Sooner or later, if I spend too much time with The Forum I will feel like bursting into tears. If it's not because I feel so insignificant, it's something else. This time it had to do with a thread about being "Out of the Closet" in the opera world, which I do know something about, well, not about "The Opera World" because the 1970s Opera Underground was not "The Opera World" although sometimes there was a path leading out of one and into the other (which I had just gotten my toes onto when I stopped singing) but I do know a hell of a lot about being a Lesbian singing opera.
When I mentioned my experiences regarding the attitudes of the (1970s) "Lesbian Community" toward my wanting to sing opera, someone, whom I actually respect very much, implied that I was being "ridiculous".
I am not ridiculous!!!. I may be small and insignificant in the scheme of things over there, but I am a real person and my real life matters.
The fact that I stopped singing because I was made to feel uncomfortable (mostly by other Lesbians) about singing opera matters!!
So maybe I should try to tell the story of "Laura and Me" from the beginning.
Laura in La Gioconda is one of the few roles in which a mezzo gets to play a romantic lead. Also La Gioconda is everything that people love and hate about opera.
When I was singing with the Opera Underground (Mme. La Puma, in fact) I saw a production of La Gioconda with the most luscious blonde as Laura. I knew that my dream was to sing that role someday, somehow.
About five years later I got an opportunity to sing that role with a small company that actually by today's standards would be considered a D House. I think I got a small stipend, I don't remember. It was the eve of my 30th birthday and I was singing better than ever. My voice had started to fill out and the role felt as if it could have been written for me. Of course I had listened to the old recording with Callas and (I think it was Barbieri) so many times I knew the whole thing by heart.
The stumbling block was that I had to play a love scene with a man.
People who weren't around just have no idea what "The Lesbian Community" was like in 1980. Most of the women were either angry at, or phobic about, men. They saw all men as, at worst, potential rapists or, at the very least, as oppressors to whom we should not give any attention (or any money, if possible). My partner and friends were already queasy about how much time I spent in opera rehearsals around straight people in general and straight men in particular. So OK, if I was playing a trouser role I was on safe ground, but now I was stepping out into the big unknown. I mean this man was not in any way a threat. He was probably about the age and height I am now, which for a man, is old!!! He never did or said anything untoward. (Tenors usually don't if they're in a duet situation where they have to worry about high notes.) So I felt between a rock and a hard place. If I did a good job, I would get flak at home after the performance. If I didn't, well, I might never get cast in a role like that again.
Since it was a small company the costumes were pretty old and ratty and the gowns I had to wear were several sizes too big. Singers were on the whole bigger then, certainly Lauras were, and I was still starving myself to keep my weight under 130 pounds (good thing, I guess, since I had to be carried onstage by one male chorister in Act IV). But the costumes looked anything but sexy and glamorous on me. I looked like I was sort of lost in them, despite attempts to take them in.
On the day of the performance, I sang the best I had ever sung in my whole life, a big "diva" role. It should have been a moment of glory. Instead, my partner was bored, said the story of the opera was stupid, that my costume was ugly, and like, so this was what all the fuss was about?
That was a big watershed both in ending my life as a singer and in changing my comfort level in my relationship.
I had set my 30th birthday as the deadline for giving up singing if it wasn't becoming a livelihood (ironically, I think if I had continued on for a few more years, resigned myself to fighting constantly with my partner over this or splitting up, and stopped starving myself, it might have become one). So not long after that performance of La Gioconda I stopped singing, enrolled in college to get a degree in Women's Studies while I worked full time as a Production Editor, became a "good dyke", and never opened my mouth again until I was "discovered" by The Mentor Who Shall Not Be Discussed in 2004.
So that was then, this was now. Now it is the eve of my 60th birthday and I am still fighting with my (mostly ex) partner over singing. I am nervous to tell her I am singing on the afternoon of August 8. (I orchestrate these things carefully - I don't want to tell her too soon or she'll yell at me for confusing her. If I tell her too close to the date she will tell me I have "sprung" something at her. I will tell her Sunday. If she does something vindictive which results in my spending the day of my 60th birthday alone I have resolved she will never see me or our dog again.)
I haven't had anything to do with the "Lesbian Community" as such since the mid-90s. As my partner and I got older, we weren't that qualitatively different from other mature women - interested in going to museums and the theater, or on a vacation to Europe. Except that we didn't socialize with single straight men under the age of 80 (my doing so at work didn't seem to bother her), we had a variety of friends and no longer saw ourselves as part of a sect. Then I met Himself and suddenly found myself attracted to men. He was unattainable but others were not.
I think I will stay away from The Forum for a while. Yes, it may be tempting to see what kind of response I got to my response to the man who implied I was "ridiculous" but I don't need to do that. I reconnected with the Forum mainly as a way to post my blog link. I will try to find other places to post it.
And I won't let anything spoil my love affair with Amneris. At least she doesn't have to kiss anyone.
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