SunServe LGBTQ+ Social Services, Mental Healthcare & Education
Recognizing that the entire LGBTQ community has the right to quality care, our mission is to provide critical life assistance and professional mental health services with an emphasis on economically disadvantaged, marginalized youth, adults and seniors in the greater South Florida metropolitan area.
As summer begins to wind down and the anticipation of a new school year starts to build, the importance of preparation and support for our community's children becomes crystal clear. For many families, the back-to-school season can be both exciting and stressful, especially when it comes to ensuring that their kids have everything they need to succeed in the classroom. This year, we are thrilled to share how the community came together in a beautiful way to lift this burden and spread joy to families in need.
A United Effort for a Brighter Future
We’re overjoyed to report that thanks to the incredible generosity of our sponsors, we were able to organize a massive back-to-school backpack drive, providing hundreds of children with the supplies and shoes they need to start the school year off on the right foot. The room was filled with backpacks of every color, bursting with notebooks, pencils, and other essentials, all ready to be handed out to smiling faces.
This effort would not have been possible without the support of our amazing sponsors. We are deeply grateful to the following organizations for their unwavering commitment to our community:
Touch A Heart Foundation: A beacon of hope, consistently stepping up to provide for those in need.
Wheelhouse IT: Ensuring our community stays connected and supported.
Emerald Elite Senior Homecare: Providing care and compassion, not just to seniors but extending their reach to the younger generation.
Miss Florida Pageant: Celebrating beauty with a purpose, empowering and giving back to the community.
Project Beauty: Spreading confidence and self-love, one backpack at a time.
Shake Shack: Feeding more than just appetites, feeding the hearts of our community.
Papa John’s Pizza: Serving up slices of hope and generosity.
Sunshine Cathedral: Bringing light and warmth to every corner of our community.
The Impact of Generosity
This backpack drive was more than just about school supplies—it was about showing families that they are not alone, that they have a community that cares. Each backpack, filled with carefully selected items, represents an act of kindness and a message to the children that their education and well-being are valued.
A Heartfelt Thank You
To all our sponsors, volunteers, and community members who supported this initiative, we say THANK YOU from the bottom of our hearts. Your kindness and dedication have made a real difference, and we couldn’t be prouder to have you as part of our SunServe family.
As these children head back to school with their new backpacks, they carry with them not just supplies, but also the knowledge that they are supported by a community that believes in them. That’s the kind of impact that lasts a lifetime.
Let’s continue to work together to create a brighter, more supportive future for everyone in our community. The success of this backpack drive is a testament to what we can achieve when we unite for a common cause.
Thank you again to Touch A Heart Foundation, Wheelhouse IT, Emerald Elite Senior Homecare, Miss Florida Pageant, Project Beauty, Shake Shack, Papa John’s Pizza, and Sunshine Cathedral for your incredible support. You are truly making a difference.
At SunServe, we take pride in our commitment to providing top-tier mental health services to our community. Our recent participation in the International Association for Social Work with Groups (IASWG) symposium in Madrid exemplifies our dedication and expertise. We're excited to share the experiences of our team members, Eric Spindelman, LMHC, and Michelle Santos, LMHC, who not only attended but also presented at this prestigious event.
Equalizing Activities in Therapy Groups
Eric and Michelle’s presentation focused on equalizing activities within therapy groups. Power dynamics can create challenges, especially for LGBTQ+ youth who often face marginalization. They shared strategies to address these imbalances, ensuring all group members have an equal voice. Their insights were met with recognition and support from the international mental health community.
Eric Spindelman: Insights and Experiences
Eric attended various presentations on current research, gaining valuable ideas for data collection and implementation. He plans to incorporate these strategies into our youth programs, enhancing our services. The symposium also provided an excellent networking platform, allowing Eric to explore potential collaborations. On a personal note, he enjoyed Madrid's culinary delights and explored the city, visiting places like Chueca, Madrid Zoo, and the Madrid Botanical Garden.
Michelle Santos: Professional Growth and Cultural Immersion
Michelle connected with various agencies and mental health professionals, fostering relationships for future collaborations. Her presentation on working with LGBTQIA youth was well-received, sparking engaging discussions. She found the symposium’s sessions and workshops highly educational. The stunning architecture and rich culture of Madrid added a unique charm to her experience, making her stay truly memorable.
