I'd heard this album only once before in passing. Now, as the plane careened above the great city, I listened more carefully. It was during these stellar moments I began to fully understand something that had somewhat eluded me in earlier times: the controversial concept of a gay culture.

Doubtlessly, I'd watched such gay culture grow beyond all expectations in modern literature. And, no doubt, I'd long been advised of gay sensibilities in the arts. What could be said our great divas—the strong goddesses of song and screen? What were they communicating? I'd scratched my head in wonder as gay cloggers out of Atlanta performed for appreciative boondocks rednecks. But male choruses? Other cities, large and small, I knew, were starting them up too. A long-time acquaintance had begun practicing for his city's Christmas concert.

Now on the plane, however, this idea of the primacy of Gaydom's artistic sensibilities became as clear as a bell, thanks to this New York City Gay Men's Chorus album. Newspapers across the globe had told how the Chorus —and groups like it—were reviving the 19th century male choral tradition. I hadn't expected that gay pride, a term snubbed by some, would strike me with such brute force through—of all venues—a male chorus.

The "stout-hearted" militarism of conventional male choruses is mercifully absent in this album. A fresh new sort of masculinity soars forth: tender, strong, vulnerable, self-assured, nurturing and honest. Listening as my plane circled I had visions of angelic men I knew, men made mighty in the face of cruel death, helpful to friends and strangers in the midst of what was then a new, extreme crisis.

I thought of Walt Whitman who'd called himself Manhattan's native son. I thought of male nurses bending close—as Whitman did—holding and kissing the dying, witnesses to their last breaths. I thought of a young man I'd met on Big Apple streets hurrying to deliver food to a person stricken. I thought of men cheerful in pain, their hearts schooled to bear the worst and walking toward it with only their courage and their candor intact.

The day before I'd watched while a person frail with AIDS had gratefully tried on a full-length overcoat brought him by a friend, one that would protect him against the coming winter. Tears filled my eyes as New York's finest chorus celebrated not only the joys of living in the nation's grandest cultural center, but the grandeur of simple, loving acts performed as well.

This choral celebration emerges at the start of Side Two, in a song—Sometimes When We Touch-- by Barry Mann, with lyrics by Anthony Burgess. The song's arrangement, by Larry Moore has been expertly orchestrated by Mark Riese.

Sometimes When We Touch is one of the truer expressions of love, and the New York Gay Men's Chorus does it best. Burgess' lyrics speak not only of love's peace and love's pleasures, but also of human insecurities through which, nevertheless, some "tenderness survives".

"I want to hold you till I die…I want to hold you till the fear in me subsides."

Love, if it is to grow, must ask the right questions : "And who am I to judge you on what you say or do? I'm only just beginning to see the real you." The Chorus lifts each stanza to sublime heights and a deep-going poignancy strikes home.

Another of the world's best love songs reigns on New York, New York, namely Jerome Kern's All the Things You Are. Its famous melody may still be familiar in certain youthful quarters, but Kern's lyrics are really the purest of his gifts :

"Time and again I long for adventure, something to make my heart beat the faster…."

This poetry at its very best, heart-stirring phrases captured in rushes of incomparable beauty:

"You are the angel glow that lights the stars
The dearest things I know, are what you are."

The album's title song, New York, New York, written for the 1977 United Artists film of the same name, is performed with that energy needed to make Manhattanites smile with satisfaction. As my plane circled a final time over the Big Apple, the song returned me to an incomparable decade I'd enjoyed while living on this very magic isle now slipping beneath me into the distance.

The best Manhattan medleys follow, including Manhattan, from the Garrick Gaieties (1925), and Sondheim's work too, done to perfection.

I was reminded of this album as I read today yet another rave review of the New York City Gay Men's Chorus in a San Diego newspaper. On the Chorus' web site New York, New York is proudly listed.

See for yourself, and order it pronto: http://virtualscape.com/nycgmc/