Guest Speaker Tells Compelling Story of His Complex Journey Toward Coming Out

One Friday night in the fall of 1994, Sean Baugh, then an Oklahoma Baptist University student was violently assaulted by two men in one of the city’s largest parks.

Suffering dislocated hips, Baugh managed to drag himself out of a ravine and a car stopped to help him. A crowd began to gather. One of Baugh’s friends who was in the crowd didn’t recognize him because he was so beaten and bloodied.

During an Exchange PRIDE lunch and learn Oct. 9, Baugh told an audience of more than 160 that he filed a police report but the incident was never investigated. He spent a week in the hospital—during which university officials got a copy of the police report. Earlier, when the school discovered that he was gay, Baugh had to sign a contract requiring him to adhere to a strict code of conduct.

“Considering the circumstances of the attack, I was in violation of a clause in my contract—I was involved in homosexual activity and that was it,” he said. “They released me from school in my senior year just before graduation. They never checked on my health—emotional or spiritual or physical.”

Throughout his talk, Baugh stressed that people who are coming out as LGBTQ+ should do it when they’re ready.

“Sometimes it requires a great deal of strength, and you should do that whenever you are comfortable with it,” he said. “I would suggest you do it gently.

“I was forced out,” he added. “That is not the way to go.”

In remarks before Baugh’s talk, Exchange Chief of Food Support Craig Masek, one of PRIDE’s co-program managers, said that coming out isn’t a single event but a lifelong process. Baugh illustrated that with his own story, one that involved doubts and conflicts well before he was assaulted. He even spent a couple of years praying to have his homosexuality taken away—until he heard a voice ask, “Why do you keep asking me to take things away from you that are a part of you?”

“From that moment on,” Baugh said, “I decided that I was not going to pray for that anymore.”

Baugh grew up on a farm in northeast Oklahoma. It was isolated, but it was within driving distance of Tulsa.

“I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, and gay role models were not something you saw yet,” he said. “The only gay person I knew was a twentysomething-year-old employee at the Taco Bell in my hometown. … I would sit there and watch this person live their life, and to know that there was at least one other gay person out there was incredibly comforting to me.”

Baugh did not have a firm grasp on his identity—he just knew that he was different from the other boys he grew up with. He discovered music when his grandfather—a preacher—signed him up for piano lessons when he was 5 years old. Baugh took to the lessons, and grew up in art and acting.

“I played piano at church, [ticking] off the grouchy older piano player lady that I unseated from time to time,” he said. “I played trumpet in the band and throughout high school, I acted and I sang and I played.”

During high school, he realized that he was gay. He had older gay friends who gave him advice. “But it wasn’t until it became time for me to go to college that the realities of who I was started to clash with the myth of who I was taught I was supposed to be,” he said.

In 1991, he enrolled at the University of Kansas. During orientation, students were told to be respectful of gay and lesbian fellow students.

“I knew I was in the wrong place, because I didn’t want to be gay,” he said. “I didn’t want to be around gays. It was a sin. I knew this. It was bad, it was wrong and it was dirty.”

After a week at Kansas, he returned to Oklahoma, where he enrolled at Oklahoma Baptist to study music. He provided music for youth worship at various church camps, toured with university ensembles and stopped fighting who he was.

“It wasn’t long before the university discovered who I was, and they began to investigate my homosexuality,” he said. “I started to receive phone calls from friends at school who told me they were being brought in one by one to be questioned about my sexuality. They were being warned not to tell me that they were being questioned or else they would be dismissed from school.”

Baugh decided to face the challenge head on with the support of Dr. Nancy Hill Cobb, a faculty member he trusted—while he was out to a few friends at the time, she was one of the first authority figures he came out to.

“She was my choir director at Oklahoma Baptist,” he said. “She went with me to the dean of students’ office and told them that they could not do this to another human being. And she lost her job later because of that. She was denied her tenure. She ended up going to other universities and making a huge difference in those students’ lives. She not only called herself a Christian, but went into that office and stood up for me when nobody else would.”

Oklahoma Baptist was not the only place Baugh encountered resistance at the time.

“This was happening while my parents…became aware of my sexuality,” he said. “They viewed it as a sin. It was really one of the worst things that could have happened to our family at the time.”

His university contract mandated conversion therapy.

“It was a month or two away from my senior year,” he said. “I was way too embedded in the life of this place to leave. So I decided to stay and sign this contract.”

At his first therapy session, the counselor asked him if he really wanted to be there. He said no. He was sent home. But it wasn’t a total release.

