Getting Saved: Coming Out as a Gay Man and a Composer [memoir] by Gerald Busby

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Gerald Busby’s rollicking and ruminative memoir, Getting Saved: Coming Out as a Gay Man and a Composer, chronicles his adventurous, dramatic life, its tragedies and comedies, starting with his birth in Texas during the Great Depression and his growing up as a piano prodigy and gay adolescent in a Southern Baptist family. He attends Yale, where he studies music and philosophy, coming out as a gay man. After adventures in New York City and traveling as a college textbook salesman out west, he realizes that he’s a composer and devotes his life to that mission, composing Runes for Paul Taylor’s dance company and the haunting score for Robert Altman’s 3 Women. Virgil Thompson helps Gerald and his partner, Sam Byers, find an apartment in the Chelsea Hotel, but in a few years both men are diagnosed HIV-positive and Sam dies of AIDS. Gerald overcomes his grief, despair, and drug addiction and resumes composing, learning the Sibelius notation program and presenting his music, including fifty string quartets, through concerts, a CD, and Facebook posts of his scores and audio. He continues to live in the Chelsea Hotel.Hashtags: #GayMemoir #FilmScoring #RobertAltman #NewYorkCity #ChelseaHotel

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Gerald Busby was born in Texas in 1935. A piano prodigy who grew up in a Southern Baptist family, he performed with the Houston Symphony when he was 15 and attended the Yale School of Music, graduating in 1960, two years after coming out as a gay man. His best known compositions are Runes, commissioned for a ballet by Paul Taylor, and the score for Robert Altman’s film 3 Women. He moved into the Chelsea Hotel with Sam Byers, the love of his life, in 1977. After Sam died of AIDS, Gerald fell apart, gradually recovering and resuming his vocation as a composer. He continues to live in the Chelsea Hotel.

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PRAISE:

Gerald Busby’s life is a grand adventure, and he writes about it with deep insight, passion, and wit. He’s a brilliant composer. I love his music, and now his words.

–Hilma Wolitzer, author of Ending and Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

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Busby bears witness to what it was to grow up gay and gifted among ’50s Texas holy-rollers, then carries us along to Yale, on to the very heart of the wild art scene that was ’70s New York City, and beyond. This story is a grand tour of the arts, America and the last half-century. A soulful, entertaining, no-holds-barred tale of a life brilliantly lived.

–Sherill Tippins, author of Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel

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From the window of my apartment, I can see the back of the Chelsea Hotel, where Gerald Busby has lived since 1977, “the last Bohemian in Chelsea,” as New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik called him. For all those years, Busby has represented and fostered the genial and provocative creative spirit of our neighborhood—and, more broadly, he has written music that has defined America’s soundtrack and musicality, from his Runes for Paul Taylor, his work on Robert Altman’s 3 Women and A Wedding, to songs for poets. In his memoir Getting Saved, Busby leads us from his boyhood home in Texas into his life as music man, taking us into the Chelsea Hotel and the company of Virgil Thomson and so many other luminaries and lovers, giving us a story full of the melody of the open heart.

–David Groff, author of Live in Suspense

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