True Colors: LGBTQ+ Our Stories, Our Songs (Cascade Public Media, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles came home right as the Father Brown episode was ending, and together we watched the next show on KPBS: True Colors: LGBTQ+ Our Stories, Our Songs. First of all, don’t get me started on the horrible name “LGBTQ+ People” our community has stuck itself with in the name of “inclusion” and political correctness. Not only is it ugly (I was about to write “ugly as shit,” but that’s being unfair to shit), but as I’ve written in various posts on the Zenger’s Newsmagazine blog it offers a sham idea of “inclusion” instead of the real thing. My argument is that the Queer movement made a big mistake when it based its entire case for equality and civil-rights protections on the idea that sexual orientation (and, later, gender identity) are as fixed and immutable as race; that “we’re born this way” and there’s nothing we can do to change who and what we are. As the Gay community grew to encompass first Lesbians and then Bisexual people, and finally Trans people, the whole idea that “we’re born this way” became harder to defend. After all, it’s hard to imagine a more “immutable” characteristic people could have than the physical configuration of their body as male or female, but the Trans community has shown us that “gender” as a psychologically lived reality stands apart from physiologically determined “sex.” Also, there are too many stories of people who lived for decades as heterosexuals, got married and had children, and then underwent a relatively sudden transition into a Gay or Lesbian identity – including actress Cynthia Nixon, one of the interviewees on this program, who 11 years ago raised hackles among fellow Queer activists when she told New York Times interviewer Alex Witchel that, having been in both a straight marriage and a Lesbian relationship, she regarded her sexuality as a “choice.”

“I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a Gay audience, and it included the line, ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been Gay, and Gay is better,’” Nixon told Witchel. “Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was Gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with.” I wrote an article in one of the last print editions of Zenger’s Newsmagazine and posted it online at https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2012/02/cynthia-nixon-bi-heroine-tells-it-like.html in which I defended Nixon against the attacks of what I called the “Queer Thought Police” and wrote, “Why on earth can’t we acknowledge at least some element of ‘choice’ in how we express our sexual desires? No Gay man is equally attracted to all men, nor is any Lesbian equally attracted to all women, any more than any straight person is attracted to everyone of the opposite sex. If we can pick and choose our partners based on height, weight, age, hair color, tastes in politics or music, or whatever weird and beautiful criteria that guide us, why can’t we pick their gender, too? Why do we have to make some hard-and-fast decision, once we’ve had our first experience with a same-sex partner, that we have to identify as Gay or Lesbian for life?” I also cited social-science data suggesting that women who have same-sex experiences are much less likely than men to think that means they have to identify as Lesbian or Gay for the rest of their lives. In the decade since I came to Cynthia Nixon’s defense (not that she really needed me to!) the whole question of what is a sexual orientation, or what is a gender identity, has become even more complicated. More young people are refusing to define themselves as “Gay,” “Lesbian,” “Bisexual” or “Transgender,” preferring to live in the moment and not restrict themselves to one gender identity or sexual orientation.

I wrote this rather long preamble to my comments on True Colors: LGBTQ+ Our Stories, Our Songs not only because I hate, loathe, despise and detest the term “LGBTQ+” (it’s an inhuman designation that even sympathetic people like the newscasters on MS-NBC stumble over) but because the show seemed on the cusp, at once striking out towards a new, less essentialist definition of the Queer community while still unwilling to let go of the older orthodoxy that we’re “born this way” and there’s nothing we can do to change ourselves consciously. It was also disappointing to me because the previews for it had led me to expect it was an all-star concert featuring openly Queer artists instead of what it turned out to be, a mix-and-match assemblage of interview clips with various self-identified community members – many of them in mixed-race relationships – with the musical performances, all accompanied by the American “Pops” Orchestra conducted by Luke Frazier. This ensemble has turned up on a few other PBS shows, including their “United in Song” New Year’s telecasts and an intriguing tribute to Ella Fitzgerald’s 1958 album Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas. The singers included a heavy-set man (though I couldn’t say for certain whether he’s male-born or a Transman) named Morgxn singing a song called “Wonder” that, like most of the new songs on the show, was a heart-felt power ballad about love but with both the singer’s and the beloved’s genders carefully unspecified. In fact, one of the points the show made without seemingly meaning to is that love is love, and whether the couple is male-female, female-female or male-male the emotions are still the same. The show contained nine songs by eight artists (Billy Gilman got two, “More Love” and “For Our World”), and a few were oldies from Broadway shows: a trio of drag queens from New York named Peppermint, Jujubee and Alexis Michelle did “A Little More Mascara” from La Cage aux Folles, Breanna Sinclairé (identified on the official PBS Web page as a Transwoman opera singer, which would be interesting to hear!) sang “Somewhere” from West Side Story (with music by Bisexual Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Gay Stephen Sondheim), and Chris Colfer, whom I discovered when one of my last home-care clients was watching streaming reruns of the TV series Glee and he performed a spectacular version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive” from Company, came out and did the song that has been described as the Queer national anthem: “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz.

