Taylor Mac on Bark of Millions:
his ‘Giant Meditation on Queerness’

Taylor Mac opens Emerson Stage’s season with an evening of songs that celebrate queerness. QV talks to him about the show.

Taylor Mac likes creating epic theatrical works that are big in scope, big on spectacle, and, sometimes, four or five hours long… or more. Take, for instance, judy’s [that’s Mac’s preferred pronoun] five-hour work The Lily’s Revenge, a work whose run time is design to echo the duration of a typical wedding celebration. Then there’s the 24-hour-long concert of American songs A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, a setlist of 240 songs drawn from the entire history of the United States

Bark of Millions is something of a little sibling to A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, with the full work comprising 57 original songs and lasting for a mere four hours — not that Mac typically performs the entire set. “What we’re doing in Boston at Arts Emerson is maybe 20 or 22 of them,” the artist told QulturVultur of the Oct. 15 – 18 run that will kick off the new season at ArtsEmerson. “One day, when there’s 100 songs, we might do another giant, durational expression of it, but for now we’re trying to make it a little bit more manageable for us and the audience.”

Mac, a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, partnered with Obie Award-winning composer Matt Ray for the show’s songs, which meditate on queer history from antiquity to today, touching upon LGBTQ+ individuals both famous and obscure. The show’s full setlist grows with time; originally consisting of 54 songs to reflect the 54 years that has passed between the Stonewall Uprising of June, 1969, to the play’s inaugural production in 2023, the work has grown to 57 songs with the passage of another three years, and Mac fully intends to keep on adding. (His goal, he told QulturVulture, is to reach 100 songs.)

Bark of Millions was nominated for a Dorian Theater Award for Outstanding LGBTQ Off-Broadway Production in 2024, along with Eddie Izzard’s Hamlet, Make Me Gorgeous!, Teeth, and the eventual winner, Oh, Mary! QulturVultur caught up with Mac via Zoom to hear all about the show’s origins, influences, and many, many extravagant costumes.

QulturVulture: When we last spoke, in 2023, you told me about Bark of Millions. You said at the time that it was “the queerest thing I’ve ever written.” Do you still feel that way?

Taylor Mac: Yeah, I do!

[Laughter]

QulturVulture: Twenty songs is less than fifty-seven, but it’s still a lot. How do you manage that?

Taylor Mac: I have twelve other singers with me in this show. I sing backup on a lot of songs, and I have my own solos, and I sing on all the group things, so I’m constantly singing in the show — but I’m not carrying every song, and that is a different kind of exercise. I have all these beautiful, talented humans in my life, and I see them as magic. You know, when you see magic in the world, you want to share it. I want to sing with them, and I want to listen to them singing, and I want to share how incredible they are with other people, so that’s part of it, too.

QulturVulture: A decade ago you did A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, a 24-hour concert of 240 songs drawn from 240 years of American history. Did Bark of Millions evolve from that?

Taylor Mac: Oh, absolutely, it did. We sang 240 songs that were primarily in the American canon, things that you heard on the radio your whole life, that you sang around the campfire and in churches and schools. Many of them were written by queer people, but because of the dominant culture, everything was geared towards [a straight audience]. The philosopher Leibniz has this theory that the universe is always singing, and that essentially our purpose on this planet is to harmonize. So, if we’re always harmonizing with the universe from this very narrow perspective, what are we missing? I don’t know about you, but I didn’t grow up with queer songs on the radio. Songs that were performed by queers who were closeted required all of us who were queer to translate — to do that extra step in order to feel we belonged, that the universe made sense to us.

[The concert] was activism. It was saying there have been centuries of omission, centuries of censorship and oppression. The Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian organization in America, had a mission statement to add to the living library of the deviant being, and educate the variants — to educate queer people and find all of the queer things in the world. When I was doing 24 Decades I learned about that, and I thought, “That’s the next project. I need to add to the living library of the deviant theme and hopefully inspire others to do the same.”

QulturVulture: The original songs in Bark of Millions are inspired by queer people across history, and you’e adding to it as years go by between the Stonewall Uprising and the current moment. Have you already written additional songs for coming years, or do you have figures from history waiting in the wings that you want to write songs about?

Taylor Mac: I have a big, long list, and everywhere we travel, we get more names. The wonderful thing about it being an ever-growing project is, nobody has to be in competition with each other; I’m not trying to say that this queer is more important than that queer. Some of the figures are mythical, some of them are historical, some are just the queen down the street that nobody would have heard of but that I happened to come upon, and they inspired me. Some of it are people that you don’t know about that historians have unearthed recently. Some of them are people that you’ve known about your whole life but maybe didn’t know were queer. It’s a ragtag potpourri, but it’s ever-growing.

