Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans

Beth Clayton and Patricia Racette

59 Beth Clayton and Patricia Racette Beth Clayton and Patricia Racette are roasting a chicken. The savory aroma is the first thing I notice as they welcome me into their Upper West Side apartment. Located a few blocks from Giuseppe Verdi Square, the place seems a fitting address for America’s first out gay or lesbian opera couple. “We wanted a little piece of sky,” Clayton explains when I remark on the spectacular view they enjoy. “Our neighbors all know we’re opera singers,” Racette adds. “But we don’t sing here. We’re actually not here that often.” Turns out the New York apartment is just their pied-à-terre. Clayton and Racette make their primary home in Santa Fe, the city where they met over a decade ago and where, in 2005, they celebrated their commitment ceremony. But this week they’re both in town together, a rare occasion, and a friend is coming for dinner. While we chat, one or the other of them gets up periodically to check on the chicken. Now at the height of their careers (Racette has recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Licia Albanese–Puccini Foundation), the two are in constant demand. A dramatic soprano with a penchant for Puccini (“I can’t wait to do Fanciulla!”), Racette has, for the moment, racked up the bigger career, with appearances at the Met and the San Francisco Opera as well as at other opera houses in the United States and Europe. Arts critic Manuela Hoelterhoff has described her voice as “a steely core wrapped with silk.” And Clive Barnes, reviewing Racette’s performance as the abandoned Japanese bride in the Met’s 2007 production of Madama Butterfly, called her “a dramatic soprano of the utmost subtlety and emotional power.” Clayton, four years younger and several inches taller (she’s a sixfooter ), is a mezzo with a voice that is “warm, dark, round,” according to the New York Times. “Sexy” is another adjective that frequently appears in reviews of her singing. One of Clayton’s signature roles is Carmen. “Simply sensational” was the verdict of the Chicago Tribune about her performance in 2000. “A brazen seductress in love with love.” “My favorite role,” Clayton tells me. “A role that is me.” Both Clayton and Racette come from small-town backgrounds. Clayton grew up in Arkansas. “The biggest town I lived in probably had ten thousand people.” Racette, who was born in 1965, comes from a blue-collar Catholic family just outside Manchester, New Hampshire. She tells me her childhood was “very provincial. My father didn’t even like to go to certain parts of Manchester because they seemed too busy.” From an early age, music figured in both their lives. Clayton started piano lessons around age five. With a Methodist minister for a father, she was active in the church, where she “did a lot of singing.” She took roles in church camp musicals and school productions. “In high school, they would build musicals around me.” As a young child, Racette, too, loved to sing. On long weekend drives with her parents she’d stick her head out the window—“like a dog”—and belt out songs at the top of her voice. After an unhappy stint with accordion lessons—“the thing came up to my forehead”— she taught herself to play guitar. “And I started writing songs. Sad things about heartbreak. It was my survival. I’d spend hours in my room with my music. When I got to high school, the choir director asked me if I’d like to join the choir. ‘Oh, no, no, no,’ I told him. ‘I only do this alone.’ A diva in the making!” But she relented the next year and joined the choir, where the director introduced her to jazz, which she fell in love with. “I wanted to be in a Manhattan Transfer kind of thing.” By her senior year, Racette had set her sights on a college where she could study jazz. 60 Beth Clayton and Patr icia Racette 61 Beth Clayton and Patr icia Racette To help her prepare for auditions, she got a voice teacher, who told her that she would be better off singing the classical repertoire. “I cried for three days.” Undaunted, she went to the University of North Texas, a college with a good vocal jazz department, paying for the tuition with money she had...