by Audrey Liebross

This summer, Cathedral City’s Coachella Valley Repertory (CVRep) presented a series of cabarets. I had the pleasure of seeing two of them, a Glenn Rosenblum presentation and a show called Islands in the Stream, presented by Broadway singer-actor Brent Barrett and his husband, Bernie Blanks (a Broadway and European performer).

I do not consider this a review. Instead, I hope the readers will think of it as an appreciation, less for the entertainment (which deserves every superlative that I can give it), and more for Bernie’s and Brent’s contribution that evening towards making same sex marriage as ordinary as any male-female love match.

Brent and Bernie’s audience consisted of numerous couples, of both the same and opposite genders, and probably a few folks of other genders or in other relationship configurations. Yet I doubt that anyone felt left out of the joy they projected — it made me feel warm and fuzzy to see a couple that had been together for twenty-one years, who so obviously still adore each other. There is clearly a lesson in Brent’s and Bernie’s long-term relationship for married people and unmarried significant others, and they did a fine job conveying that lesson.

The two met when they were appearing in a production of Camelot in New York, Brent as King Arthur and Bernie as a knight. Apparently, they were both smitten with each other early on, but even in New York, they hesitated to be completely open about their relationship. The world was very different then — Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT), instituted as a military directive in 1993, was the law of the land until 2011, preventing “out” gays from serving the United States in the armed forces. And DADT was actually a major step FORWARD; before the policy, gay Americans could not serve at all, and they could be prosecuted for lying about their sexual orientation.

The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was also going strong. It had halted the movement towards allowing same sex couples to marry, although so-called “civil unions” were on the horizon. Those states that permitted marriage for same-sex couples could not do anything to give the spouses federal rights, such as survivor benefits, or rights in states that did not recognize marriage equality. People today tend to excoriate Bill Clinton for signing DOMA, but, I, a liberal who has just turned 70 years old personally remember the era that spawned both DADT and DOMA. I believe that we ought to thank President Clinton — when DOMA became law, there was already a movement beginning among conservatives for a constitutional amendment to bar same sex marriage. Even a progressive Supreme Court could probably not have figured out how to get around such an amendment. Clinton’s end run allowed him and others to argue that we didn’t need a constitutional amendment because a statute already barred such couples from getting married. At the time, I (and probably Clinton) assumed that DOMA would be either struck down or repealed in the not-too-distant future, and we were, thank goodness, right.

But getting back to Brent and Bernie and their inability to marry or even to be particularly open about their relationship when they first got together, they felt drawn to the song “We Kiss in a Shadow,” from The King and I, because it described the circumstances that applied to same sex couples — especially those whose families would have rejected them if they knew about the relationship. Yet, despite the inherent sadness of “We Kiss in a Shadow,” their interpretation was hardly a tear-jerker, because they performed it in a cheerful jazz tempo. I like to think this is because of society’s having moved forward, allowing Bernie and Brent to become a joyful and mutually adoring married couple, out in the open.

Much of the show consisted of light-hearted banter about events in the relationship. Bernie kept repeating how handsome his husband is, apparently one of the things that attracted him. (Bernie is right in my opinion — Brent is indeed drop-dead gorgeous). Yet, in contrast to Bernie’s admiration for Brent’s appearance and talent, and his gentlemanly nature, Bernie revealed an area in which he believes that Brent needs Bernie’s help: Brent’s wardrobe choices. It is apparently a running gag between them that Bernie serves as Brent’s clothing Svengali to avoid clothing disasters. Once again, this is the kind of circumstance that many couples can relate to — I heard a hilarious talk by a mystery author who informed her husband that he most certainly could not wear shorts to a funeral, even in Florida. I doubt Brent’s choices were ever THAT awful, but most of us have either dispensed or received sartorial advice from our partners.

