“People don’t realize how queer the Harlem Renaissance was.”
Albert Lee makes the point while reflecting on how the “fluidity” of his sexual identity — and the multi-pronged path of his musical career — draws from cultural forebears rooted in that landmark era a century ago.
“As a person who sings literature, the joy of my own journey as an artist has been latching onto Langston Hughes’ voice early in my career,” he says. “And then, as an intellectual and as an artist, and as someone who was really trying to understand the next level of my own self, I was to come upon James Baldwin’s writings and see — just from Hughes’ generation to Baldwin’s generation — a real evolution of how poets, of how artists, are able to move through the world and able to identify.”
While studying vocal performance in college, Lee recalls hearing Hughes’ poem “Minstrel Man” for the first time, performed as an orchestral art song by Margaret Bonds in a recital by Leontyne Price. “When I heard this particular song, it was a lightbulb moment of, ‘Oh, I can find things to sing in the classical music field that actually speak to my own experience, that speak to my own heart.'”
Years later, he still sings the song “with incredible reverence and incredible joy because it unlocked a scholarly interest for me. And it unlocked sort of an artistic connection.”
Lee splits his time between teaching and performing — as a professor and associate dean at the Yale School of Music, and as an acclaimed tenor who has appeared with ensembles ranging from the Philadelphia Orchestra to Vermont Opera. This month, he stars in The Delta King’s Blues, a world-premiere production and the first full opera commissioned by the IN Series. It marks a joyous return for Lee, who last appeared with the company in its production of The Ordering of Moses three years ago.
Featuring music by Damien Geter and a libretto by Jarrod Lee, The Delta King’s Blues is billed as a one-act “blues opera” and an “immersive juke-joint experience,” performed by five vocalists and a small orchestra blending blues and classical musicians. The work honors legendary guitarist Robert Johnson and retells the fable, as Lee puts it, of Johnson “allegedly selling his soul to the devil for a career in the blues, and for notoriety and fame.”
Lee notes that The Delta King’s Blues “is so incredibly powerful because of its use of typical operatic devices, like motif, but also its use of popular idiom, like the blues.” It’s music “people gravitate to, which people understand, which you can pat your foot to.”
The running time is under an hour. “Opera can be very, very, very long,” he says. “And this is not that. But I will say that what is in that full hour is very, very rich.”
Asked whether the production contains any specifically queer elements — beyond the fact that composer Damien Geter, librettist Jarrod Lee, and IN Series artistic director Timothy Nelson are all members of the LGBTQ community — Lee pauses before answering.
“I can’t think of anything that is overtly or obviously gay in the show,” he says. “However, I think we all know that there’s never a moment [when] we’re together in any space, in any place, where there are humans, that the presence of queerness is not somewhere in the room.”
Lee places the IN Series within a “contemporary iteration of American opera,” one in which “well-trained Black composers and librettists, and women and people who have heretofore been sort of passed over and not given opportunities in this field, are telling stories…that we heretofore have not really heard. And they’re telling them in ways that we haven’t really considered.
“I adore working for this company,” he continues. “And you can’t always say that in the arts. Every company is not…challenging the boundaries. The IN Series — I will say it this way — is doing the Lord’s work when it comes to opera.”
The Delta King’s Blues runs this weekend at 340 Maple Dr. SW, on D.C.’s Waterfront. Additional performances the third weekend of December will be held in Baltimore at 2640 Space, 2640 St. Paul St. Tickets are $25 to $52, or $72 for reserved seating at cabaret-style tables with served food and drinks in D.C. Call 202-204-7763 or visit inseries.org.
Before it veers into a gay cautionary tale, Tadeo Pestaña Caro's stylishly low-key A Few Feet Away maintains an effortless neutrality about the sex and dating exploits of its soft-spoken hero Santiago.
Just twenty years old, Santiago is an architecture student fairly new to Buenos Aires, a fresh, cute twink from the province still gaining his footing in the city. That telling detail, revealed during Santi's first hookup in the film, partly explains why he relies on the dating app Grindr for making new friends.
That does not explain why Santiago simply can't stay off Grindr. He becomes practically consumed with scrolling through faceless, nameless profiles, in desperate search of who knows what exactly. Hiding behind his profile name "Seth," he's not just after sex, it seems, and he's not looking for love, as far as we're led to believe.
Every December, Grindr releases Grindr Unwrapped, an annual report drawing on data from its more than 15 million monthly users to reveal what LGBTQ people consider culturally relevant and how they behave on the app -- from pop-culture tastes to sexual habits, fetishes, and hookup styles.
"With Grindr Unwrapped, you get to see the real diversity in sexual activity, sexual desire, sexual appeal, and see some of the things that are more universal and some that differ culturally between different groups of gay and bisexual men and others using the app," says Zachary Zane, Grindr's sex-and-relationship expert.
Estranged cousins Mina (Renea S. Brown) and Sade (Hillary Jones) in a.k. payne's intimate drama Furlough's Paradise could hardly be more different in taste and temperament, but they still share more in common than just blood.
Despite wildly differing living circumstances, both women risk hoping for their version of a better future. They both harbor dreams that feel so big they have to keep them closely guarded, and both are haunted by choices they made that led them down uncertain paths.
Mina and Sade once shared a childhood, a sisterhood and friendship, bonds that frayed as their lives arced in seemingly opposite directions. Mina, the bright Ivy League grad, now lives in L.A. on a plump Google salary. Sade, of whom far less was expected, resides in a cell inside a West Virginia state prison.
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