A Proud Moment for SunServe
We couldn't be prouder of Eric and Michelle for their exemplary representation of SunServe at the IASWG symposium. Their dedication to improving the lives of LGBTQ+ youth and their passion for social work shone brightly on this international stage. It is an honor to have such talented professionals on our team.
At SunServe, our mission is to provide compassionate care to our community. Eric and Michelle's achievements underscore our commitment to this goal. Their participation in the IASWG symposium highlights our expertise and enhances our capacity to serve our clients with innovative approaches.
By: John Marler Director of Communications, SunServe
July 7th is celebrated as Global Forgiveness Day. These are great opportunities to remind ourselves of the importance of forgiveness, to value the forgiveness that others have offered us in the past, and to focus on forgiving those we may need to forgive—including ourselves.
Focusing on forgiveness is important for many reasons. We all know that holding onto anger hurts us more than it hurts the object of that anger. Unresolved anger can create health problems just as unmanaged stress can,1 and it robs us of happiness as well. Knowing this, however, doesn't always make the anger magically dissolve. It's sometimes really difficult to forgive.
Why Is Forgiveness So Difficult?
There are a few reasons that forgiveness in practice is much more challenging than forgiveness in theory. Some of the more common reasons (as well as counter-arguments) are:
They don't deserve it. We think the other person doesn't deserve our forgiveness. (They may not, but we deserve to be free of anger.)
The pain is still fresh. When we think about forgiving the other person, we are reminded of what they did, and we become angry all over again. (This reaction will become less intense over time as we work on accepting what happened. This can be a sign that we need to work on this more, however—again, for our own sake, not for theirs.)
We think forgiveness means approval. We think forgiving the other person is the same as saying what they did was okay, or that they are welcome to do it again. (This isn't true either. Forgiving means letting go of anger, and of a lack of acceptance of what happened. Forgiving does not mean condoning the behavior, and you can definitely forgive and take steps toward protecting yourself in the future. You can even let go of the relationship but still forgive.)
The Role of National Forgiveness Day and Similar Holidays
So why does it help to have a special day for forgiveness? We are free to forgive others anytime, and often the best time to do so is right when you realize that you're holding onto anger. However, there are times when it really helps to have a special day to focus on forgiveness. Here's why:
An official reminder. When we're holding onto anger, sometimes we don't realize when we've gotten to the point where we are ready to forgive. Having a special day when we are encouraged to look inward can help us to get to a place of being ready to forgive, or realize that we're already there.
Momentum from a group. It also helps to have the motivation and momentum to get past our personal obstacles to forgiveness and forgive already. Having a day focused on forgiveness, a day that everyone is encouraged to celebrate can provide motivation and momentum at the same time.
A fresh start for the holidays. With the holiday season approaching, we may see family and friends we haven't seen for a while; it's good to clear out any anger we may be holding onto so we can celebrate from a fresh and loving place.
What to Do on National Forgiveness Day
So how does one celebrate National Forgiveness Day or any day that we've decided to celebrate as our own forgiveness day? By forgiving anyone and everyone we may be angry with. (And again, if you are reading this on a day other than the official National Forgiveness Day, you absolutely can create your own "day of forgiveness" whenever it works for you.) Here are some more specific ideas:
Take a minute to think about anyone you may be angry with, even if that anger is not fresh. Then decide to let go.
If there is a lot to forgive, just let go of as much as you can for now, and work on it again later.
Forgive your parents if you're holding onto anger from your childhood.
Forgive people you grew up with if you had some childhood experiences you're still angry about.
Forgive your spouse or partner if you have any relationship baggage that you're holding onto. If it feels difficult to forgive because you're afraid that you'll open yourself up to getting hurt by them again, realize that the anger itself is hurting you, but you can take steps to change your relationship and the way you are treated in it.
Forgive yourself if you're feeling any self-directed anger for anything, such as goals you haven't met, promises to yourself you haven't fulfilled, or mistakes you've made in the past. Just let it all go!
If you are unable to get to a place where you can forgive someone or something from the past, and holding onto the associated pain and anger is affecting your wellbeing, you may want to consider working with a professional. Sometimes there are deeper issues to work through, and having the support of a professional can make the process much easier and quicker to move through.
How to Let Go and Forgive
Forgiveness can be freeing, but it's always easier said than done. The following forgiveness resources can help:
The Powerful Benefits of Forgiveness Forgiveness can be a real challenge at times. It can help to motivate yourself to go through the process by arming yourself with a clear understanding of why it's worth the effort. Learn what you'll get out of it when you forgive those who have hurt you.