What could have been the saddest moment in Bernie’s and Brent’s relationship instead turned into the story of how they pledged themselves to each other. They had spent two years largely apart while they pursued performance opportunities around the world, separately. Finally, after months of not having seen each other, they arranged to spend a bit of time together in Greece. Brent did not yet know it, but Bernie had realized that he could no longer handle the lengthy separations and had resolved to tell Brent that they either had to find a way to be together or Bernie would break off the relationship. Bernie wrote a song that afternoon about his feelings, which he performed for the audience. He explained that he wanted to show the uncertainty that he was facing —he knew that he would leave the Athens hotel room either pledged to permanence with Brent, or having just broken up with the man he wanted to spend his life with. Fortunately, the couple worked out their differences that night and arranged to be together permanently, both emotionally and geographically.

Most of the cabarets that I have seen center around a theme — Broadway musicals of the Golden Age or songs about New Orleans, for example. Instead of trying to educate the audience, this one let us into Brent’s and Bernie’s hearts and helped the audience to get to know them as individuals and a couple. I am not sure that twenty years ago, they could have gotten many straight people to attend such a program, because of lingering prejudice.  Brent and Bernie have done a great service to both LGBTQ+ people and to straight people — they have openly shown what many of us straight folks wrestled with concluding: that gay people are “normal,” and same sex couples are a lot like mixed sex couples.

I have read that people opposed to marriage equality are often not opposed to same sex love or gay people having long-term relationships, but “only” to physical intimacy between two men or two women. Bernie said that he is sometimes asked what keeps the couple together. He told the audience that the answer is “Great sex.”

I thank Brent and Bernie for making it ok to admit to an audience that they have sex, and to challenge straight people who may still have residual issues about two men having sex to get rid of them. Maybe, being more open to discussing the “great sex” that these two head-over-heels-in-love individuals are having will help us old geezer straight folks to see that sex between consenting adults is normal, no matter who is doing it — including straight old geezers.

Thank you, Bernie Blanks and Brent Barrett for your extraordinary cabaret, and thank you CVRep for presenting their performance. Brent and Bernie may not have intended this cabaret to be educational, but it definitely was, in that it taught a great deal about love.

the policy was issued under Department of Defense Directive 1304.26 on December 21, 1993, and was in effect from February 28, 1994, until September 20, 2011.[1] The policy prohibited military personnel from discriminating against or harassing closetedhomosexual or bisexual service members or applicants, while barring openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from military service. This relaxation of legal restrictions on service by gays and lesbians in the armed forces was mandated by Public Law 103–160 (Title 10 of the United States Code §654), which was signed November 30, 1993.[2] The policy prohibited people who "demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts" from serving in the armed forces of the United States, because their presence "would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability".[3] DADT ended in 2011.

Even with DADT repealed, the legal definition of marriage as being one man and one woman under the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) meant that, although same-sex partners could get married, their marriage was not recognized by the federal government. This barred partners from access to the same benefits afforded to heterosexual couples such as base access, health care, and United States military pay, including family separation allowance and Basic Allowance for Housing with dependents.[10] The Department of Defense attempted to open some of the benefits that were not restricted by DOMA,[11] but the Supreme Court decision in United States v. Windsor (2013) made these efforts unnecessary.[12]

The Defense of Marriage Act was signed into law in 1996 and defined marriage by the federal government as between a man and woman, thereby allowing states to deny marriage equality. President Bush announced his opposition to same-sex marriage while the House introduced a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as between a man and a woman.

Only a few years after President Obama declared DOMA unconstitutional, — and instructed the Justice Department to stop defending it in court — the Supreme Court advanced marriage equality through key decisions in 2013. Hollingsworth v. Perry determined Prop. 8 lacked legal standing while United States v. Windsor deemed DOMA unconstitutional — all but paving the way to full equality.

The moment for full marriage equality finally arrived on June 26, 2015, with the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. In a landmark 5-4 decision, marriage equality became the law of the land and granted same-sex couples in all 50 states the right to full, equal recognition under the law.