“I actually honor the counselor for that,” Baugh said. “But what I didn’t realize was that this was going to be strike one against my contract.”

Then the assault in the park happened. Found in violation of his contract, Baugh was released in his senior year before he could graduate. He was able to transfer to the nearby University of Central Oklahoma—but had to delay his graduation by a year.

“My faith was shook,” he said. “My trust in people was damaged. But what was not damaged was my love of music.”

He moved to Dallas, which he found to be more accepting, and earned a graduate degree in conducting at Southern Methodist University. He chose a career in marketing and design, working at a large marketing agency in Dallas. But the urge to make music never left. And then he found the Turtle Creek Chorale.

“They were already world-renowned when I joined them to be a singer in 2006,” he said. “Both to sing for the then-outgoing conductor of 20 years, Tim Seelig, and to perform in a piece I had come to love called ‘When We No Longer Touch.’ It was one of the very first requiems for AIDS victims. By then, the chorale had lost nearly 180 singers to AIDS over the years.” (You can hear the whole piece, separated into several YouTube clips, here.)

He fell in love with the chorale, not just because of the beauty and power, but for its heart—which touched his own family.

“My father, who was an Army Veteran, lost his life years after he was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam,” Baugh said. “He stood proudly at a concert as an Army Vet while 200 gay men sang the Army song for him. I’m really thankful I got to share that with him before he died.”

Even after moving to Dallas, Baugh still occasionally felt conflicted. He had a partner named Gene for six years who his parents never met—because when they came to visit, Baugh asked Gene to leave the house while they were there.

Baugh’s father died without ever meeting Gene. Baugh’s mother, who had not met Gene yet, asked why he didn’t come to the funeral. Baugh was stunned—he wasn’t even aware that his mother knew who Gene was. But she’d figured things out from Facebook.

“After that, my mother met Gene and learned to love him,” he said. “And my grandparents, who were extremely conservative, both met him. They understood who he was and they treated him with an incredible amount of kindness.”

Baugh later told the audience that coming out should also honor the people you’re coming out to and their experience.

“I did not give my family the benefit of the doubt that they would love Gene,” he said. “I made an assumption that they would not accept him, and that assumption was wrong and I missed out on my father ever getting to meet my partner of six years because my assumptions did not honor their ability to have empathy.”

Baugh had an opportunity to become the chorale’s conductor, and he’s been its artistic director since 2015. He gave up his marketing gig for a full-time job as choir and orchestra conductor at Dallas’ Cathedral of Hope, the largest LGBTQ+ church in the world.

“Through that church, I was able to rediscover the faith that had literally been beaten out of me,” he said. “And through some really wildly coincidental circumstances, I found myself on the podium of the Turtle Creek Chorale, leading this group of singers. Over the past 11 years, I’ve been blessed with the honor of using my experiences with the church, with hate, and with love that I found in unexpected places, to shape a chorus.

“I truly believe that without my experiences growing up and the things I went through, I would not have been emotionally or spiritually equipped to do any of this,” he added. “Many of our singers come from places of such darkness. They’re looking for a family. They need a pastor. They need a therapist. They need a leader. They don’t just need a conductor.”

Baugh concluded his talk by quoting lyrics from a piece titled “Let Me Listen,”  a song by Dan Forrest and Charles Anthony Silvestri that the chorale performed in 2023 with the Dallas Symphony:

“We come from different places,
You and I,
on different paths we journey;
let me walk beside you for a while –
let me listen.

So briefly do our lonely paths converge,
Yours and mine,
along this human journey;
what hollow loss to never hear your song –
let me listen.”

Baugh added: “The chorus says, ‘Let me listen, let me listen as your story, your triumphs and your tears, your trials and your fears. Your story has never been mine to tell, so let me listen.”

To learn more about Turtle Creek Chorale, click here. You can view performance videos and more here.

Exchange PRIDE (People Respecting Individuality, Diversity & Equality) presented the lunch and learn. Executive Vice President/Chief Human Resources Officer Dr. Patrick Oldenburgh Jr. is executive champion. Audit Project Manager Roger Hugh is co-program manager along with Masek. Senior Talent Manager Brian Lautieri and Restaurant Program Manager Patrick Newman are assistant program managers.

Associates interested in joining a special emphasis program, including PRIDE, or are interested in knowing what resources are available to them, can click here to view the Equal Employment Opportunity Diversity and Inclusion’s SharePoint portal.

If you missed the lunch and learn, you can watch it below: