Jerry Carden Oral History on The Gay Men's Chorus

Jerry Carden Oral History on The Gay Men's Chorus

Gay choruses

Presbyterian Church

Jerry Carden's account of the history of the Champaign-Urbana Gay Men's Chorus.

Jerry Carden

History Harvest 2019

2019-10-26

Gabriela Kaminski

Anna Rataj

In copyright

.mp3

English

Sound

1980s

Urbana, Illinois

Champaign, Illinois

00:04:46

Jerry Carden: This is Jerry Carden and I’m going to be speaking on behalf of the Champaign-Urbana Gay Men’s Chorus. I was not one of the main organizers of the chorus, but I did sing with the chorus during its entire history -- which began in 1984. And it began, more or less, through the interest of a local student in choral conducting at the university who was gay himself. Many larger communities such as Chicago, San Francisco, New York, any of the major cities were developing gay men’s choruses. And he thought, “You know what, we’re a smaller community, but we can still support a gay men’s choir.” And, he wanted to also have experience with a community choir that he could put on his resume. So he thought, “This is a perfect mixture of those things. So, we started putting out feelers and just through word of mouth found a lot of guys that liked to sing. So, we came together and decided that, yeah, we would make it more official and actually incorporate it as a 501(c)(3), and started doing rehearsals. Now, that first conductor, because he was doing it out of the goodness of his heart or for his own professional development reasons, didn’t as for a salary. But, he was with us for maybe the first two -- two and a half years. His name was Tim Carney, and we would rehearse at the university because he had university ties. We would often use one of the rehearsal rooms at Krannert. Or, we would sometimes use local churches for our rehearsals. And, we started doing concerts right away. We would do a Spring and a Fall concert. We would usually have a holiday concert. Sometimes did special concerts related to a fundraiser. When the Gay Community AIDS Project formed, we -- well I guess we formed at about the same time -- we would sometimes do benefit concerts, or there would be a variety show, and we would sing as a part of their variety show with other kinds of performances.

Anna Rataj: Do you know any of the specific venues that you performed in?

Jerry Carden: We performed in, actually McKinley Presbyterian was where we did a lot of our concerts. We did some at the Unitarian Universalist Church. And...I’m thinking that was the main churches where we did our concerts. And, kind of the highlight of our time frame together was when we combined with the Windy City Gay Men’s Chorus and did a joint concert with them in Orchestra Hall in Chicago. And, that was one of the items that I brought in was a program from that event. And, then they also came down on a road trip and did a concert with us. I think the concert we did at Orchestra Hall was 1986. That was Fall of ‘86, and then they came down in the Spring of ‘87 and did a concert with us. And, we also went to a regional conference, or chorus concert, in Indianapolis. Which was a grouping of -- or what I want to say -- a symposium I guess, of gay choruses from the Midwest. We continued on with different directors over the years, just based on, it was usually somebody that was in choral music but didn’t necessarily want to do it for free. So, we had to start collecting dues and raising money in order to pay our choir directors. And, oftentimes we would have a fee for the rental of the church or performance space. We continued on, our final director -- regular director -- was, his name was Bob Beasley, and it was also the beginning of the ’90s when Bob was HIV positive, and he was suffering from different opportunistic infections with the progression of his illness, and he was also experiencing a lot of psychological issues. It became difficult for us in some of our rehearsals, because he could sometimes get very mean, and bitchy, and some people actually dropped out, and some people were wanting to support Bob because we knew what was going on and that he was having difficulties in his life. But, over time, he got to the point where he could really no longer conduct us and we folded for a little while. During the time frame when he was in the last stages of his life and he died, and then, I really don’t remember for sure but there was a few semesters that we didn’t rehearse and somebody else that was interested decided that they’d try to revive the chorus. So, we did a few performances, maybe at ‘95, but I think that was really kind of the end of the chorus because there just wasn’t that much energy for organizing it anymore and it had kind of run its course. So, that’s the history of the Champaign-Urbana Gay Men’s Chorus.

Anna Rataj

Jerry Carden

MTD City View, Champaign, Illinois