Growing up in a time of oppression for the 2SLGBTQ community, trumpet player Shaun Brodie grew used to living a lie. He had girlfriends. He stuffed his queer reality away, refusing to acknowledge it.
“You know about gay because [of the phrase] ‘Oh, that’s so gay,’ or somebody called you a ‘faggot’ on the playground; you don’t want to be connected to that. It’s a terrifying thing to think, ‘This is what I think I might be, but everything I hear about it is bad and negative and there’s nobody saying anything good about it.’”
In the meantime, the world was dealing with the AIDS crisis; growing up, Brodie was told it was a gay disease.
“That’s the last thing I ever wanted, for that to be me,” he says.
But things have changed. June is Pride Month. People are aware. Brodie is the artistic director of Toronto-based chamber-pop ensemble Queer Songbook Orchestra (QSO), who sing a variety of songs through a queer lens, and who are performing in town on June 22 (their debut album, Anthems and Icons, came out on June 15). It’s a bit of a homecoming, in a way, as Brodie’s coming-out story has a Victoria connection; his first experience in the 2SLGBTQ community was at a Victoria gay bar, with friends from UVic.
“Walking into a gay bar’s a totally cathartic experience,” says Brodie. “It’s this territory that I was always so terrified of. Setting foot in it—it’s a certain kind of declaration.”
At the time, he wasn’t out to the friends he was with.
“I kind of felt undercover,” he says, “but I knew I had to come out. It was sort of my first peek into what that world might look like.”
After working as a freelance musician and toying with the idea of going to journalism school, he began working with QSO, who currently has a call out to fans to send them their personal stories around queer experience that are connected to a song that means something to them.
“We incorporate them into our show,” he says, adding that the stories make for a much more intimate show. “This music has been a part of your life. Queerness has been part of your life all along. I hope people come away from it seeing that queerness is just part of life.”
For Brodie, alterity and queerness do not intertwine.
“It’s not an other; it’s just part of it, which… we don’t hammer anybody over the head with that in our shows, but it’s there,” he says. “I kind of hope people walk away from it with that.”
Queer Songbook Orchestra
8 pm Friday, June 22
$35, Metro Studio Theatre
intrepidtheatre.com/shows/songs-of-resilience