How to Forgive Like so many things in life, forgiveness is easier said than done. Here are five strategies to help you to go through the journey from wanting to forgive and let go to actually do it!
NBC Out News Writes: The archdiocese told NBC News in a statement Monday that it has "a constitutional right to hire leaders who support the schools’ religious mission."
By Janelle Griffith
A gay guidance counselor is suing the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis for discrimination, alleging it fired her from a job at a high school because she's in a same-sex marriage.
Lynn Starkey, one of two gay guidance counselors who have accused the archdiocese of discrimination, names the church and Roncalli High School — the Catholic school where she worked for nearly 40 years until she was fired in May — in the lawsuit filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
Starkey alleges that the archdiocese and school discriminated against her on the basis of her sexual orientation, subjected her to a hostile work environment and retaliated against her after she filed complaints of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
She alleges that the environment at the school was also hostile toward homosexual students, faculty and staff.
"Starkey has suffered damages as a result of Defendants’ retaliatory actions, including but not limited to lost back pay, lost front pay, loss of future earning capacity, lost employer provided benefits, and emotional distress damages," the lawsuit states.
The archdiocese told NBC News in a statement Monday that it has "a constitutional right to hire leaders who support the schools’ religious mission."
"Catholic schools exist to communicate the Catholic faith to the next generation," the statement said. "To accomplish their mission, Catholic schools ask all teachers, administrators, and guidance counselors to uphold the Catholic faith by word and action, both inside and outside the classroom."
According to the archdiocese, Starkey "knowingly violated" her contract by entering into a same-sex marriage, "making clear that she disagrees with the Church's teaching on marriage and will not be able to uphold and model it for her students."
Starkey is the second Roncalli High School guidance counselor to raise discrimination complaints against the school and archdiocese.
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A judge signed the agreement after a three-year legal battle challenging the state's so-called bathroom bill, known as H.B.2, and the law that replaced it.
RALEIGH, N.C. — A federal judge approved a legal settlement Tuesday affirming transgender people's right to use restrooms matching their gender identity in many North Carolina public buildings.
The consent decree between the state's Democratic governor and transgender plaintiffs covers numerous state-owned buildings including facilities run by executive branch agencies that oversee the environment, transportation and Medicaid, among others. In return, the plaintiffs have agreed to drop pending legal action against the governor and other defendants.
The agreement was signed by Judge Thomas Schroeder after a three-year legal battle challenging North Carolina's so-called bathroom bill and the law that replaced it.
"The importance of this cannot be understated — it is about nothing less than the ability to enter public spaces as an equal member of society," said Lambda Legal lawyer Tara Borelli, who represents the plaintiffs. "Nationally, this decree sends an important signal that targeting transgender people for discrimination is unacceptable."
The agreement between the plaintiffs and Gov. Roy Cooper says nothing in the current state law can be interpreted to "prevent transgender people from lawfully using public facilities in accordance with their gender identity" in buildings controlled by the state's executive branch.
The agreement further says executive branch officials, such as the current and future governors, as well their employees at state agencies, are forbidden from using the current law "to bar, prohibit, block, deter, or impede any transgender individuals from using public facilities ... in accordance with the transgender individual's gender identity."
North Carolina's Republican legislative leaders, who passed the "bathroom bill" and its replacement, had opposed the consent decree.
The 2016 law, also known as H.B.2, required transgender people to use restrooms matching their birth certificates in state government buildings and other publicly owned structures including highway rest stops, schools and universities. While that requirement was later rescinded, a replacement law halts new local antidiscrimination ordinances until 2020.
Transgender plaintiffs who had challenged the original law amended their lawsuit to fight the replacement law, arguing that it continued to harm them by creating uncertainty over bathroom rules. They also challenged the moratorium on new local laws to protect LGBTQ people.
Joaquin Carcano, the lead plaintiff and a transgender University of North Carolina employee, hailed the judge's decision in a statement.
"After so many years of managing the anxiety of H.B.2 and fighting so hard, I am relieved that we finally have a court order to protect transgender people from being punished under these laws," he said.
Still, he said the current law's moratorium on new local anti-discrimination laws "remains devastating."
Schroeder had ruled in late 2018 that the replacement law couldn't be interpreted as preventing transgender people from using restrooms in line with their gender identity. Plaintiffs incorporated similar language into their consent decree. The mixed ruling last year, however, rejected some of the transgender people's arguments while letting other parts of the case proceed.
