Elizabeth and Beverly Glenn-Copeland: “Community is where we have our power”

Pioneering Canadian-American trans artist Beverly Glenn-Copeland, who goes by Glenn Copeland, self-released his now-legendary album Keyboard Fantasies via a 200-copy cassette run in 1984, selling just a handful while the rest waited in storage.

In 2015, a Japanese record collector emailed him about selling the remainder, leading to a renaissance for the album. The music spread globally, and a few years later, in his seventies, Glenn embarked on his first European tour to share his songs with live audiences.

Tomorrow evening, accompanied by his wife, theatre artist and musical producer Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland, he will be taking on the stage of The Button Factory, where they will perform tracks from his 2023 album The Ones Ahead, as well as favorites from across his storied career.

When I chat to the couple, they are sitting in an apartment in Edinburgh, following their performance in the city the night before, and cannot wait to make their first trip to Ireland.

“We both have ancestral ties on the Irish land,” explains Elizabeth, “and we've written a musical play that's based in West Ireland, called The Raven of Éirean Mhór – we'll be doing a little excerpt from that play in the concert.

“My great-grandmother,” she continues, “was an Irish midwife. I feel such a connection with Irish music and the storytelling nature of Irish culture. And a lot of the slave owners, in the transatlantic slave trade, came from Ireland. So, moving through his African-American heritage, Glenn has a great-great-grandmother that looks like me – pale skin, red hair – so there's a lot of connection there.”

“I have been wanting to come to Ireland for years and years and years,” Glenn interjects, all smiles. “I have always loved Irish music. The first time I heard it, I literally think my hair uncurled, because it felt so familiar to me.

“When I was younger,” he tells me, “I actually went and studied with somebody who played the Scottish pipes. But while I was there, they were also playing the Irish pipes – and they're way more subtle. You can feel so much energy – because the Scottish pipes were made for war, whereas the Irish pipes are much softer.

“And the other thing I loved about Irish culture is that in the old days, the women were the ones who were in charge of the entire Irish country, and did so with such compassion, and care.”

“We also love the spirit that has come out of Ireland over the centuries,” Elizabeth adds, “in terms of the grounded fighting against injustice, which we see even today.”

LIVING WITH THE DIAGNOSIS

This run of shows in the UK and Ireland, Glenn’s first since 2018, will be performed entirely accompanied by his wife – just as our interview is. A year ago, the 81-year-old musician shared his diagnosis with Major Neurocognitive Disorder, better known as dementia. Despite the life changing news, the couple is dead-set on making sure that Glenn continues to live his life to the fullest.

“One of the things that helps is this tour,” Elizabeth explains. “Last year, around this time, we did what we thought was going to be our last tour. And then in January or February, we found ourselves sitting around in the living room, doing all the things that we had been told we should be doing, in terms of routine.

“Glenn and I looked at each other and said, ‘well, maybe we're doing the right things, according to all the literature, but this doesn't feel like we're living our lives.’ And Glenn said, ‘there's places I want to see, people I want to talk to before I lose capacity.’ Is it a risk to cross the ocean? Sure, but life is full of risk. So it's a risk that we've chosen to take, to have this full-bodied, lived experience.

“We also, from the beginning, just wondered: where do we find the life, here? And it means that sometimes we sit and cry together. But it also means finding the humour and the lightness. And for me, as his caretaker, that also means seeing that, as parts of his executive functioning go offline, his essential self is actually more present.”

Smiling gently to his wife, Glenn simply says: “Thank you, dear. It's lovely for you to say that.”

LOVE AND COMMUNITY

Seeing the love emanating out of Glenn and Elizabeth is no difficult task – in the soft words they exchange, or in Glenn’s arm around his wife’s shoulder, which stays there for the entirety of our chat. After over 40 years of partnership, sitting with them is as emotional as it is inspiring. How do the two artists continue to influence each other?

“Every way possible,” Glenn smiles. “Elizabeth is such a genius, she's so brilliant around so many different aspects of anything that has to do with art. And I feel so honored to have her as my wife.”

Their relationship, the couple explains, is also something that goes well beyond themselves: “Three or four years ago, we did a concert where all these young people came up and talked about the experience of our shared love, and what that meant to them.

“We came to see that when we create a loving relationship with any human, be it romantic or even a great friendship, that love is bigger than the sum total of the two parts of the individual. There's me, and there’s Glenn, but Glenn and I together, there's something larger that comes through.”

Elizabeth and Glenn Copeland. Photo credit: Wade Muir

This idea of love as a communal feeling is something that takes centre stage in both of Glenn and Elizabeth’s artistic philosophies, particularly on display in their upcoming show, which focuses on imagining a new world of community and connection.

“Community is where we have our power.” Elizabeth says.

“In settings where we come together to create art, to listen to music, this is where we can feel the experience of our collective power. This is what is going to take us forward in these difficult days. We always love, in concerts, that people have that experience of the collective.”

“And this is how humans survived,” Glenn adds. “This is how we came up. We don't have long nails. We can't run fast. We have no teeth worth talking about. The only way we survived was as a community.”

Where do the two of them find the strongest sense of community these days?

Elizabeth gives a quick glance to Glenn, who nods at her to answer: “In music and art,” she says. “In the small acts of kindness that we can offer each other. But we really do see that since the pandemic, especially in the part of Canada that we've come from, that sense of community, which was just on the edge of surviving, has been broken, and many people are really lost in a place of despair. We went to Newfoundland in June, and there we rediscovered what a really alive community can feel like. And that's what we're looking forward to coming to Ireland for.”

TRANS ELDERSHIP

Glenn can barely remember a time where he didn’t live as openly queer – as a lesbian throughout his youth, and then as a trans man, after coming out in the nineties. Has it felt liberating, I ask, to be able to finally live with his preferred gender identity, even so late in life?

“The truth is, I've always lived my life,” Glenn admits. “I told my mother I was a boy when I was three. And of course, on some level, she didn't believe it – but on another level, she started being worried about it. And so, growing up, I'd wear these falsies, and I'd be forced to dance with boys. The whole thing was ridiculous, but the culture wasn't ready for it, and I was still trying to figure out how to present myself.

“At a certain point, I just thought, well, I'm who I am, and I can't not do that. So by the time I was in university, I had a female partner.”

“What has made Glenn's legacy so profound, as a trans elder, is that he was never able to live as anyone other than himself,” Elizabeth agrees. “So even though he didn't have a name for it at the time, from his twenties to his forties, he’s always been fiercely himself – that's what makes his eldership so powerful.

“There's a reason why we don't have a lot of trans elders,” she continues. “So many of them were lost in the AIDS crisis. So many just gave in to the understandable despair of living lives where there was constant violence. So having Glenn with us at this time is priceless.”

In the past few years, in the US, the UK and elsewhere, there has been a clear political movement working to roll back the trans and queer rights that were so difficultly acquired by people of Glenn and Elizabeth’s generation.

Observing those changes, just in the course of their lives, Elizabeth says, is “infuriating. The advances that have been made, and now the drawbacks. It's infuriating, it's frightening, it's disconcerting. It's heartbreaking.”

“At the same time,” Glenn insists, “you are who you are. You can't start hiding because of the world – I'm not saying that everybody should do this. Some people have reasons why they are going to go into hiding. But if you don't have reasons that are really, from your perspective, important, then you just have to try to go forward, and to hold your truth.

“And yes, it's a risk,” he admits. “But important things have always been a risk.”

• Glenn and Elizabeth Copeland play The Button Factory tomorrow at 8pm. Audience members are required to wear a mask in order to protect the health of the performers.