Statement of Objective

In July 2000, 5,300 singers, nearly all of them gay, lesbian, transgendered, or bisexual, descended upon the suburban community of San Jose, California, for Festival 2000, a quadrennial festival sponsored by GALA Choruses, Inc. (“GALA”). GALA is an international organization of gay and lesbian choruses. The organization has a roster of 217 choruses that range in size from 5 to 252 singers. (About GALA Choruses 2001).

The choruses that performed at Festival 2000 varied wildly in musical skill. Though the singers didn’t necessarily share a level of competence, they did share in their enthusiasm and support for the other choruses performing at the event. Indeed, every chorus, regardless of skill, received a standing ovation at the end of its set. The audience’s appreciation of skill level was demonstrated not by whether it gave a standing ovation but by how many standing ovations it extended to a particular group.

Thus, it was clear to most observers that the primary focus of the festival was not on musical excellence (although that indeed was attained by most choruses), but on mutual support, fellowship, and community.

Music has been cited and studied as a vehicle for social change. (Welch 1990). Both jazz and rock and roll have been utilized by social activists to bring about changes in the community outside the group producing it. Jazz, for example, helped create a bridge between black and white which ultimately helped bring about social change for African-Americans. Cite.

However, music does more than effectuate social change outside the group. It can also have a galvanizing effect within a particular group, thus solidifying and nourishing the group until social change can occur on the outside. A strong sense of community is, in a sense, a shelter that minority groups use until the political storm is over.

The objective of this research is to explore the dynamics by which a group develops and enhances its individual and collective sense of community by participating and sponsoring specific musical activities. The research will focus on a particular group within the gay community: members of gay and lesbian choral groups. The focus of this research is not the effect of music on the surrounding majority community, but its effect on the minority community itself, and the reasons music seems to be a unifying factor within certain groups of people. Specifically, the research will concentrate on the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered population, and attempt to determine what role music plays in building community.

Literature Review

There has been research on the role of music in the development of African-American (Bratton, 1998) and Polish-American (Blejwas, 1999) communities. However, the gay community is different from most other minority groups in one crucial respect: The African-American and Polish-American groups constitute a kind of diaspora, since each group has in common a particular land of origin. Where a minority group is part of a diaspora, its music provides a link to the group member’s heritage or place of origin.

Not so with the gay community, however. There is no “gay homeland,” and so music cannot reconnect the gay community with its origins in quite the same way. Thus, research previously conducted on other minority communities may not have the same applicability.

Another factor that may be relevant in studying the role of music in the gay community is the fact that “gay music” (if there is such a thing) is not necessarily music made or written by gay performers or composers. Indeed, some of the most popular music icons in the gay community have every appearance of being heterosexual: Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Gloria Gaynor, and Cher come to mind. This may contrast with other minority groups, where the unifying feature of music may center on the pride that comes with success by minority musicians. It may be due to this difference that music in the gay community contributes more to the internal unity of the group, rather than reaching outward to the heterosexual community. It may be, in fact, that for the gay community, music serves as a way to separate itself from the heterosexual community to a greater degree than it does for other minority groups.

There has been little research done on the role of music in the enrichment of gay culture. The most notable was a study of women attending the 1990 and 1991 National Women’s Music Festival (Eder 1995). This study, in which fifty women were interviewed, explored the creation of community in the context of the festival, and also explored barriers to community, such as lack of diversity. The study, however, is over ten years old, and involved a very small number of participants at a single event.

One scholar has undertaken a survey of GALA chorus members; that survey is currently posted on the GALA website, and can be taken either online or by mail. (Balen 2001). This survey provides for a potentially large sample. However, there are several serious flaws with the methodology. First of all, there is no mechanism in place to eliminate, or at least reduce, the number of duplicate responses. Second, the purpose of the questionnaire does not appear to be scholarly in nature. Rather, the information “will prove useful for individual choruses as well as GALA International for strategizing, fundraising, and general development purposes,” and only secondarily will be used for research purposes. (Balen 2001). Finally, the questions are so imprecise so as to be useless for scholarly purposes. The question in figure 1 is typical:

[Figure 1]

Thus, to gain a better understanding of the role of music in the gay community, updated research must be conducted. There must be a much larger sample, so that generalizations can be made about music in the gay community at large. Finally, the questions posed must be precise enough to provide meaningful information to the academic community.

Subjects for the Study

This research will conduct a study among individual members of GALA choruses. Worldwide, GALA choruses have 10,000 members. This group, while self-selected, is ideal for two reasons. First, it provides a very large target population. Second, the group will be relatively homogenous, since all members will have sought out participation in a choral activity, an activity that demands a fair level of commitment. While many studies would benefit from a more heterogeneous sample population, here the homogeneity allows closer inspection of the reasons people find music participation important. Rather than including subjects for whom music may not be an important part of their culture, this study will include only subjects whose interest in music rises above a minimal threshold. . . . .

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