Our Ethos
Membership of our Rainbow Choir is open to any LGBTQ+ person regardless of race, religion, creed, belief or musical ability.
Joining the choir will not only ignite your own life with passion through the joy of music, but you will also be helping to make a big difference in the community.
A similar movement gradually formed in Europe, with the foundation of, for example, the London Gay Men’s Chorus in 1991 and Paris’s Melomen in 1994.
LGBTQ people have been excluded from the mainstream throughout history, and have fought since the late 1960s for the fundamental human rights to be visible, to love, to marry, to be protected under the law. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the inclusion and sense of community that singers of all backgrounds feel in a choral group is something especially important to LGBTQ+ singers. Choral groups, it turns out, have a unique function in the LGBTQ+ community, as a safe space and a place of deep belonging.
If you asked singers LGBTQ choruses why they sing, 70%–80% would say “because these are my friends” or “this is my chosen family.”
Now for the first time in Surrey, LGBTQ+ poeple can feel free to belong and sing out in a safe space and all the while doing it to also help our own community with the funds we raise at our concerts.
(quotes from Charles Beale as written in the Oxford Handbook of Choral Pedagogy)