Pretty soon we found ourselves unable to dig out of the mountain of debt that we are in.” “We had a couple of concerts that didn’t sell well, we lost some subscribers and we made some bad financial decisions. “We are in a world of hurt, and we are struggling to stay alive,” Holzer said. The group’s deficit, Holzer said, has grown to about $400,000. Expenses for 2017 were about $1.59 million, sending the chorus into the red. Tax filings, however, show total revenue of about $1.36 million in 2017, a 21% decrease from the previous year. The bad press accelerated the troubled finances of the group, which had expanded staff and increased its annual budget to about $2 million. By the end of February, executive director Jonathan Weedman’s contract had not been renewed, Duran had stepped aside as board chairman and several high-profile board members resigned, including prominent LGBTQ activist and philanthropist Ariadne Getty. Some chorus members protested the handling of the complaints and accused leadership of suppressing allegations for months, if not years. The trouble became public in February when the allegations of inappropriate touching and comments by Duran were reported in The Times and elsewhere. “I could sing my truth, I could live out loud.” “For the first time, I was in a group of people where I didn’t have to pretend to be somebody else,” Hayashi recalled during a recent GMCLA rehearsal at First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. The first concert he performed in was titled “Songs of Pride and Joy.”
He was 42.Īlone, adrift and shunned by his former friends, Hayashi found his way to the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, the oldest LGBTQ arts organization in the city.
Seven years later, when he still secretly yearned for relationships with men, he made the painful decision to leave the ministry and come out. Hayashi joined the staff and traveled the world as a speaker for the cause. In graduate school at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Hayashi met a man who had started a Christian ministry that specialized in reparative therapy. They guided him toward the church choir, and there he stayed, cultivating a life led in service of God. That made his parents nervous, so when he was 6 and they discovered his singing voice, they were relieved.
As a child, Hayashi was artistic, he cried easily and he gravitated toward “shiny, pretty things.” Hayashi was not like other men he knew at church, and he certainly wasn’t like his older brother, whom he considered the embodiment of testosterone. Gary Hayashi thought that if he could just get close enough to God, he would be cured.