The Lesbian & Gay Big Apple Corps (LGBAC) is a community band based in New York City. Founded on September 24, 1979 as the New York Gay Community Marching Band, LGBAC is the third-oldest community band in the United States dedicated to serving the LGBT community. The mission of LGBAC is to provide the lesbian and gay community with a supportive and friendly environment for musical and artistic expression and, through performance, to promote social acceptance, equality, and harmony for all. Membership is all-inclusive, predominantly lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer, and the band welcomes heterosexual players as well. The band performs year-round as both a concert band and a marching band.
As a concert band, LGBAC traditionally produces two concerts each year, one in the fall and the other in the spring. Chamber music concerts are offered occasionally.
As a marching band, LGBAC marches in a wide variety of events, predominantly but not limited to gay pride marches, July 4 parades, and the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. The marching band includes a featured baton twirler, ballet dancers, color guard and honor guard.
Famous quotes containing the words lesbian, gay, big, apple and/or corps:
“Why is it so difficult to see the lesbian—even when she is there, quite plainly, in front of us? In part because she has been “ghosted”Mor made to seem invisible—by culture itself.... Once the lesbian has been defined as ghostly—the better to drain her of any sensual or moral authority—she can then be exorcised.”
—Terry Castle, U.S. lesbian author. The Apparitional Lesbian, ch. 1 (1993)
“For hym was levere have at his beddes heed,
Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed,
Of Aristotle and his philosophie,
Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie:
But al be that he was a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340–1400)
“O, pluck was he to the backbone and clear grit through and through;
Boasted and bragged like a trooper; but the big words wouldn’t do;
The boy was dying, sir, dying, as plain as plain could be,
Worn out by his ride with Morgan up from the Tennessee.”
—Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894)
“She was so overcome by the splendor of his achievement that she took him into the closet and selected a choice apple and delivered it to him, along with an improving lecture upon the added value and flavor a treat took to itself when it came without sin through virtuous effort. And while she closed with a Scriptural flourish, he “hooked” a doughnut.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Ce corps qui s’appelait et qui s’appelle encore le saint empire romain n’était en aucune manière ni saint, ni romain, ni empire. This agglomeration which called itself and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)