The cross-generational choir singing their way through the Christmas season
IF you are travelling up the A48 on a chilly winter morning, the last thing you might expect is to be serenaded by the warming tones of a Christmas carol while driving.
But packed into a coach on the way to Llanelli, the South Wales Gay Men’s Chorus (SWGMC) is practising for the festive period.
‘This is my social life’
Nigel Lewis, the oldest member of the choir, is tucked away on the back seats.
At 66, the retiree doesn’t often go out on the gay scene. “If I go on the scene,” he says, “I go with the choir, so this is my social life.”
Rehearsing around the corner from his home, Nigel stumbled across the choir 16 years ago, and has been performing with them ever since.
He remembers his mother asking him to join: “She said ‘you’ll make lots of friends’ and she said ‘you’ll really enjoy it’… and that was her dying wish actually.”
What started with just a handful of gay men in 2008, has evolved into a fully-inclusive choir, open to all sexualities, genders and backgrounds.
During his time with the choir, Nigel says he has become “the joker in the pack”, dressing up in any costume laid out for him. “They’ve made me a witch, I’ve been a bride twice, I’ve been a Christmas cracker.”
Despite his experience, he still gets nervous before performing and is known to take a swig of his ‘special squash’. “Just to get me going,” he says.
It’s the choir that puts his nerves at ease: “Being around the guys, it makes you feel more relaxed”.
The SWGMC have performed at the Hackney Empire, Cadogan Hall and the National Theatre, travelled to Munich and Bologna to compete internationally, and are winners of the Cornwall International Male Choral Festival.
Despite reaching beyond South Wales, the group still focuses on spreading joy throughout the region, a mission at the forefront of their 2024 Christmas calendar, which begins with a performance at Llanelli Queer Collective’s first festive Fayre.
‘If everything was perfect there wouldn’t be the need for a choir’.
Sporting multi-coloured Santa-hats, the choir stand underneath the warming lights of a Victorian railway shed, swaying along to White Christmas and Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.
The audience is hardly the size the choir has grown accustomed to, but appearing at local events is a key part of the group’s ethos. Every year, they attend Pride events across South Wales from Merthyr to Cowbridge and Caerphilly.
As Nick McNeill, a longstanding member of the choir explains, “someone who’s probably struggling a little bit with their sexuality, they might see us at a Pride or at an event and think ‘Oh, there’s an opportunity for me to step up and become my true self by being part of this community’”.
Walking to the pub after the performance, some of the choir have a slur shouted at them from people in a passing car.
Whilst this is a rarity for the choir to experience, it shows why their meer presence, showing queerness in a positive light, is still important in 2024.
Jayden, one of the group’s newest members, says: “If everything was perfect there wouldn’t be the need for a choir.”
This visibility of queerness in the choir’s events has been moving for the software developer. At the choir’s annual summer concert, he saw his parents crying. “They said they were just so happy for me, they felt like I’d found a group where I could flex that part of myself and not be ashamed,” Jayden says.
One day later, the SWGMC performs Sweetest Kick and When She Loved Me at Cardiff’s Reardon Smith Theatre, dressed in black, with red ribbons fastened over the hearts for World AIDS Day.
Their hauntingly beautiful melodies are in stark contrast to the ‘Holly Jolly Christmas’ of Llanelli.
It’s not only a reminder of the sadness and joy that sit hand in hand at Christmas but within the reality of LGBTQ+ history.
Their performance is not just a testament to the breadth of the choir’s repertoire, but yet another way that the group stand in solidarity with the queer community.
‘I know I’m gonna walk into a room full of people that actually care whether I’m dead or alive’
At their weekly rehearsal at Roath Church House, the choir breaks for tea and biscuits. In the large-yet-cosy space, members spanning from the age of 18 to 66 natter away.
Thirty-two-year-old Lawrence Fletcher says that cross-generational friendships can be hard to come across in queer spaces. “That’s completely not the case here, people span all sorts of different lifestyles and ages,” he says.
Mark Achurch has been a ‘real-turner upper’ at rehearsals for the past 12 years. “I joined for the singing really rather than the social but found both and met a family,” the 61-year-old says.
Lawrence says that a fixed point of contact is important for the choir: “That regular week on week on week no matter what is really helpful for some people…that sense of ‘I know I’m gonna walk into a room full of people that actually care whether I’m dead or alive’…there’s certain people who need that.”
This sense of care also extends beyond the rehearsal room.
Part of Lawrence’s role as the SWGMC’s Accessibility & Inclusion Officer involves establishing a support network for members who might be struggling. The choir also regularly holds social events, from meeting in local bars to hosting cabaret nights. This summer proved particularly memorable, when a walk up Pen Y Fan ended with the choir in a sing-along in a pub, with a group of ladies and their terrified husbands.
‘I’ve really found my place. This is where I belong’
One week later, Storm Darragh thunders its way through Wales, but the choir refuse to let this get in the way of their sold-out Christmas concert: ‘Yuletide Treasures and Gay Apparel’.
At Capel Salem in Canton, members bustle around erecting lighting, adorning mismatched tables and chairs with Christmas decorations, stacking mounds of mince pies and fruit cake onto plates and filling jugs with tea and coffee. They even find time to add The Twelve Days of Christmas to the already-packed programme.
For Adam Donelly, the concert marks his first official performance with the group since joining in August.
The 25-year-old says he found it “quite daunting at first”, but being part of the group has increased his confidence. When he sings with the choir he knows he isn’t on his own.
“I’ve really found my place,” he says. “This is where I belong”.
Over the concert’s two-hour run-time a festive feast is served, with the audience listening to dreamy acappella performances of Christmas classics, from Nos Galan to Fairytale of New York. In breaks between songs, the choir members top-up drinks, restock plates of food and chat to friends and family.
Despite the wonderful music, it is these moments of human interaction that evoke the true spirit of Christmas. The smiles, hugs and laughter show the deep bonds of friendship and community the choir have created not just between themselves, but across Wales.
Nick describes it best: “We’re just a choir that happens to be gay”.
