Rich joined the HMC Board of Directors in July 2020.
HMC has been in my blood since 2003. I joined as a singing member and found the best friends of my life. I was certainly young and had just come out as gay and was certainly in a low place. HMC became my family and I’m so very thankful to be a part of the board and help shape the future of this amazing organization.
What song makes you happy?
All of the songs from naked man or from the charts “Rise Up” by Andra Day
What are you looking forward to the most after the pandemic?
Seeing people I haven’t seen in over a year and TRAVEL!!
Heartland Men’s Chorus Explores Love, Before And After the Holocaust
/in PressLaura Spencer | KCUR
In the 1920′s and into the early 1930′s, there was a thriving gay culture in Europe, especially in Berlin. But, with the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, that all changed.
The Heartland Men’s Chorus explores the music of the period, and a tale of two lovers sent to concentration camps – and their different fates – in a program called “Falling In Love Again.”
Listen to interview highlights online
The two sides of falling in love with Heartland Men’s Chorus
/in PressKellie Houx | KC Studio
Dr. Joe Nadeau, artistic director of Heartland Men’s Chorus since 1998, calls Falling in Love Again a dramatic presentation. “It’s more of an event than a concert. Many people think of the history of the gay civil rights movement with the Stonewall riots in 1969 or Harvey Milk in 1978. Decades before in Berlin, Paris and London, there was a thriving gay community. This concert offers two parts; first that pre-1933 gay world of Berlin with the bawdy, gender-bending world with some very suggestive material that demonstrates the excitement before the Holocaust. Then in 1933, it’s like the whole gay community got shut down. That will be the second half of the show. It will be looking at reclaiming and finding love in your life.” Nadeau says the first half will have music from shows such as Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret and Three Penny Opera. Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling in Love Again” will be part of the show as will “The Lavender Song” (“Das Lila Lied”), a cabaret song written in 1920 that is often considered one of the first gay anthems.
Act II features the Midwest premiere of Jake Heggie’s For a Look or a Touch, a stirring tale of two lovers sent to the Nazi concentration camps — one who is exterminated and one who lives to recount a love lost and unspoken. Guest baritone Morgan Smith and actor Kip Niven join HMC to present this moving tribute to the power of love in the midst of devastating circumstances. Two Berlin teens, Manfred Lewin and Gad Beck, loved each other before Lewin and his family were arrested by the Nazis. Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer took Lewin’s entries in the tiny journal he wrote as a gift to Beck. Lewin and his family died in Auschwitz; Beck survived and lived in Berlin until his death in late June 2012 at the age of 88. In Look, cast as a staged song-cycle, Lewin’s ghost, sung by Smith, forever 19, visits the elderly Beck, played by Niven, asking him to revisit memories he’s kept buried. Lewin’s songs are interspersed with Beck’s spoken narration.
Niven has been a fan of the Heartland Men’s Chorus for years. He also met Nadeau when Nadeau was the music director at his daughter’s middle school. “We became friends. Joe knew I was an actor and that I started a group called E.A.R.Th (Equity Actors’ Readers’ Theatre). We rehearsed next door to the Women’s Chorus, which Joe directs, and he reached out to me in August of last year. Any actor would be interested in this, but it has particular resonance for me. I am liberal in my politics, particularly social issues. When people wield hatred against those who are not alike, it becomes a touch point for me.”
Niven says he looks forward to giving voice to Beck and his plight for Kansas City audiences. “Leading to World War II, Berlin was in its heyday of indulgence and then the world turned on itself to be one of the most terrifying times in history. Certainly being a Jew, gay, or gypsy was not tolerated. Not quite a direct parallel, but the journal of Lewin to Beck personalizes a greater story. It’s similar to those who read Anne Frank. It’s difficult to wrap your mind around 6 million people when the story can be brought closer with two people or a family like the Franks. It seems more approachable to understand the loss, pain and survivor guilt.”
Niven says he wants audiences to listen to the story and hear the humanity. “People were indeed slaughtered for their uniqueness.” Nadeau saw the first performance of For a Look in Seattle. “It’s a life-changing concert with healing and power. We are offering the Kansas City premiere that takes our vision to heart. We aim to provide enlightening and empowering stage. People will learn of Paragraph 175 which became part of the Nazi code which allowed persecution for an inappropriate look or touch. The chorus comes in about a third the way in as victims during the Holocaust. It’s quite amazing. When I experienced the show, the audience didn’t know what to do at the end. There was this silence because it’s so heart-wrenching.”
The estimates of gays killed is somewhere around 15,000. “When people were released, it was considered a crime and people who were gay just didn’t talk about it,” Nadeau says. “As society becomes more diverse and accepting, the lesson we learn from history, as long as there is another group called they or them and whether those lines are divided because of the color of their skin, gender, religion, sexuality or more, whatever that definition is, we need to not repeat what the Germans did to the Jews, the gays and other minorities to dehumanize them. It’s not about them, but about us and that we must respect differences and honor our sameness.”
In conjunction with Falling in Love Again, HMC co-presents the art exhibit Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945, on loan from the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Admission is free and the exhibit will be open to the public runs through April 10. The display will be in the Dean’s Gallery, 800 E. 51st, at Miller Nichols Library on the University of Missouri-Kansas City. This exhibit is presented by The University of Missouri-Kansas City in partnership with The Kansas City Museum. The exhibition is sponsored by the UMKC Division of Diversity, Access and Equality, and the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America.