And the songs aren’t representation; that was the major thing that was so important to me. I don’t know how to represent myself on a stage, let alone another human, let alone an entire demographic. But what I can do is, I can wonder about other people. I can do the Socratic method, I can ask questions, I can pay attention, and I can see other people, and so that’s what the songs are. They’re a giant meditation on queerness.

QulturVulture: The show’s costumes are so amazing, colorful, and extravagant. Are you swapping costumes in and taking them out from show to show, or is there a set selection of costumes you’re using?

Taylor Mac: Machine Dazzle is the costume designer that I work with. He makes wearable art. He’s more sculptor in some ways, a sculptor working in the realm of costume. Bark of Millions is a meditation on queerness, so he’s made all these great outfits for this large ensemble of singers and musicians. He’s always bringing in some new headpiece looking at what someone wore last time and going, “Oh, it needs this change.” He’s following his muse, and I want nothing more in life than to be part of getting to experience him following his muse.

QulturVulture: Another thing that’s exciting about Bark of Millions is that it’s like the most amazing drag show ever.

Taylor Mac: Everything’s drag. I would say that even nudity is drag. It’s a choice we make. You can choose something that feels, for lack of a better word, normative; something that the mass market has told us is acceptable, something that says, “Today is every other day.” Or, you could choose something that says, “Today is today, different from every other day, and the reason it’s different is because we’ve chosen to elevate the esthetic with surprise and wonder.” It’s really about consideration, I think, and the whole goal of theater is to surprise people into wonder, into a deeper consideration of the world, and to wake us up from this numbing down that we all do as a way to survive — but, of course, that’s what’s actually killing us. So, it’s trying to give us a little bit of breath to escape that paradigm.

QulturVulture: You can be wearing nothing, or a fabulous drag costume, and still put on a different attitude, a different persona that reflects an era or a style more than an individual.

Taylor Mac: That’s its own kind of drag, and we do that. There’s a song that I don’t think we’re singing this time, but it’s called “BDB Women” — BDB is “Bulldyke Blues” — because most of the women who sang the blues early on were lesbians and were bull dykes. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Lucille Bogan, even Ethel Waters. Billie Holiday was bisexual. A lot of the root of popular music comes from the blues, and so a lot of the root of our music comes from Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, and so that is lesbians, right? And so, of course, that song we wrote in the blues [style]. So, yeah, that’s part of the consideration. You can’t consider the blues and not sing the blues. You gotta at least try.

QulturVulture: There’s a companion songbook to Bark of Millions. What was the impetus for that?

Taylor Mac: Well, in the history of the world, a major publisher has never published a queer songbook, so it’s time. The other reason is because the vision for the show and all these songs wasn’t that it stops with us. It was to add to the living library of the deviant theme, so it was a hope that other people will pick up these songs and sing them. It was a hope that they might offer up some healing for those of us who have grown up with this hurt in us from a lack. The book, I think, is Volume One, and it’s 50 songs; it would be nice to have another 50 and do Volume Two in, like, 10 years. I think that would be super sweet.

The first book is all lyrics and essays. It’s a compendium, and the second book is all the sheet music. So, if you don’t reach sheet music, you can still participate in its beautiful poetry and interesting thoughts in the essays about queerness. If your friend reads music, you can invite them over, and then you can use the lyric book, and your friend can play the sheet music. You can create music and community together. Our hope is that people gather in small groups, or you just do it alone in your in your living room if you want.

QulturVulture: Is that why it’s not on Spotify? You’re looking for people to actually play this music on their own instruments, with friends?

Taylor Mac: Let’s be honest, it’s not on Spotify because I don’t have a half a million dollars to record 57 songs in a studio. We’re figuring out how to make it happen in the way that we want it to. It’s a lot of fundraising, and we live in a country where taxes go to killing people instead of making culture, so it’s going to be a long process. But also, I grew up going to church and getting the hymnal, and we didn’t have recordings of these songs; we just sang them and learned them. And we didn’t have recordings of the songs that around the campfire, and we didn’t have recordings of the songs at school. In that tradition, it’s sweet that we’re offering up the song, but it’s also, like, us not micromanaging how the songs are done. You will sing them how you sing them. This is giving you enough to get you started.

“Bark of Millions” plays at Emerson Paramount Center’s Robert J. Orchard Stage from October 15 – 18. For tickets and more information, follow this link.