It was due to the singers’ support, resilience, and bravery in coming back and continuing to sing that helped the organization survive,” Riggs said. “And slowly but surely, we have rebuilt.”
The Oakland Gay Men’s Chorus was founded in 1999 by Dick Kramer, the first-ever director of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. These two Bay Area choruses are part of over 200 gay men’s choruses nationwide. The first was the Anna Crusis Feminist Chorus, formed in Philadelphia in 1975, followed by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus shortly after.
The organization holds auditions in the spring and summer, attracting about a dozen singers to each one. Singing members pay $360 annually, and volunteers help at each event. There are roughly 80 singing members, including trans and straight singers.
Jeff McEwen has been a member of the Oakland chorus since 2009 and originally started as a member of the chorus across the Bay. When he first joined, there were roughly 30-35 members. In addition to singing, McEwen served on the board of directors for six years, with two of them as president, where he helped develop a membership strategy that would help in case of a crisis, which was one of the reasons the organization managed to stay afloat during the pandemic shutdown.
“When you have more people, you have a bigger, more powerful sound,” he said. “Those people bring more people into seats, so you sell more seats, and so there’s more revenue, so the organization is more financially stable.”
McEwen is most excited to perform the song Feeling Infinite, which was commissioned for them by composer Dominic DiOrio for the chorus’s 20th anniversary in 2019.
Like McEwen, Shawn Simon, who joined the chorus in 2016, also looks forward to performing the song. Simon first learned of the chorus through another friend who is a chorus member in Los Angeles. Simon had previously done musical theater and sang for his church choir. Simon and others are also part of a dance routine accompanying It’s Raining Men at next weekend’s performance. He currently serves as vice president, and one of his duties is to continue implementing the strategic plan that McEwen and others helped start.
“The chorus is very much that sweet spot where I can engage with folks and feel like I’m a part of something, and not that I’m just singer number 275,” Simon said.
Simon recalled a spring performance where the chorus sang Jonathan Oliver Wesley Jr., a song by Tom Brown about finding his best friend’s name on the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
“It was so solemn hearing the power and the emotion of everyone, seeing people out of the corner of my eyes crying as they’re singing,” he said. “And then just taking a moment after was powerful.”
You Can’t Stop the Beat: A Pride Cabaret takes place on Saturday, June 22, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, June 23, at 4:00 p.m., at the Odell Johnson Performing Arts Center at Laney College.
