Missouri news

Audra Sergel: "There's always been seeds planted by thoughtful people who are different, and they will bloom."

KBIA | By Bailey Stover,

Nick Sheaffer

Published July 7, 2025 at 6:18 AM CDT

Audra Sergel, who is a queer woman and the artistic director of The Quorus, Columbia's LGBTQQA-Z Community Choir, sits at her piano on Friday, April 11, 2025, in her office at Historic Senior Hall on the Stephens College campus in Columbia. "When I'm next to my partner, and we are traveling, I'm fully aware that we are not passing. When we are in Columbia, I don't ever think about it anymore. It is not something where I worry at all about being queer in Columbia. The second that we drive 30 minutes beyond our little bubble and that kind of thing, I do start thinking about it. And, typically, with that privilege, I do remind myself that, first of all, there's also a privilege as you become middle aged. As a woman, you become invisible to a lot of people, and it is a superpower unlike any other. And I kind of like that because you can kind of be in a space and disrupt a space, and people aren't even the wiser because your mere existence is pretty invisible. So then you can go in and be like, 'I'm setting a tone in here of acceptance and love and being who I am.' So there's something beautiful about the superpower of invisibility," Sergel said. "With the privilege of passing, there's a responsibility, and I've taken that pretty seriously. Even in those moments when I'm passing, I know I'm going to be the first person to stand up if something goes awry in a room that I'm in."

Audra Sergel is a queer woman in her late 40s who's an active member of the community through her role as the artistic director of the Quorus, an LGBTQ+ choir.

She spoke about persevering through tumultuous times and navigating the changing tides of queer acceptance.

Alphabet Soup shares LGBTQ+ Missourians’ stories through portraiture and personal narratives.

Audra Sergel: I tell my students I lived in the before times. I lived in the before times when coming out meant you could be killed, seriously injured, stalked, hurt, and Matthew Shepard was the first time I realized the gravity of hate.

When we use that rhetoric, when we promulgate these ideals – that they kill people.

And so, to have someone like Obama come right on out and say, "We're going to let love be love," and it was such a breath of fresh air to just know that this is what we're moving toward.

And I think that's why the recent re-election has been more terrifying than the first. We've all lived through something now. We've lived through a global pandemic together.

And now we're living through what I believe to be really terrifying propaganda for the queer community, minorities, immigrants, and I think our trans siblings are at the forefront of that fight right now.

My dad's always just been cool with it, and for the first time, after this election, he said, "I'm really worried about you. I'm worried about your safety, your physical safety as a leader. They could hurt you. They could hurt the choir members." So, we've had a response of upping our safety game.

Encircled by a necklace of fake rainbow flowers, Audra Sergel's stuffed bear sits on a shelf in her office for students to hug or hold at Historic Senior Hall on the Stephens College campus in Columbia. Sergel said her mother gave her the bear when she was about 12 years old. "The difference for me is the shorthand. It's like when you're with a really old friend, and they know that story about your grandma. And so when you make that weird little joke, they totally get it. And there's that shorthand when you're with other queer people, and when you're with allies," Sergel said of the community The Quorus has fostered. "I'm not ever worried when I say, 'My wife this,' where in some contexts I make sure to say 'partner' rather than wife so that it's neutral and it doesn't offend anyone in the room. And I think that most minority folks would say that that shorthand and that sense of belonging, there are certain things that even if you create and cultivate safe space, some of them just feel like your living room, and some of them just don't. And that's OK. But that's why we create different types of spaces: so everyone can find that."

Being 48 and living in the before times – I sometimes have homesickness for the feeling of when we knew we were protected, and that that was collectively understood and celebrated as a nation.

Now, it's a real factor of – in two or three years, are we going to be safe enough? Are we even going to be safe in a year? Well, how bad is this going to get?

Because we're already seeing a response to people being given permission to hate other people, and that permission is terrifying.

It's been going on for so long, and the deeper I go into queer history, the more I realize that there's always been seeds planted by thoughtful people who are different, and they will bloom.

We just have to tend to them and keep nurturing, so eyes on what we can do, eyes on what we can change, and hopefully that's hearts and minds with some music.

It makes me sad to say this, but I feel right now in our political environment that there are a lot of people who are seeing what I call the backside of Disneyland.

And I feel really grateful to my queerness for showing me that so early because I'm now resilient. I've built the tools and the community and love around me and in myself – that I can be who I am and be resilient and I have this flood of compassion, and those things make me really proud that being queer brought that to me, that blessing to me, the empathy and resilience and kindness are wrapped in queerness to me.

Audra Sergel holds her phone showing a picture of The Quorus, Columbia's LGBTQQA-Z Community Choir, during one of the group's performances on Friday, April 11, 2025, in her office at Historic Senior Hall on the Stephens College campus in Columbia. "I love it when we get the whole band there, and we're at The Blue Note, and the mics are hot. And everyone's on the risers, and they're dancing and they're singing, and they're all in colors and sparkles, and people have dyed their hair. And it's just a celebration of who we are. I love that. I love that it's the normalcy of just on Sunday night you might have a poker game that you go to every week or you might have a little potluck that you do at your church or whatever it is, but that people are choosing to come to The Quorus as part of their time," Sergel said. "It's never not on my mind. I don't know how to say that. It's always on my mind I guess is how you'd say that. Of people spending their time with you, and the luxury of that, that they're giving that to you. And so making sure that when we're there that it's meaningful, that it's connective."