A year ago this month we landed in South Africa to learn that Melvin Naik, the mayor of George—where we would be performing a free community concert and participating in the city’s first-ever Pride parade—had gone onto a popular Christian radio program to declare...
The Boston Gay Men’s Chorus (BGMC) announces today that it raised $38,000 to benefit South African organizations serving LGBTQ people and those living with HIV. The money was raised through cash donations and ticket sales for concerts performed during its South...
When LGBTI activists and George municipal officials confirmed BGMC’s visit to their beautiful coastal town on South Africa’s Western Cape, they saw it as a perfect opportunity to hold the city’s first-ever Pride march. Plans for the event were proceeding apace...
By Alex Kapitan People said that going on tour would be transformative, but I don’t know how much I really believed it. That’s the thing about transformation—it’s not something you can truly prepare for or understand until it’s happening. It wasn’t until our third...
By Gerald James SATURDAY, June 16, 2018—This was going to be like just any other day for the BGMC while we are in South Africa but it became so much more. Originally, we were to participate in various workshops with GALA (Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action), Men 4...
A few months before our trip to South Africa, Dr. LeWana Clark, who has been the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus’s American Sign Language interpreter since 1989, was in touch with leaders at the Kliptown Youth Program. With the number of children and teens living in...
JOHANNESBURG, June 14, 2018—Our day started with a slight jet lag fog and an early start. The hotel breakfast was full and bountiful with both traditional and non traditional offerings. The funniest moment of the morning was watching my partner’s expression change...
by Peter Kokoszka JOHANNESBURG, June 16, 2018—These first couple of days of our South Africa tour have helped to deepen my understanding of the rich very recent history of this country and also broaden my thoughts on how many of the songs in our program overlap in...
by Dana Hoare-Travaglini SOWETO, June 15, 2018—Today we traveled to Soweto to visit Kliptown and met some of the beneficiaries of our first concert at Soweto Theatre tonight. Kliptown is a section of Soweto for the poor—homes are DIY, no electricity, running water...
On June 14, we visited the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. Opened in 2001, the museum walks visitors through the history of South Africa’s violent system of state-sanctioned racial discrimination and segregation and the many decades of struggle to overthrow the...