"Benedictus", Ilyas, and Thoughts on Xenophobia

Here's the choir singing Ilyas Iliya's "Benedictus" at GALA, and a picture of Ilyas and Vicki onstage later that day with the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus.

Every place that we performed "Benedictus", the audience reacted with tears, standing ovations, and enthusiastic praise afterwards.

Ilyas is a talented, up-and-coming composer and had two pieces making their GALA premiere this Festival, "Benedictus" and also "Safeer el-Layl", which he wrote for the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. Stephanie mentioned this to our audiences at the different MCCs -- "Safeer" is particularly groundbreaking because it is the world's first piece of choral music about gay love sung in colloquial Arabic, and performed by a gay-identified chorus.

I found the audience's reactions to Stephanie's comments about "Safeer" pretty interesting, and in some cases, disappointing. In Decatur, I heard some people say "Wow..." and there was applause. In Gainesville, there was nervous laughter. (Some MCCSF people were commenting afterwards that the Gainesville folks didn't understand why gay men would sing in a "terrorist language".) We got another awkward reaction when Stephanie mentioned "Safeer" in Tampa. (The GALA audience responded positively to both Ilyas' introduction of the piece and SFGMC's delivery of it.)

I thought that the audience reactions were worth commenting on -- it really shows me where other parts of the country (queer or not) are at, politically and culturally. Xenophobia and intolerance/fear of Middle Easterners (well, probably, anyone who's different from them) still remain unexamined in many places, and prejudice still gets in the way of recognizing our common experience as human beings, queer people, and people of faith.

San Francisco isn't perfect -- a few weeks ago I saw "A Jihad for Love" at Frameline, which is a groundbreaking film about the lives of queer Muslims. From the reactions of the audience, many of whom were queer Muslims, I could tell that talking openly about the issue of LGBT people in the Islamic world is still a pretty new and controversial thing to do. Even in SF there are not many opportunities for queer Muslims to be their full selves in community -- as both queer people, and people of faith. I can't even imagine what life must be like for queer Muslims in the South. I feel newly grateful to be part of MCC San Francisco, a queer church that incorporates some Islamic music (and music of other faith traditions) into its Taize service, and where Sufi readings sometimes find their way into Sunday worship. I appreciate this inclusion, and its underlying significance.

I should be careful how I say this... but the tour reaffirmed something I already knew or suspected: that being an LGBT person does not necessarily mean that someone will have a certain set of beliefs or politics. Identifying as lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, gay, etc., does not always give people further insight into the other ways that people are marginalized in our society, nor does a marginalized person necessarily sympathize with other marginalized groups. Being LGBT in Gainesville or Tampa is not the same as being LGBT in San Francisco -- different ways of expressing ourselves, different politics, different alliegances, etc.

The introduction that Stephanie prepared for the person announcing our group at GALA included a long description of the diversity of our members. The words that I can remember that she used to describe us included Pagans, Jews, Atheists, Christians, students, teachers, sex workers, and musicians. The GALA audience didn't seem to have much trouble with these labels... but now that I think of it, all of these details of our identities and lives were not presented quite as overtly to the MCCs that we visited. Might our experience have been different if they had been? I don't want to imply that our ways of doing something are better than anyone else's -- they're just different. And I think that even in MCC, our church is unusually open.

Back to "Benedictus" -- the lyrics translate to "Blessed is the one who comes in the name of our God", a beautiful message originating in the Hebrew scriptures. After three gospel pieces, one upbeat one and two slower tunes, "Benedictus" was an abrupt change of pace in our GALA set, with its classical feel and a cappella sound. The other pieces featured soloists and the band, so this piece was the choir's chance to show what we could do all on our own, with no backup. The energy I felt from the choir during that piece was really intense. I know I mentioned this earlier, but when we finished the final "Hosana!", there was a long, stunned silence from the audience...longer than I've ever heard from an audience in my thirteen years as a choral singer. Ilyas said that it was a full six seconds before they finally broke the silence and gave us a wonderful standing ovation.

There wasn't enough time for GALA to clear up the copyright stuff on all of our pieces, so the only one that they recorded was "Benedictus". I can't wait to hear the recording!