On an otherwise dreary Tuesday evening in November, New York’s Merkin Concert Hall was coming alive with the latest installment of Steven Blier’s much-loved New York Festival of Song series. There was a special element of anticipation as the evening’s program of songs reflecting on gay life—coyly titled “Manning the Canon”—was over two decades in the making for Blier. “I remember mentioning it shyly to various members of the NYFOS team and getting a measured response rather than an enthusiastic thumbs-up,” Blier wrote of the event’s 22-year gestation period in his program notes. The audience’s response in 2010 was nothing short of enthusiastic.
“Manning the Canon” is one example of a rapidly shifting social climate. In recent years public figures, including numerous singers, have led by example by coming out to the press and fans: Soprano Patricia Racette and mezzo-soprano Beth Clayton did so in 2002 with Racette’s Opera News cover story (the couple even contributed to Dan Savage’s viral video project, “It Gets Better”), countertenor David Daniels has been open with the press since a 1997 New Yorker profile, and former singer Darren Keith Woods—now general director of the Fort Worth Opera—has produced works touching on GLBTQ issues onstage to warm reception.
Here Racette, Clayton, Daniels, Woods, and others share their varied experiences on coming out, each confirming that it does indeed get better.
Patricia Racette | Soprano
“Personally I never went to that much effort to hide it. It’s just a matter of how public I was about it, which sort of just grew year after year. I grew more comfortable with it, if you will. I was a young singer starting out on this very competitive profession, so it was . . . I suppose I could say that it was tolerated. I think I had a certain amount of power coming out [in print] in 2002 when I already enjoyed many years of success. [Beth Clayton] and I did it for a lot of personal reasons. It didn’t feel right to be secretive and behave in a way that seems we were ashamed of the one thing in our lives that we feel the most proud of, I think—our relationship. Why not share that? Why not scream it from the mountaintop?
“If I were married to a man and I was going to an opera rehearsal where I’m portraying Mimì and Mimì falls in love with Rodolfo, I would be acting either way. That wouldn’t be my real life and my real relationship. So, in some ways, my own personal sexuality doesn’t really have any bearing or anything to do with [my art]. I’m not informed of any projects for which I’m passed over—for whatever reason. No one tells me . . . [and] it doesn’t matter. This is a career that can span 40 years, and I’m not willing to be in hiding for the majority of my life. . . . I can’t imagine having to have this be a secret.”
Beth Clayton | Mezzo-soprano
“As with most gay people, you hide it for a little bit longer because you think people don’t know. And we really need to give everybody a little bit more credit. [Laughs.] People are on top of it and they’re pretty sensitive. You know, my family certainly ‘got it,’ but they got it before I told them. . . . They were receptive to whatever because they are beyond loving and pretty amazing. Also it was kind of a surprise to me, to be quite honest. I don’t think that’s everyone’s story. I think what’s more typical [is] a lifelong awareness, whereas I sort of grew into mine. But I do embrace it; it is my truth.
“And I’ve said this in interviews before: ‘lesbian’ does not need to be an adjective associated with me. It’s a noun, and it’s one of my truth nouns, but I don’t need to be ‘lesbian mezzo-soprano Beth Clayton.’ I think that’s a little unnecessary.
“If you want to be an artist on any level, I believe it requires truth. Because that’s what we’re all speaking, or what we should all be speaking. . . . It frees you to become the full artist you can be. . . . It’s scary to make the choice in a lot of contexts, so you don’t want to make yourself unsafe. But you need to find alliances. We all feel ashamed on some level about it, but we have to free ourselves from that self-loathing and see the light on the other side.”
David Daniels | Countertenor
“It was my decision, obviously, as it gets down to it, but I had to take other people into account. I don’t know how shocking it was for anybody. Mainly if I got anything negative, at least to me, it was from the gay community. Like, ‘Why does he feel he needs to talk about that? That’s his private life and why does he have to make himself a gay singer?’ But that’s mainly the only negative thing I ever got.