The consent decree was first proposed in late 2017 by the plaintiffs and Cooper, who had inherited a role as a defendant in the case from his predecessor, Republican Pat McCrory. McCrory had signed H.B.2 into law.
Saying the state is "welcoming to all people," Cooper spokesman Ford Porter said in an email Tuesday that: "Today's decision is an important step to putting the harmful impacts of H.B.2 in the rear view mirror for good."
Republican House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger, who intervened in the case as defendants, had urged the federal court to reject the consent decree. Their lawyers argued that the plaintiffs were using the latest version of the consent decree to essentially resurrect arguments already rejected by the court.
They also argued the agreement overstepped the proper role of the court because it "purports to bind North Carolina State officers and agencies, in perpetuity, to a temporary political settlement."
Addressing the legislative leaders' concerns in a written order Tuesday, Schroeder noted that nothing in the agreement limits the legislature's ability amend the replacement law "or pass any law it wishes."
Moore spokesman Joseph Kyzer said House lawmakers were reviewing the ruling and assessing options.
Bill D'Elia, a Berger spokesman, said the consent decree essentially confirms executive branch antidiscrimination policies instituted under a 2017 Cooper executive order, while also "putting this lawsuit to bed."
"Hopefully we can finally put this years-old issue behind us and move forward," he said in an email.
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Original Post: LINK LGBTQ NATION Writes: A year ago, he was sleeping on his sister's couch with an empty bank account. So what happened to make him the most successful gay hip-hop star of all time?
This week, 20-year-old rapper Lil Nas X pulled back the curtain on his life situation, providing some insight into how he went from a poor young person living in the Georgia projects to an out gay, record-breaking hip-hop star whose song has become Billboard’s longest running Number One track of all time.
In a recent tweet, Lil Nas X wrote, “Wow man last year i was sleeping on my sisters floor, had no money, struggling to get plays on my music, suffering from daily headaches, now i’m gay.”
Lil Nas X only recently gained notoriety after releasing “Old Town Road,” his musical collaboration with country music singer Billy Ray Cyrus. “Old Town Road” went on to break music records. Soon after releasing the song, Lil Nas X came out as gay, becoming the only artist to come out while having a number one hit record, his June 2019 album, 7.
But he came from humbler beginnings. Lil Nas X (birth name Montero Lamar Hill) was born in the little town of Lithia Springs — population 15,491 — outside of Atlanta, Georgia. After his parents divorced at age six, he was raised by his mother and grandmother in the Bankhead Courts housing projects.
The projects were surrounded by warehouses and industrial plants. The projects had chronic issues of backing-up sewage and were reportedly so dangerous that mailmen had to walk with police escorts. Most of the residents were under the age of 19 in families headed by women. During this time, he knew many people whose loved ones had been murdered.
Three years later, at age nine, he and his little brother moved in with his father in Austell, Georgia, a town of 7,512 people about 17 miles west of Atlanta.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Nas said, “I remember not wanting to go. I didn’t want to leave what I was used to. But it was better for me. There’s so much shit going on in Atlanta — if I would have stayed there, I would have fallen in with the wrong crowd.”
He says he barely speaks with his mother and hasn’t spoken with her since “Old Town Road” came out.
Rolling Stone writes:
Nas was a bright kid, a self-described class clown, but one who took schoolwork seriously. He started playing trumpet in fourth grade, and by junior high he was good enough to make first chair. But he gave it up when he started high school because he “didn’t want to look lame.” “I wish I would have stayed in it,” he says….
As Nas started high school, his social life migrated almost entirely online…. He got deep into Twitter, making friends and posting memes and jokes across several different accounts … to build a following, so he’d have a platform to promote himself someday. At first he tried his hand at comedy, posting goofy videos to Facebook and Vine.
He eventually started studying computer science at the University of West Georgia. The summer after his freshman year, he experimented with making music and decided to drop out after a song of his called “Shame” gained some popularity on SoundCloud.
Rolling Stone reports:
He crashed at his sister’s house and lived off the money he’d saved working as a cashier at Zaxby’s, a Georgia chicken chain, and as an attendant at Six Flags, where he supervised kids’ rides like Yosemite Sam’s Wacky Wagons. He didn’t have a car or even a driver’s license. “There was no point in a license,” he says, “ ’cause when am I gonna have a car?”
