I didn’t use the original headline for this story since it was a headline and an editorial “Gay men’s chorus silenced on eve of show at Catholic school”
West Palm Beach � Friday night was supposed to the be crowning achievement after nine months of twice weekly three-hour rehearsals by Voices of Pride, the Gay Men’s Chorus of the Palm Beaches.
But instead of giving its premiere performance at Rosarian Academy on Flagler Drive, the group called more than 500 ticket holders to say the show had been canceled.
How in the world did anybody at this Catholic Grade school ever think this was a good idea to have a group called Voices of Pride, the Gay Men’s Chorus perform there? This school is sponsored by the Adrian Dominican Sisters who at least in the U.S. have been infected with progressive wackiness, so maybe that explains it.
“They’ve known from Day One that we were an openly gay organization,” Robert Beaulieu, president of the group’s board of directors, said. “That was the thing that was so fabulous, a Catholic facility warmly opening their doors to this gay organization.”
The school had a longstanding relationship with the chorus’ artistic director, had seen it perform and figured everything would be OK when it agreed to let Voices of Pride use the auditorium, school spokeswoman Carey O’Donnell said. That was until school officials saw the chorus rehearse six weeks ago and found some musical acts inappropriate for a Catholic-school setting, she said. The chorus was told the acts had to be removed and it agreed, O’Donnell said.
…At issue, Beaulieu said, were several songs and sketches, including Unchained Melody, Real Good Man and a spoof of the Broadway standard Old Fashioned Wedding from Annie Get Your Gun. For that, Beaulieu said, three of the 30 members wore wedding dresses. He said the songs were part of a medley, making it impossible to edit out numbers the night before.
“These little parodies and spoofs are things you would have seen on The Carol Barnett Show or Uncle Milty in the ’50s,” Beaulieu said. “It’s the fact that we’re gay … and it was perceived as men singing love songs to men. It’s men singing to an audience.”
Yeah a group of gay men in wedding dresses singing “Old Fashioned Wedding” is only “perceived as men singing love songs to men”, how could anybody make that foolish mistake?
…”I can’t say I blame them,” said O’ Hanlon, whose two children attend the school. “It could reflect on the image of the school.”
Just the image of the school? How about promoting the homosexual lifestyle to children? Of norming objectively grave behavior to Children. The name “Voice of Pride” does not invoke the idea of chastity for those who suffer from same-sex attraction, but instead is a PR slogan for homosexual acts.
Sanders, the school principal, made the decision to call off the show, but if she hadn’t, Bishop Gerald M. Barbarito of the Catholic Diocese of Palm Beach would have canceled it, his spokesman, Jim Brosemer, said.
…”It is imperative that the concert of the Voices of Pride be canceled at the academy,” Barbarito said in a written statement. “While the church is open to any means that promotes the dignity of every human person which is bestowed by God himself, it cannot provide a forum that would contradict its moral teaching.”
The principal’s statement sounds like Bishop Gerald M. Barbarito told her either she was to release a statement or that he would. Especially since they had try to say the cancellation was because of the “adult nature of some aspects of this performance” and not because it was never appropriate for this group to sing there in the first place. At least we can be thankful that more and more this type of nonsense is being exposed and stopped.
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I weep. I was educated by Adrian Dominican sisters all through high school. They have changed very much in the 40 years since I graduated!
some people are just THICK!
I have to wonder about one thing though. And I’m just thinking out loud, prompted by the choir dude’s comparison of the numbers he describes to skits on the Carol Burnett or Milton Berle. So don’t give this the orthodoxy-fisk.
The fact is that transvestism and sex-reversal is a very VERY old form of humor, that long predates the current gay agitprop. I hardly think that anyone would object to showing a kid of say 9 or 10 a movie like SOME LIKE IT HOT or TOOTSIE or VICTOR/VICTORIA, though all these movies’ plots have subject matter involving somebody falling for the “wrong” sex (or “right” sex that’s looks like the “wrong” sex … every permutation you can think of). I remember as a boy in Britain constantly seeing (usually deliberately unconvincing) transvestism on Benny Hill and Monty Python and on stuff like postcards and pageants at Blackpool. I also loved British glam-rock (stuff like early David Bowie, Gary Glitter and Sweet) without ever detecting anything … uh, queer … going on.
A couple of days ago, I saw on Game Show Network, reruns of Match Game and the $100,000 Pyramid. In the former show there was, as usual, Charles Nelson Reilly with “Auntie” Brett Somers sitting next to him. In the latter, the guest player celebrities were Henry Polic (the secretary in the series Webster) and Jo Anne Worley, and on this particular episode, when they were introduced at the start, they did a bit of a campy dance around one another, ending with Worley doing a high step-kick.
Now, watching these shows with the eyes of a man in his mid-30s, it was obvious that what was going on in both shows was a gay man dishing with a fag hag. But my hand to heaven, Charles Nelson Reilly did not register on me as a boy (and Match Game was one of my favorite shows). Nor did Henry Polic. I mean, I could obviously tell they were a bit sissy or poofy (to say what I would have then). But I drew no conclusion from that … and, this is the key point, I didn’t even know there *was* a conclusion to draw, for good or ill. Not until I was about 17 or 18 (about the time AIDS became a public matter) was I aware that there was this group of people who behaved in this or that way. I may have had an unusually sheltered childhood, but there it is.
So to bring this back to this choir, the problem is that for a singing group to perform *as a specifically-defined group of open homosexuals* simply changes the dynamic. It deflates the innocent fun that this kind of campy cross-dressing material can be. The material certainly has a saucy subtext that stays “sub” (which is why they call it “sub-text” I think) but is probably harmless if you get it and certainly meaningless if you don’t. The same 30 men could perform as the Acme Singing Troupe, probably do the exact same material (depending on the details) and nobody would raise an eyelid. Even jokes about two men “marrying” — the last lines of SOME LIKE IT HOT are a marriage proposal from a man to a man, and on at least two Looney Tunes shorts I recall, the Rabbit of Seville and What’s Opera Doc, Bugs and Elmer “marry” or get in wedding dresses.
Now, nobody who has seen a parish choir, a Broadway show or a community-theater musical would be under any illusion about the large number of eligible bachelors in this Acme Singing Troupe. But I suspect the 8- or 10-year-olds in a grade school (if they enjoyed it at all) would enjoy it as campy incongruity, and as absurd farce — exactly as I enjoyed Benny Hill, Bugs Bunny etc., as a boy.
What I’m saying, I guess, is that this choir story is one example of one bit of damage done by the out, open homosexual culture. By destroying its appearance of innocence, it has ruined campy fun (at which gay men excelled since Oscar Wilde — talk about sabotaging your own cultural heritage). With everything out of the closet, open, out and authentic, the wink and the nudge are no longer viable. So material like this now becomes a matter of “protecting our children” from what they would never have had to have been protected from 30 years ago partly because the dirty material itself was subtextual and partly because in the pre-Gay Days, they wouldn’t have had the intellectual appartus to grasp it. But now the school, the Church and parents groups are *forced* to take a stand, and sometimes even having to explain the controversy just introduces concepts that children can live without and so can only screw them up (though it’ll all come up in due time obviously). Come to think of it, South Park has satirized sex education and “Miss Ellen” in rather similar terms.
“the last lines of SOME LIKE IT HOT are a marriage proposal from a man to a man”
That’s who the guy on the right in the bishop’s wedding picture reminds me of! The much-married halfwit in “Some Like It Hot”, who goes for the Jack Lemmon character. Thanks, Victor.
That was Joe E. Brown in Some Like it Hot, BTW.
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