As a 61 year old gay man, Tim Teeter has lived with the LGBTQ community for many years. Tim felt very connected to the community as a young man, but he recognized a change as he approached middle age.

[There were] no opportunities to communicate with younger gay men, which means that I no longer had a real way to know about their worlds.” Tim relates. “The community lacks bridges between the generations.”

The We Are Family Songbook Project at Emmanuel Episcopal Church (EECBaltimore) is a movement to rectify the tremendous “generation gap” that Tim and many others experience in the LGBTQ community.

The generation gap leaves LGBTQ youth isolated from their history and culture, while the elders feel isolated by age and a lack of understanding for the struggles they endured. By encouraging these two communities to tell their stories through song, the songbook project will provide a mutually beneficial “knitting together” of the LGBTQ community.

The We Are Family Songbook will be created through workshops involving 4 musicians, Decoda, Inc working with 16 LGBTQ community members. The culminating performance of the songbook at the end of the workshop will reach several hundred members of the local community, but the long-lasting effect on the LGBTQ community is immeasurable.

GiveCorps is working with EECBaltimore to make sure that The We Are Family Songbook Project will be ready for performance on October 11, 2013 to coincide with National Coming Out Day.  Your gift will bring expertise from Decoda, Inc., a NYC-based musician’s collective, to Baltimore to work with the LGBTQ community and lead this week-long workshop.

Together, we can bring together the LGBTQ generations through songwriting. Let’s make it happen!