Rainbow connection

Photo: Matt Chapin

SING OUT Youth Pride Chorus members raise their voices together in rousing harmonies.

Photo: Matt Chapin

If the last choral performance you dragged your tweens to featured a dour-faced conductor and a snoozefest song list, we can understand why they weren’t impressed.

SING OUT Youth Pride Chorus members raise their voices together in rousing harmonies.

Photo: Matt Chapin

If the last choral performance you dragged your tweens to featured a dour-faced conductor and a snoozefest song list, we can understand why they weren’t impressed. Thankfully, New York’s Youth Pride Chorus delivers the much-needed antidote: shows that are part musical revue, part activism, part artistic statement and good enough to take to the stage at some of the city’s top concert halls.

“We’re not interested in perfect, tight-assed, art-for-art’s sake,” said Wes Webb, director of the organization, about his work with the young singers. “The general theme I want to impart to them as young queer people, as young artists, is that it’s not just about your voice sounding pretty, it’s what you do with it.” And what the 20 members of the five-year-old chorus have done with their voices is excite audiences all around town—from their annual Pride Concert in June to an appearance at Carnegie Hall this past December. Open to young people between the ages of 13 and 21 who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender or their allies, the YPC is a joint project of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center and the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus—and it’s the only group of its kind in the city. 

“The reason for being here is to be part of a group of people who are like them and to be activists in their own right,” Webb said. “The tools to do that happen to be music and movement. All of that is in the service of giving them a voice.” When those voices unite, the result is unique and powerful enough to make tweens unplug their iPods and listen. For example, the “Queer Hallelujahs” holiday concert at Merkin Concert Hall in December 2006 included an African-American spiritual as well as songs by Poison and the Beach Boys. Their 2006 spring concert, “Queer Voices Through the Ages,” featured works by a Renaissance nun and “Midnight Radio” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. “The finale we kept repeating was, ‘Lift up your hands,’ ” Luis Garay, 16, a bass baritone from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, said of “Midnight Radio.” “We had our hands in the air, and so did the audience. I was just so proud to be there. It was absolutely breathtaking to see everybody included.”

That sense of inclusion and community, a rarity in high-school hallways, is one of the main reasons members come from all five boroughs for the once-a-week rehearsals. “The people are the best part of the chorus,” says Nickkita Ramnine, a 20-year-old member of three years who lives in Brighton Beach. “We’re always laughing together.”

Those interested in joining the group can sign up for a voice evaluation in January. Once they’re in, rehearsals for the June Pride concert start immediately. It and the other major show of the year, planned for December, are sure to entertain all who come, even those adults who’ve become perennial parental audience members. “It’s always an emotionally charged performance,” said Ramnine. “People say we give them hope.”

Visit gaycenter.org/program_folders/YES/arts.html/ for more information about the organization.