After failing to gain traction with his new musical experiments, he discovered a catchy banjo sample on YouTube, paid its creator $30 and wrote “Old Town Road,” a song about being a loner cowboy. He created it specifically with an eye towards going viral, writing easy-to-remember lyrics and promoting it by retweeting cheesy cowboy and horse images on Twitter.
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For these musicians, transitioning can mean risking their careers — and their art.
AUSTIN, Tex. — Holding his whiskey in one hand and his Stetson in the other, the opera’s hero — a tough stagecoach driver — offered an unhappy barmaid some advice in a strong, clear tenor voice.
“You could be anything,” sang the tenor, Holden Madagame.
He should know. Mr. Madagame, 28, is part of a new wave of transgender opera singers. Trained as a mezzo-soprano, he risked his singing career when he transitioned several years ago and began taking testosterone, which lowers and alters the voice — a voice he had spent years fine-tuning for opera, where success is measured in the subtlest of gradations.
“A couple of my singer friends were sort of like, you’re ruining your career, you’re ruining your life, the voice is everything,” he recalled recently. “And I thought, it’s not. I would rather enjoy my life, and pursue singing if it happens. I didn’t know if I’d be able to.”
It turned out that he could. Now he is one of several transgender singers who are beginning to make their mark in the tradition-bound world of opera. Some, like him, found new voices, either with the help of hormones or through retraining. Others kept the voices they had built their careers on — even if it meant continuing to perform in the gender they had left behind. Now some are getting higher-profile roles — and upending preconceptions about voice and gender.
Opera itself is beginning to change: The most-produced new opera in North America in some recent seasons has been “As One,” a transgender coming-of-age story. This is happening as transgender rights are being debated by sports officials, in state legislaturesand in the armed forces, where President Trump moved to ban transgender troops from serving.
As Mr. Madagame was singing in Austin this spring, a transgender woman, Lucia Lucas, was 450 miles north, at the Tulsa Opera in Oklahoma, rehearsing the title role in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Ms. Lucas retained her powerful low baritone voice after her transition: Estrogen does not raise the voice the way testosterone lowers it.
“It would be great if I could just take estrogen and wake up and sing Brünnhilde,” she said. “It doesn’t work like that.”
In some respects, this generation of transgender singers is adding a new wrinkle to a very old tradition: Opera has been gender fluid since its beginnings. The earliest operas had boys’ roles sung by female sopranos, and both female and male roles were sometimes sung by castrati — men who were castrated before puberty to preserve their high voices.
When that practice ended, the high male roles they had sung were often taken by women. And many great composers, including Mozart and Strauss, wrote “trouser roles,” male parts created for women to sing. One of the most successful European transgender opera singers is Adrian Angelico, a 35-year-old Norwegian who kept his mezzo-soprano voice after transitioning in 2016, becoming one of the few men specializing in trouser roles.
We spent time with four of the artists at the forefront of this new wave.
At first, testosterone did not seem like an option.
Mr. Madagame, who was assigned female at birth, moved to Berlin after graduating from the University of Michigan, where he had studied singing, but things were not working out as planned.
“I got massively depressed. I just couldn’t sing,” he recalled. “And I kind of knew that it was about gender, but I didn’t want to admit it.”
By that point, he had put in years of hard work becoming a mezzo-soprano. A whole new voice could jeopardize it.
“Frankly, I did not have any experience with what would happen,” said Stephen West, one of his voice professors at Michigan, who remembered him as an exceptional mezzo.
Opera singers rely on their unamplified voices for their livelihoods, and they spend years perfecting their techniques — so they tend to be wary of anything that might strain or damage their voices. But Mr. Madagame had grown so unhappy that he decided to take the leap into the unknown.
“I decided that if I’m not singing, and the only reason that I’m not taking testosterone is that I want to sing, then I should just take testosterone,” he said.
After the first few shots, he recalled, the timbre of his voice — its overall color and resonance — began to change. “At first, it’s not the actual pitches that are dropping,” he said, “but it’s like the overtones are lowering.”
Then came a period when his voice grew unsettled: “I had no singing voice — I had, like, an octave range,” he recalled. “It was terrifying. I thought, What if it stays like this?”
He felt better emotionally, but grew concerned when he still had trouble singing after the first few months. He began to wonder if he would be able to work again.
