The one change that worked: I abandoned my cynicism – and joined Europe’s biggest gay choir

I’ve sung at the Royal Albert Hall, made friends with people I would otherwise never have met and felt the power of being seen and heard for who I really am

It is April 2022 and I am standing in the middle of the stage at Cadogan Hall in London. As the pianist plays a plucky staccato intro, it dawns on me that I am about to sing the West Side Story classic I Feel Pretty, with choreography, in front of a packed audience, alongside 200 gay men.

This was my first time performing with the London Gay Men’s Chorus (LGMC) – Europe’s largest gay choir. I first saw them perform years earlier in Soho, where they sang Bridge Over Troubled Water at a vigil for the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida in 2016. After making it through the pandemic, the chorus’s years-long waiting list and months of rehearsals, I was under the bright stage lights, trying to remember the first line of the song and thinking: “what have I got myself into?”