To top off every year before going into the next, QNotes takes a thorough examination of the people in the Charlotte LGBTQ+ community. When going through a selection of names, our staff deliberates over who has made the most impact in the Queen City in the last 12 months, whether that be through allyship, contributions, work at the ground-level, or any mixture of these qualifications. For our 2024 Person of the Year, it isn’t just the year-in-passing that he’d made an impact. Even though he’s occasionally hidden in plain sight, the contributions he has made in the city speak for themselves.
A resident of Charlotte since 1981, John Quillin has seen many changes in the city since that time. His efforts towards improving the quality of the lives of others is evident even then. Long before national hotlines and organizations like the Trevor Project, there was the Lesbian & Gay Switchboard. Headquartered in a shared office near Park Road Baptist Church, the group Quillin was a part of staffed telephone switchboards, taking calls from individuals in our community in need.
“This was before the internet,” Quillin explained. “And so people would call and ask things like ‘we need to know where the bars are, who’s a banker we can use, what about a realtor, how about doctors, or I think I’m gonna’ kill myself, can we talk about that?’ Yeah, I mean, we did that seven nights a week for years.”
Once the Roman-Catholic group called Acceptance, a pro-LGBTQ+ group that diverged from another Catholic chapter called Dignity, joined forces with Quillin and company, the Mental Alignment Community Service Project (MCSP) was formed. That further bolstered their numbers and the mission of support the original small organization was founded on.
From ‘83 to ’89, Quillin watched as what became community institution flourished. At that pivotal point came the start of the organization he is likely most known for these days: One Voice Chorus.
According to Quillin, another important figure in the Queen City’s LGBTQ+ community, Dan Kirsch, visited Charlotte for one of his first times on Halloween of 1989. Kirsch lived in Philadelphia at the time, where he had performed in the city’s gay men’s chorus. He told Quillin that was something he wanted to do in Charlotte. Jan McCoy, the other part of the would-be trio, already lived in the area. As fate would have it, Quillin brought the two parties together to form the new choral group in the Queen City.
“We signed Jan up as the director,” Quillin recalled. “And I was the assistant director. We started rehearsals at my place of work, which was the United Way. We had an auditorium with a piano, so we had space, parking, and that piano with a pianist. We started rehearsals in January of 1990.
“Jan left in ‘92 after spending about two and a half years. At that point, I suggested to the board that we do a dual thing, where we would have two directors. So, I was able to get Catherine Mayhand to agree to do that with me. From there, we did that together for seven years as the artistic directors, and then when she left, I just did it solo, and stayed for a total of 15 years.”
While in the trenches of developing the chorus organization, Quillin had his hands in other things too. As quoted to him in his exit interview, the now-conductor had spent “six years, ten months, and twenty-one days” at the old Phillip Morris cigarette company in Concord. While the company was good, the job as a systems analyst wasn’t, and the next venture happened at Philharmonic Orchestra, or better known today as the Charlotte Symphony.
Then, an opportunity opened up at United Way, allowing Quillin to do something he really loved, working from his starting position in the Allocations department, where he eventually rose to the director, all before moving across the aisle to being director of information technology upon the installation of a new CEO.
An interesting surprise uncovered during our interview was his other prior work, after United Way: Quillin even played a part at WFAE, Charlotte’s local radio affiliate for National Public Radio (NPR). As the director of membership and major giving from 1998 to around 2001, there was a time listeners would hear his voice over the airwaves, pitching to potential patrons in the way we tend to hear funding drives now each quarter.
Lastly, Quillin joined his husband Rick Haffner at his company, taking on the role of CFO for Fluid Language Solutions. After 12 years, the couple sold the enterprise in 2012, where, in Quillin’s own words, “I became a full time musician again, which I hadn’t done since college.”
In addition to One Voice, starting in 2006, Quillin has taken the time to produce a few different choruses largely populated by LGBTQ+ voices from Charlotte and the surrounding areas. The initial start of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Charlotte was in ’06, a vision potentially closer to Kirsch’s concept dating back to 1989. From there, under the parent group Queen City Performing Arts (QCPA), during the organization’s 19th season, the Women’s Chorus of Charlotte was established in 2022. At the helm of both, not surprisingly, is Quillin.
For someone who has been on the scene with so much, the honorary Charlottean is only getting started, and is ready for more. This year saw the addition of the Act Out Theater Company, an LGBTQ+ theater company that aims to bring LGBTQ+ narratives to the stage, added under the QCPA umbrella. This year, the Men’s and Women’s Choruses were able to perform Alzheimer’s Stories (written by Robert Cohen, a gay composer from Pennsylvania), a performance piece exploring the recollections of chorus members and friends with relatives who’ve had the disease. QCPA also brought small ensembles into the fray, in the form of Seventh Son, from the Men’s Chorus, and Vox Dominae, from the Women’s Chorus.
The year 2025 will start off with first rehearsals on Jan. 13, from which a few performances are already planned. March 29 will mark the return of “Sing for the Cure,” which, after a decade’s absence, will feature performers in a push to raise funds for breast cancer survivors and support services for those undergoing treatment. Fall 2025 will also feature a new collaboration with Charlotte Gaymers Network, with QCPA leading their voices to video game tracks from multiple eras, all at the newly renovated Carolina Theatre.
When asked what it has been like to be on the journey of bringing so much to Charlotte’s LGBTQ+ community, and to the city in general, Quillin had one word: “fulfilling.”
“I realize there are probably a couple of thousand people that have been through while I was either directing One Voice, or the Men’s chorus, or the Women’s chorus, a couple of thousand people who have gone through as singers that I have had the good fortune to direct, and the time they spend in chorus is incredibly important.
“And it matters so much because music cuts through people’s emotional barriers and gets right to the heart of the matter, and you can deliver a message in music that they’ll hear, that they would never hear otherwise.
“I’m just really humbled by the journey that I have been able to be on because nobody comes to see me. You know, they come to hear the chorus sing. They don’t come to see me directly. They come to hear, you know, the tenors and the Maritimes and the bassist sing. They don’t care what I do. And so I’m just there, and they, the singers, are the ones who have the stories to tell, and I just want to open a path to make that possible.”