“I have no idea: Nobody knows,” he recalled thinking. “So, yeah. Terrifying.”
He returned to some of the easy Italian arias he had learned as a teenager, not too hard and not too high. But they were suddenly not so easy.
“They teach you a lot just by singing them,” he said. “I thought, Well, my voice just needs to be retrained to do these things. But at first I couldn’t even sing those.”
Stephanie Weiss, a voice teacher with a private studio, coached him as his voice settled, and saw him through tough early moments when his voice would crack. Mr. Madagame had a breakthrough while working on a Mozart aria. He was having trouble, as many young tenors do, gracefully reaching the high notes, Ms. Weiss remembered, so she gave him a few tips — including which vowels to hold as his voice climbed into his upper range.
Something clicked.
“He said, ‘Oh my God, I never thought I could make that sound,’” Ms. Weiss recalled.
It helped, she added, that Mr. Madagame had already developed a solid technique. “Now,” she said, “he really has found his voice — in every way.”
Soon Mr. Madagame, who now lives in Görlitz, a German town on the Polish border, began getting small roles with small companies in Germany and the United Kingdom. He was accepted by the Glyndebourne Academy, a program of the prestigious Glyndebourne Festival in England.
He also became an activist, working to educate people about transgender issues. His website includes essays on “Why is it rude to ask a trans* person what their birth name was?” and “The FAQ to end all FAQs,” which includes a series of “questions not to ask but I’ll answer anyway,” including a section explaining which parts of his anatomy he has changed, and which he has not.
He dreams of singing Lensky, the doomed poet in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” but he is mostly working now on smaller character tenor parts, not starring roles. “I’m 5-foot-2,” he noted — another casting challenge.
But it was a lead role that brought him to Austin. He starred in “Good Country,” an opera by the composer Keith Allegretti and the librettist Cecelia Raker that was based on the true story of Charley Parkhurst, a stagecoach driver who lived as a man but was discovered, after his death in 1879, to have been born a woman.
They wrote the part for a transgender singer — and after they cast Mr. Madagame, they tailored it with his voice in mind.
She entered the rehearsal room in her street clothes — striped top, silver flats, hair pulled back in a ponytail, a little lipstick on — and began singing one of the most toxically masculine characters in opera: the title role in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”
Mozart wrote a number of male roles for women to sing. Don Giovanni is not one of them. But as her booming, powerful baritone ricocheted off the walls, Ms. Lucas, 38, became the character — plotting his next seductions with relish and menace.
Her performances in Tulsa made headlines, and were the latest indication that her career was more than just getting back on track after she risked it by transitioning to female while working as a baritone for an opera company in Karlsruhe, Germany.
“It was always a question of, So, when is my career going to be done, so that I can transition?” she recalled in a recent interview in New York, explaining that she had felt disconnected from her birth gender since her childhood in Sacramento. “I never thought that they would coexist.”
But in 2013, she decided not to put off her transition any longer. She came out at the annual opera ball in Karlsruhe: Her wife, also a singer, wore a tuxedo, and Ms. Lucas wore a gown.
The company was initially supportive. “It was a good case study: Can somebody who is trans have a career in opera?” Ms. Lucas said. “I thought, Can I have a career after if I only change one little thing? It’s actually not something about the stage, it’s something personal. Because I’m going to continue singing baritone; I’m going to continue playing men on stage.” Since hormones would not alter her voice, and retraining as a contralto seemed impractical, she remained a baritone. Now the vast majority of her stage roles are male — a gender she was uncomfortable with in life. But she said she had made peace with it.
“I’ll just go and put a beard on,” Ms. Lucas said, noting that she impersonates all kinds of characters onstage. “Clearly it is a disguise. It’s not bringing you back to an old life.”
When she had facial feminization surgery, she did not let her doctor do anything to her sinus cavity, nose or Adam’s apple.
“As much as I was putting my transition in front of my career,’’ she said, “I didn’t want him messing with anything that would mess with my voice.”
But after a while, her contract in Karlsruhe was not renewed, and she did not get called to auditions elsewhere that she would have expected in the past.
She grew more determined.
“Clearly my transition was important: It was more important than my career,” she said. “But now that I’ve done my transition, basically everything that I want to do, I’m like, Oh, no, I do love my career. I do want to keep my career. I’m going to fight for my career now.”
Her path to the Tulsa Opera began with an email from Tobias Picker, its artistic director and a composer who has written operas for the Metropolitan Opera and other major companies.
