Key conductor: world-renowned lesbian conductor Sebrina Maria Alfonso found a way to move home to Key West--she imported a symphony.

"I'm what they call a real conch," confirms Sebrina Maria Alfonso. "A fifth- or sixth-generation conch." Weighed against her major achievements in the world of classical music, Alfonso's claims to conchhood might seem inconsequential--unless you know Key West, Fla. That tiny island at the southernmost tip of the United States is known as the Conch Republic, and only those residents born on the island can call themselves conchs.

It's a short list--not much longer than the list of major Cuban-American conductors who also happen to be out lesbians.

A rising-star conductor with a resume including gigs from Baltimore to Prague to Tokyo, Alfonso moved back to Key West in 1997 determined to put together a symphony of her own. The idea, which she conjured up along with some musician friends, began as a pipe dream. "One day I thought, Why not?" Alfonso says. "Then my grandmother died [back home in Key West]. Two of my grandmothers were still alive. And I thought, If you're gonna do this, do it now."

A March 1998 fund-raiser made it clear that the island was willing to get behind Alfonso's vision. To find musicians Alfonso worked her Rolodex, calling all over the country to cherry-pick great players who could fly in the week before the annual concerts--December 10-11 this year, and long soldout--and home thereafter. "They had to be that good," Alfonso points out, "because we would have very little rehearsal." The first set of back-to-back concerts, in December 1998, was a roaring success, and the Key West Symphony has been a hot ticket ever since.

Initially following in the footsteps of the high school band teacher who first inspired her, Alfonso says she broadened her ambitions to classical music during college. No matter what the musical style, she says, "I was attracted to the power of a conductor to inspire the people sitting in the chairs."

She has since made the most of that power as the first Cuban-American to conduct the National Orchestra of Cuba in Havana. A Key West impresario visiting Cuba told colleagues about her, and Alfonso was invited to visit in 2002. She has returned every year since. "It was very difficult the first year," she says. Not only were the musicians suspicious of outsiders, but Alfonso herself was carefully watched.

Over time, as people realized that she had no political agenda, hearts opened. Now, Alfonso says, her annual trips to Havana are exhausting because she leaves so many Cuban friends behind when she returns to the States.

She has also conducted underwater. As part of a uniquely Key West benefit event called the Underwater Music Festival, Alfonso accepted the challenge earlier this year to conduct her own symphony's recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the ocean floor at the Looe Key National Marine Sanctuary, surrounded by divers holding prop instruments representing a "trombonefish," a "manta-lin," and so on.

It was silly, yes, but not easy. Alfonso had just four days to renew her diver's certification. The day itself was windy, and underwater currents were rough. "I was on my knees, just trying to stay put," Alfonso says with a laugh, "and I could see we were slowly being pushed into the rocks. But I was conducting my little ass off!"

The resulting picture was such a hoot, she says, "that thing went around the world. We found it in Pakistan, China, Israel. [People wrote about it] in every language." Alfonso laughs. "It's hard to imagine people would be so interested in a conductor from Key West. But then, where else do people sit on a coral reef and do something so silly?"