Making our town sing: out composer Ned Rorem and renowned poet J.D. McClatchy pair on a long-awaited operatic version of Thornton Wilder's classic American play.

After gay composer Ned Rorem turned 80 back in 2003, he decided to try some things he'd not done in a long time, like going into a bar. "Since I don't drink or smoke anymore, I don't know what to do in a bar," says Rorem, who nevertheless went looking for distraction at the Townhouse, a sweater bar on Manhattan's upper east side. "I stayed for 28 seconds," he says.

That was long enough for a 30-something film and video director to take note and follow him out the door. A sidewalk conversation led to a date, and now, nearly three years later, Rorem has a steady boyfriend. (James Holmes, Rorem's lover for 32 years, died of AIDS complications in 1999.)

"We have a lot of friends in common, Steve Sondheim being one of them," says Rorem. "We play a lot of Scrabble and look at Jeopardy! and otherwise talk about higher things."

Something else Rorem set out to do in his ninth decade was to write a major new opera. Though widely known for his vocal music, the prolific composer has done surprisingly few works for the stage.

Given that the new opera, Our Town, is an adaptation of the beloved play by Thornton Wilder, it may become Rorem's most enduring work. The piece debuts at Indiana University in Bloomington, February 24-March 4, and is slated for productions in the spring and summer by five other companies, from Aspen, Colo., to Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

"It's about people who are not bigger than life but who suffer or undergo the standard climaxes of life, like adolescence, marriage, and death," Rorem says of the 1938 play. "We who are Quaker say, 'It speaks to my condition.'"

Speaking of conditions, are there any gays or lesbians in the fictional New Hampshire town of Grover's Corners? "There's one, the choirmaster, who's a drunk and commits suicide," says Rorem. "He's probably gay. That's hinted at in the movie."

But J.D. McClatchy, an old friend of Rorem's who wrote the libretto for Our Town, disagrees. "Why would I make the one unhappy, suicidal character gay? Maybe Ned [read this character as gay because he] wanted to write a gay opera," says McClatchy.

Actually, McClatchy and Rorem talked about collaborating on an opera about Walt Whitman more than a decade ago. In the meantime, McClatchy, the out poet who is also editor of The Yale Review, has penned librettos for a dozen other American operas. Among them is Miss Lonelyhearts by out composer Lowell Liebermann, which premieres at the Juilliard School on April 26.

Now, having pooled their talents on Our Town, the collaborators get the fun of arguing about what they've wrought. "Inevitably there were gay people in Grover's Corners, [as well as] in Hemingway and Tolstoy," concedes McClatchy. And as for that poor choir director, "he has a sadness and a secret."

"All choir directors [are gay], without exception," Rorem deadpans. "No brass players, fewer tenors than you might think, 50% of baritones."

Rorem came up with this formula decades ago--and probably based it on firsthand knowledge, if his many published titillating diaries are any indication. He even shared his theories and findings with the great sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Rorem took Kinsey's famous test in 1948, and afterward the two ,developed a friendly correspondence. Rorem s letters about matters musical and sexual are housed in the Kinsey Institute, which also happens to be at Indiana University, where Our Town premieres. More of Rorem's diaries and other writings from 1993 to 2005 are scheduled to be published this fall in a collection titled Facing the Night (Shoemaker and Hoard). It will be his 17th book.

"When I've finished something I usually just forget about it and go on," says Rorem. "We've invented art as a way to get through life."

Dalton is a music critic and arts reporter for the Albany, N.Y., Times Union.