Mr. Picker was planning to write an opera based on “The Danish Girl,” David Ebershoff’s novel about one of the first people to attempt sex reassignment surgery, and he was looking for a transgender singer to appear in it. The idea appealed to Ms. Lucas: getting to premiere a new work by an important composer in which she would get to play a trans character.
But when Ms. Lucas came to New York to audition, and sang an aria from Verdi’s “Otello,” Mr. Picker decided to hire her for something much sooner.
“The Verdi was so astonishing that I thought, Well, it’s time to start casting ‘Don Giovanni’ anyway — so I asked her to do it,” Mr. Picker said.
Her appearance in Tulsa was an event. When an excerpt from a documentary that is being made about her was screened at a local art house, the Circle Cinema, Ms. Lucas told the audience that much of her work aimed to show people that being trans was not a big deal.
“I’m trying to show that being trans is not the story,” she told the crowd. “It’s sort of like anti-advocacy.”
“ID?” a transgender character asks a police officer in “Stonewall,” a new opera about the raid that helped spur the modern gay rights movement.
“I’d love to have an ID!” the character continues. “But the powers that be won’t give me one — at least not one that represents me.”
The line resonated with Liz Bouk, the mezzo-soprano singing it. Mr. Bouk is a transgender man who had only recently gotten a new driver’s license listing his sex as male.
“I felt like a teenage boy when I got that driver’s license,” he said. “After getting the driver’s license I went out and bought a pickup truck and learned how to drive stick shift.”
But Mr. Bouk’s transition, which came just as a hard-won career as a mezzo was finally beginning to blossom, involved difficult trade-offs. As much as he has sometimes longed to take hormones, he fears what they could do to his voice. So he decided to forgo them, and to keep playing what he calls “fiery women” and trouser roles on stage.
“If I’m working, if I’m singing,” he said, “can I stand the dysphoria of being in the wrong body, and being misgendered at the grocery store, or by people I don’t know?”
He changed his name from Elizabeth Anna to Liz (friends call him “Mr. Liz”) but put off a future change, possibly to John, so as not to confuse casting directors. He wears his blond hair long, but not as long as he used to. And he brings two head shots to auditions: one in a suit, labeled “Liz Bouk as himself,” and one in a dress, labeled “head shot for female roles.”
Since coming out as a man, he said, and feeling more at peace, his voice has improved. He has been working on shows about his journey. And he keeps getting work — and good reviews. But he sometimes has moments of yearning offstage, when he looks in the mirror.
“It would be great,” he said, “if my outsides matched my insides.”
“Please rise and remove your caps for our national anthem,” the announcer said shortly before the start of a 2015 Oakland A’s baseball game, “as performed by San Francisco Conservatory of Music graduate Breanna Sinclairé.”
Ms. Sinclairé raised a microphone and became what is believed to be the first transgender woman to sing the anthem at a major league game.
It made news around the world, and showed how far she had come since her darkest days, when she was briefly homeless and subjected to attacks on the streets of New York.
Ms. Sinclairé said that it was her earliest conviction that she did not feel comfortable in her body. That feeling carried into her singing, too.
“People kept pushing me to be the tenor, because I was tall,” Ms. Sinclairé said. “And I’m like, I don’t want to be no damn hero! I want to be the damsel in distress!”
After an unhappy stint at a bible college in Canada, she was admitted to the California Institute of the Arts — and saved enough money cutting grass to buy a Greyhound bus ticket to make the trip.
She decided to transition in her senior year at CalArts, and one of her teachers, Kate Conklin, encouraged her to try singing mezzo-soprano repertoire.
“We were working with what was already there.” Ms. Conklin said, noting that Ms. Sinclairé could already sing quite high.
Next came San Francisco, and its conservatory.
“We had never had anyone come in and audition for us who was transitioning,” said Ruby Pleasure, her teacher there. “And it was obvious that she was a diamond in the rough.”
Last New Year’s Eve, she appeared with the San Francisco Symphony. She continues to study, and is expanding into higher soprano roles. Next spring she will return to Canada to sing in an opera at the Against the Grain Theater in Toronto.
“I’m going to be in Toronto as my true self,” she said. “Singing soprano.”
BY: Michael Cooper
Michael Cooper covers classical music and dance. He was previously a national correspondent; a political reporter covering presidential campaigns; and a metro reporter covering the police, City Hall and Albany.
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