A Film & Theatre Cruise on the “Crystal Serenity” will be calling here next year on May 2nd. The ship will feature live performances and movie screenings on a trip from Los Angeles to New York.

Members of the chorus will perform several times and meet guests on the 17-day spring sailing aboard the Crystal Serenity. Actresses Tippi Hedrin (“The Birds”) and Kate Burton (“Grey’s Anatomy”), film lecturer Drew Casper, Center Theatre Group artistic director Michael Ritchie and others are scheduled to be part of programme too.

Amongst the “others” will be the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles (GMCLA), a fifty member strong openly male homosexual singing group that was formed July 12 1979.

In February 1998 a cruise ship (the ‘Leeward’) was banned from docking in Grand Cayman because it was carrying homosexual holidaymakers. The government of the day said there was “no guarantee the group would uphold appropriate standards of behavior.”

Last year, the Cayman Ministers Association (CMA) was outraged when in August (2010) the Atlantis Gay Cruise Lines made a scheduled stop here. The ministers in the past have staged demonstrations against gay passengers making controversial headlines over the world.

We contacted Rev. Nicholas Sykes, Secretary of the CMA and told him about the cruise and the GMCLA asking for a comment. He was not forthcoming except that he would be bringing it up at a future meeting of the CMA.

We have been unable to find out how many members of the Gay Choir will be visiting but as they will be performing several times during the cruise it should be the majority of the chorus.

The GMCLA website says, “While public understanding of gay life has evolved much since 1979, there is still fierce resistance to lasting change by opponents to LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans gender) equality. And the road to today has not always been easy. Through the height of the AIDS crisis, the Chorus lost over 150 members. Only 12 original members remain. As a result, GMCLA has a deep history of service within the LGBT community, singing at countless memorials, making and commissioning music that helps the community to mourn, to celebrate, to dream, and to prepare for victory.”

GMCLA was the first openly gay chorus to tour South America (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile) in 2006, performing at some of the continent’s most revered theatres and concert venues. Repertoire included North American and European classical and popular music from Bacharach to Verdi, as well as new works commissioned for the tour by Daniel Catán, Rosephanye Powell, and Daniel Alfonso. New music for the Tour was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Irvine Foundation, and Los Angeles County Arts Commission. In each of the four countries, the Chorus raised money for LGBT and HIV organizations, as well as helping to start the first gay chorus in South America, to be based in Rio de Janeiro.

Each year the Chorus prepares three main concerts, each performed four times in the historic landmark Alex Theatre, Glendale, California, and has performed over 100 times on the Alex stage since 1994, more than any other musical group in the theater’s history.

It will be interesting if the CMA do have anything negative to say about this.