My favorite song of the night was “Hey, Jesus” by Trey Pearson, described in the show’s official Web page as a “celebrated Christian singer” even though I can’t imagine much of the Christian-music audience being able to accept a man with long drop earrings singing a song asking Jesus why don’t you accept me because I’m Gay. It was by far the best song of the evening not only because it was the one most open and out-front about the singer’s own sexuality but because it had qualities like wit and subtlety all too little of the other new songs on the program did. What I found particularly irksome was that even the songs themselves, or some of them, were interrupted by the talking heads – but then that always annoys me in music documentaries. Ironically, some of the talking heads were actually more interesting than the singers, most notably the two young interracial Gay male couples who talked movingly about how they were both called to the ministry despite hearing the usual homohating B.S. about how if they were Gay they were sinners who were going to Hell. Also especially interesting were Cynthia Nixon (even though she didn’t say anything nearly as provocative as what she’d told New York Times reporter Alex Witchel over a decade before!) and Sue Hyde, who recalled her mother asking her, “Are you a feminist? Are you a Lesbian?” Of course she said yes to both, and mom was taken aback briefly but ultimately grew to accept her. The show was hosted bo former Jeopardy! champion Amy Schneider and also featured an interview with Jason Collins, former professional basketball player who came out as a Gay man after he retired in 2013, though he returned to professional basketball briefly in 2014 with one of his old teams, the New York Nets. The final performances on the musical side were André de Shields, wearing a preposterous robe that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the bizarrely costumed entourage of outer-space jazz pioneer Sun Ra, singing a song called “Colors of My Life” from the early-1980’s Broadway musical Barnum – it’s a retrospective number and de Shields’ obviously advanced age made it quite credible – and the Indigo Girls doing one of their earlier songs, “Closer to Fine.”

The Indigo Girls are a folk-rock duo consisting of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, who in the middle of their careers both came out as Lesbian (though they’re not a couple; Emily is married to Tristin Chipman and Ray has a longtime partner, Carrie Schrader, with whom she’s raising a daughter) after realizing by their own account that they couldn’t ask their audiences to be honest about themselves if they weren’t willing to do the same. Ray and Saliers have known each other since elementary school in Atlanta, Georgia and have been steadily touring and recording since the 1980’s. “Closer to Fine” was a nice show-closer that ended the proceedings on an optimistic note even though much of the commentary was about the holy war the resurgent radical Right in America today is waging against the Queer community in general and its most obvious social, sexual and gender outlaws – drag queens and Trans people – in particular. I remember watching the 1977 film Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/12/word-is-out-stories-of-some-of-our.html) on Turner Classic Movies and noting how much of it seemed dated while other parts hardly seemed dated at all. As I wrote afterwards, “Word Is Out is an unexpectedly relevant movie for our own time in that, even though we seem to have reached a plateau of acceptance, there are mass social and political forces in this country who aim to take it all away from us.” Some of the interviews in True Colors seemed almost too reminiscent of the ones in Word Is Out – particularly the ones about Queer folk struggling to keep their own spirituality in the face of churches that define us as immoral or amoral monsters – despite the 45 years between the two films and the growing acceptance of Queer folk among majorities of Americans. As Michael A. Cohen wrote on MS-NBC’s site, https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/republicans-2023-pride-backlash-polls-bud-light-rcna89564, “A record 71% of Americans now support same-sex marriage. Polling from just last year shows that 8 in 10 Americans oppose anti-Gay discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations (and that includes nearly two-thirds of Republicans)."