Who I Am

This is me, circa November 2013.  Taken at a gathering of online forum friends.

The Anagrams of Eric Peterson

• Entire corpse
• Tenor recipes
• Encore sprite
• I secrete porn
• creepier snot
• precise toner (good one for a French horn player)
• recent poser I
• icon pesterer
• and (drag your mouse over this blank space below to read...)

  Penis Erector!

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  The Details

  The Beginning

  I was born in Washington D.C. in 1964 and grew up in McLean, Virginia (a DC suburb) with my parents and older sister. Mom and Dad retired to Beaufort, SC for 25 years or so, then ended up in Durham, NC near my (now) brother. 
  
   

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  Schools

  I went to college in Williamsburg, where I majored in music and waffled between several minors before ending up with Psychology.

  I then went to graduate school in Baltimore, where I majored in horn performance and minored in voice.

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  OMG, I'm a Big Homo

  During my grad school years, I went through the terrifying and exhilarating process of coming out of the closet, which solved many problems and created almost none. Since then, I've been proudly, if quietly out, figuring the best form of activism is simply to provide an example of a happy openly-gay man.

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  The Philadelphia Years

  I moved to Philly after grad school, figuring it was on the East Coast, but wasn't DC (where I grew up), Baltimore (which I was ready to leave) or New York (which I wasn't ready for yet). I spent the rest of my twenties there starting my career as a computer geek, did a lot of community theater, played horn, sang semi-professional opera chorus, conducted Philly's gay band and Learned About Love.

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  Leopold the Cat

  

  In 1991, I adopted a huge black fluffy thing named Leopold. Mr. Leo was only a ten-month old kitten when his first owner - a friend of several friends of mine - passed away suddenly. Mr. Leo was my neurotic, evil, gorgeous and much loved boy for fifteen wonderful years, until we lost him to various illnesses in May, 2006.

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  It's a Wonderful Town

  In 1994, literally on my 30th birthday, I moved to New York City and instantly my life became much more stimulating. Although many people warned me about the perils of New York, it turned out to be everything I hoped it would be.

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  The Wumpus

  Four months after I moved to NYC, I met the most wonderful man in the world. Six months later, we set up household in historic Jackson Heights, Queens.  We're still there and still going strong.

Why Wumpus?  Just a nickname I started calling him online when we first met.  I call him Mr. Man online now, and other things in private.

 

That's us in Sorrento, Italy, in 2005.  We travel a lot.

Oh, yes, and then we got married.  That was fun!   Aug 2019 was our fifth wedding anniversary.  Jan 2020 will be our 25th anniversary together.

Work

During grad school, I discovered how easy it was to earn money knowing just a little bit about computers. I did word-processing and other computer stuff for a Baltimore law firm part-time. Once in Philadelphia, I started doing tech support and eventually training. I managed to weed out the tech support (hurrah!) and segue into technical writing. Now I'm a Senior Business Analyst. I was in the same job (sort of) for over twenty years, but got laid off in Nov 2018.  Got a new job in Feb 2019, but it was a poor fit and they mercifully laid me off in Dec 2019.  (what's next?  Good question)

Performing

Although I never attempted to go pro after grad school, I've always been performing in one way or another. Acting, musical-directing, band directing, opera chorus, chamber music, a whole bunch of stuff. I spent my first few years in NYC playing horn with a woodwind quintet, and performing on and off with the Lesbian and Gay Big Apple Corps band, the sister band to the one I conducted in Philadelphia. In '98, very suddenly, I became the BAC's artistic director and spent seven seasons with them, conducting over twenty concerts and leading the band in its Carnegie Hall debut. Band took up all my time until I stepped down on Maestro Eric Peterson Day.   Since then, I've played with the band as much as I can, and ran a chamber music conference for them when they hosted the 2008 LGBA conference.

Since retiring from the band, I've returned to the theater, hurrah, music-directing ten shows and serving a couple of seasons as a choral director. I also won a major award.  See Eric Peterson Music Services for more info.

 

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Online Haunts

I spent years handing around online forums and have many many invisible friends.  Mostly I'm on Facebook now ("toastpoint"), Twitter (also "toastpoint").  I've also blogged since the early 2000's  - see stanharding.livejournal.com.