“I’m a pretty open book. I really am true to who I am—and not about being gay, but about who I am and my personality. It’s much easier to get through life that way than to constantly be a chameleon for each person you’re with. . . . Being open and honest and being out allows me, I believe, to be a more communicative artist when I perform because I think there’s a freedom in loving who I am and being cool about it that allows me to be free when I’m singing.
“There was a young boy in South Carolina in a performing arts high school studying voice with a friend of mine, and [he] had tried to commit suicide four times with his struggle in being gay. He read the articles about me in the New Yorker and Opera News and, I think, in the Advocate. He wrote me a long letter saying, . . . ‘You really have let me think that there is a future for me.’ And he wanted to thank me. And if that’s one person, then it was worth me [coming out]. I know that’s very cliché, but that’s the truth.”
Nicholas Phan | Tenor
“When you are a performer, you have this . . . you just inherently have a public presence, and there’s a responsibility that comes with that public presence. . . . You have to set examples for not only younger people to show it gets better and we can lead happy and successful lives, but also to show people who don’t have as much experience with gay people and for them to know that as well.
“I had always felt very unaccepted beforehand, but then the minute I did come out, there was something about taking that action to the community. I was very lucky about this. There were people that were forced to accept me. It was the first time I felt like I had found my place in high school, my place in my community. I was welcomed, accepted, and embraced.
“The one moment I really thought about it was when I started writing my blog in 2006. That was when I thought to myself I’ve got a decision to make: Do I write about it? I really did think hard about it, actually, because with blogs, you have to decide how open you want to be on all aspects of your life and which aspects you’re going to talk about. That was what made me feel like I had to make a decision about whether I was going to be publicly coming out. It was a little different. It was much more subtle and efficient for me.”
Steven Blier | Collaborative pianist, director of NYFOS
“I think coming out to your parents is the test. That weighs a little while, although it should have been pretty obvious to them. It’s a little easier with your friends—a lot easier with your gay friends—and it’s harder with your parents who have expectations of you. My mom was born in 1914 and my dad in 1911, so their view of gay people was tempered by the way in which they grew up—and also their view of how gay people were going to be accepted in the world was tempered by the world in which they lived in. Modern kids have parents who smoked marijuana. We didn’t. That’s the difference.
“[Now] I think things have loosened up and normalized. More singers are coming out, and more gay singers are being accepted as leading men, as legitimate artists. If you can sing the role, you can sing the role. It’s all about making a certain noise at a certain time and that’s always been true. It’s more of being able to be relaxed and open about who you are rather than, ‘Oh, if they knew I was gay, they wouldn’t cast me as Tristan.’ Believe me, if you can sing Tristan, you can have sex with cows. It’s okay. Just sing Tristan, and we don’t really need to know too much about what you do afterward. I think that, generally, openly gay artists are not discriminated as much as they were—much, much less.”
Darren Keith Woods | Tenor, general director of Fort Worth Opera
“When I moved here [Fort Worth, Texas], they asked me if I was married. ‘I have a partner, Steven.’ ‘Oh really? How long have you been together?’ I think maybe because Van Clibern was here, being gay was not that big of a deal. A lot of these donors who budget their corporate or individual donations come to our house to have dinner, and that’s one of the most wonderful things.
“My personal life rarely comes up. But if it does, now that I’ve been here 10 years, a corporate donor at the end of the meeting would go, ‘Tell Steven we said, “Hey.”’ That’s just part of my life as an executive director. It’s not really part of the conversation when we’re talking all about opera.
“I came back [from the Paris premiere of Angels in America] and said, ‘We need to tell this story. . . . It’s going to be really tough, but I really think this is a story that needs to be told.’ We made it bigger just than opera. The paper called it probably the most important collaboration in 100 years, where everybody was involved and the opera was just one component. We sort of soften the blow of the play and the opera and the atonality of it by making it about AIDS awareness and everything else.
“It was a really wonderful thing. Opening night [I] saw people leaving and coming up and saying, ‘Thank you for having the courage to do this.’ I thought, ‘If I get hit by the proverbial bus on the way out of here, this is worth it.’”
