A&C

Sounds Like Solidarity

New Mexico Gay Men’s Chorus premieres its first mental-health focused show

BY RILEY GARDNER riley@sfreporter.com

When it comes to the New Mexico chorale scene, Aaron Howe has worked practically everywhere. And though he has served as creative director for the New Mexico Gay Men’s Chorus since 2010, other career highlights include positions with Musical Theater Southwest and the Albuquerque Little Theater, as well as a period as artistic director for the Santa Fe-based women’s chorus, Zia Singers. Yet, as an openly gay man working in music and performance, his career might not have begun in the manner you’d expect.

“My first calling was actually church music,” Howe tells SFR. “I really felt I was going in that direction.”

Moved by the tunes found within religious settings, Howe worked as the music director for various churches throughout Albuquerque, including Heights First Church of The Nazarene, Community of Joy Lutheran Church and the queer-friendly Metropolitan Community Church. In 2004, however, Howe was outed against his will and forced to resign as musical director for a church he doesn’t wish to name—his religious music career came to a sudden, heartbreaking halt.

That’s about when Howe discovered the community chorus, a godsend, he says. And now, decades later, and at the helm of the New Mexico Gay Men’s Chorus, he has curated a show that addresses something with which queer people (including himself) are no doubt familiar, and at much higher rates than their straight counterparts: mental illness.

“We wanted to address the issue [of mental health] exacerbated by the isolation,” he explains in regards to You Are Enough, the chorus’ first concert with a focus on the topic. “It’s not meant to offer solutions or concrete ideas, but it’s more or less de-stigmatizing—taking down the notion only weak people have mental health issues.”

Of course, the show isn’t meant to suggest only queer folks experience mental anguish, nor does it imply queerness is homogeneous: The queer community is wide-ranging and complex, with numerous embedded subgroups. Even so, a 2015 survey from the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found 37.4% of sexual minority adults surveyed (ie, people attracted to the same sex) were living with moderate or serious mental illness, compared to 17.1% for straight folks. Among those surveyed, 18.2% of the sexual minority adults reported major depressive episodes, while straights hovered much lower at 6.2%. And things obviously didn’t improve much during the lockdown era of COVID-19. The Kaiser Family Foundation found, for example, that queer people faced high job losses across 2020 and experienced higher levels of stress than those in heterosexual households.

Such stats inform much of You Are Enough, with its title and content inspired more directly by You Are Enough: A Mental Health Suite by composer Aron Accurso. Delving deeper, the upcoming concert features show tunes from Broadway heavyhitters such as “You Will Be Found” from Dear Evan Hansen, numbers from Jagged Little Pill and Next to Normal and Cyndi Lauper’s forever-banger, “True Colors.” The hope, Howe says, is to break down that sense of isolation that can often prevent those struggling with mental illnesses from seeking help. Howe hopes the performance might repair a damaged sense of solidarity among queer communities, too, particularly as dating apps and the ubiquitousness of social media continue to make places like gay bars feel less essential.

“In the artistic world and the music world, there’s a much higher world of acceptance than in general society, but it wasn’t always that way,” Howe continues. “When I was in college in the ‘90s, I knew very few people even in the music department who were open at all. It’s been a lot more in the last 10 years that we’ve seen so much acceptance. [Today] we’re talking about things like safe spaces: That’s an essential reason gay choruses existed back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when guys couldn’t feel they could be themselves without risk. We’re not a monolith as much any more. As it gets more accepted, we don’t have to huddle so much.”

In its 41-year history, the New Mexico Gay Men’s Chorus has evolved from a 16-member collective to a larger organization with members spanning Northern New Mexico. And though the heyday of similar gay men’s singing groups has waned, with the fallout of the AIDS epidemic far behind us, Howe holds onto a sense of consistency, even as he hopes for larger post-pandemic crowds. All the same, he says, much of the chorus’ audience skews older, and the choir itself is composed of men between their 40s and 60s. Perhaps this reflects shifting priorities as we age, but for the chorus members, it’s a chance to push beyond sexuality, by which queer people are often defined, and experience why gay gathering places have traditionally been so important in the first place.

“It’s not always about gay relationships or issues, we’re more universal and using this platform to say queer people are a part of the art scene just like everyone else,” Howe says. “We’re coming together to make music safe. You can express things like love. Most of the time we gay people are in the minority, but frankly, it’s nice when not.”

COURTESY NEW MEXICO GAY MEN’S CHORUS

COURTESY MAX WOLTMAN PHOTOGRAPHY

Aaron Howe conducting the New Mexico Gay Men’s Chorus.

YOU ARE ENOUGH

7:30 pm, Friday, April 1. $20-$45 Lensic Performing Arts Center, lensic.org You can reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 LGBTQ+ youths can reach out to The Trevor Project at 1-866-488-7386