Nazi persecution of homosexuals focus of traveling exhibit at UMKC
/in PressBarbara Bayer | Kansas City Jewish Chronicle
Courtesy Schwules Museum, Berlin: ‘Solidarity.’ Richard Grune lithograph from a limited edition series ‘Passion des XX Jahrhunderts’ (Passion of the 20th Century). Grune was prosecuted under Paragraph 175 and from 1937 until liberation in 1945 was incarcerated in concentration camps. In 1947 he produced a series of etchings detailing what he witnessed in the camps. Grune died in 1983.
When the Holocaust comes to mind, many people Jewish and non-Jewish alike, often forget that the Jews were not the only people persecuted by the Nazis. The persecution of the homosexual community is the theme of a traveling exhibition from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, entitled “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945” hosted by the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The free exhibition opened Feb. 16 and continues through April 10 in the Dean’s Gallery of the Miller Nichols Library.
The exhibition is being co-presented by the UMKC Division of Diversity, Access and Equity, in partnership with the Kansas City Museum and in conjunction with Heartland Men’s Chorus’ spring concert, “Falling in Love Again,” March 23-24 at the Folly Theater. It is also a project of GLAMA: the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America, a collecting partnership of the Kansas City Museum and the LaBudde Special Collections Department of the UMKC Libraries.
“Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933–1945” examines the Nazi regime’s attempt to eradicate homosexuality, which left thousands dead and shattered the lives of many more.
From 1933-1945, Germany’s National Socialist government attempted to root out those who did not fit its idealistic model of a “master Aryan race.” Jews were the primary victims and 6 million were murdered in the Holocaust. Millions of others were persecuted for racial and political reasons, including homosexuals. Visitors to this informational exhibition will learn about the Nazis’ attempt to wipe out homosexuality and terrorize German gay men into social conformity with arrests, convictions and incarcerations of tens of thousands of men in prisons and concentration camps.
Rick Fisher, the executive director of the Heartland Men’s Chorus, said the exhibit was brought to Kansas City as an educational resource for the community that ties into HMC’s upcoming concert “Falling in Love Again.” The program includes the Midwest premiere of the Jake Heggie opera “For a Look or a Touch,” which is based on the journal of Manfred Lewin that is housed at the USHMM.
“The journal tells the story of two gay lovers separated by the Holocaust as one was sent to the camps and exterminated. We see the exhibit as an opportunity for our community to learn about this often overlooked chapter of gay history in greater detail,” Fisher said.
Christopher Leitch, director of the Kansas City Museum at Corinthian Hall, said the museum became involved at the suggestion of HMC Artistic Director Dr. Joseph Nadeau.
“He had seen the exhibition and immediately saw the relevance in presenting it concurrently with the concert. He contacted GLAMA: the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America, which is a partnership of the UMKC Libraries and the Kansas City Museum. Stuart Hinds of UMKC and I had seen the exhibit at the USHMM in Washington and we agreed on the spot it would be good for our museum,” Leitch said.
UMKC’s Hinds, who is director of Special Collections, added that he thinks this exhibit tells a story unfamiliar to the majority of the university’s student population, and it provides an excellent opportunity for the library to enhance their educational experience in an unexpected and engaging manner.
“I serve as co-faculty adviser to Pride Alliance, our LGBTQ student association, and as a result I am privy to first-hand accounts of discrimination and intolerance they encounter, not only on campus but in the community as well. Members of the majority communities may have the impression that all is ‘hunky-dory’ for oppressed minority groups — gays are on TV, after all — but, as we know, this is not the case. Reminding visitors of how easily that oppression can expand and encompass entire populations is critical to its prevention in the future,” Hinds said.
Museum Director Leitch said it was important for the university and the museum specifically, to co-sponsor this exhibit because both are interested in important chapters of 20th-century history.
“We encourage all students and citizens to be better informed about the world, and the community, we all live in. And of course GLAMA is interested in the untold stories of marginalized LGBT persons across time and around the world. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a stellar reputation for scholarship and accuracy, and we all knew that working with them we would be presenting the best possible exhibit. There is a piercing honesty in all they do — bearing witness to such depraved truths is not easy, or comfortable. But if, as educators, we want to have a better world, where these things cannot be allowed to happen again, then we have to participate in exposing the deeds of the Nazis in all their horror and degradation,” Leitch said.
HMC’s Fisher hopes the exhibit gives those who see it a sense of history and reminds people to never forget the horrors of the past.
“Although great strides have been made toward LGBT acceptance and rights in Western countries, and are being made in the USA, there still is great persecution and atrocities being committed against our people around the world. We tell our stories and sing so that one day, we all may be free,” Fisher said.
The exhibition will be supplemented with special “brown bag” film viewings. “Bent,” the 1997 film adaptation of the Tony-award winning Broadway play about a gay couple imprisoned in a concentration camp, will be shown at noon March 6 in the Miller Nichols Library iX Theatre. The documentary film “Paragraph 175,” which shares the stories of individuals who were persecuted because of the law, will be shown in the same location at noon March 13. Brief discussions will be held after each film.
Visit kansascitymuseum.org/persecution for additional details and programming.