‘What I do with my body is none of your business’: musician Beverly Glenn-Copeland on trans rights, cult stardom and living with dementia

When Beverly Glenn-Copeland was diagnosed with a form of dementia called Late two years ago, he was advised to stay at home and do crossword puzzles. He tried, but he doesn’t like crosswords, and it didn’t feel right. One day, recalls his wife Elizabeth, he said: “Honey, I know this is meant to be giving me more time, but I just feel like we’re not living a life. I have places I want to see and people I want to meet before I die. Since we have to make money, let’s make money doing what we love to do.”

And so the couple, who live in Hamilton, Ontario, are in London, midway through a tour that is the latest chapter in Glenn’s extraordinary late-in-life journey from unknown musician to revered cult icon. It has only been 10 years since his indefinably radiant music was rediscovered (not that it was ever really discovered in the first place), and he wants to enjoy it.

If you didn’t know that there are things Glenn can no longer do – drive a car, fill in paperwork, transcribe his music – you would take him for an unusually sprightly 81-year-old. Swaddled in a fleece and a giant scarf in the garden of the couple’s rented house, his hair a snowy cloud, he has a sly, twinkling mirth and an explosive, eye-rolling laugh. “Some things go downhill,” Elizabeth tells me before we sit down, “but in some ways he’s more himself than ever.”

Partners and collaborators for almost 20 years, the couple appear intertwined, leaning on each other’s shoulders, clasping hands and tag-teaming anecdotes. At one point Elizabeth reminds Glenn of a favourite song and he fondly taps her head: “This is my memory.”

Music has always come easily to Glenn. “It just gets sent to me and then often I forget I wrote it,” he says. “And that doesn’t have to do with the dementia. That’s just how my mind works. It’s an in-the-moment thing. I can’t sight-read for heck but if I receive it, I’m able to put everything down.”

“Glenn is a savant,” says Elizabeth. Glenn shields his mouth with his hand to deliver a comic aside: “Usually they call them idiot savants.”

For most of his life, Glenn made music without hope of recognition. Two singer-songwriter albums in the early 1970s – imagine a more fraught Terry Callier – went nowhere. His 1986 album Keyboard Fantasies, a meditative miracle that gets labelled ambient or new age but is really sui generis, sold a few dozen copies on cassette. Most of his music remained private. He has countless unheard songs recorded on various outmoded formats over the years.

“It didn’t bother me at all,” he says cheerfully. “I wasn’t doing it for an audience. I was doing it because it was sent to me. The kind of music I was receiving wasn’t the kind of thing that would excite most audiences. People were like, What is this?” He was much better known (and paid) through his role on the Canadian children’s television show Mr Dressup.

Elizabeth remembers seeing Glenn perform in a restaurant in Toronto in 1976, when she was 19 and he was still identifying as a woman. “Very few people in 1976 appeared gender neutral,” she says. “He was sitting up there in a tracksuit, playing beautiful music but not remotely interested in the audience. It was like, if you’re listening, you’re listening, and if you’re not, you’re not.”

Elizabeth, who has been a poet, educator, improv comedian and musician, met Glenn properly in 1992 and they became friends and occasional collaborators. In 2007, they reconnected and fell in love, since working together in education, activism and community theatre. “Glenn said, ‘I know what’s going to happen, honey. I’m going to die and then they’re going to discover my music and you’re going to be set.’ And I said, ‘Screw that, I want you to feel the fruits of your labour.’”

It happened out of the blue. In 2015, when Glenn was 71, a Japanese collector tracked him down and asked if he still had any copies of Keyboard Fantasies. That set off a life-changing chain of dominoes: reissues, new recordings, team-ups with Sam Smith and the xx’s Romy, his first international live shows and an album of covers and remixes by the likes of Bon Iver and Arca.

Now the couple have made a new album with their musical director Alex Samaras and producer Howard Bilerman. Laughter in Summer was meant to be an informal session with a choir at Montreal’s Hotel2Tango studio but they emerged with nine songs, some old, some new, each one recorded in a single take.

Glenn’s version of the 19th-century folk song Shenandoah reminds him of his childhood in Philadelphia. His mother, Georgie, (“an exceptionally brilliant woman”) worked on early childhood education for the United Nations and taught him old spirituals. His father, John, was a high school principal and a classical pianist who played obsessively at home. Glenn secured a scholarship to study music at McGill University in Montreal. “When I think about it, I didn’t have much choice. [Music] was coming for me.”

Glenn didn’t even learn what trans identity was until the 1990s, but “I told my mom I was a boy when I was two or three. Sometimes you know that. It’s not about genitalia, it’s about what you feel you are. In the 50s I was forced to do all kinds of things I didn’t want to do. As soon as I could, I went, ‘That’s enough of that. I’m not going to pretend.’”

These days, gender-questioning young people often ask him for advice. “Mostly what I say is if you feel you can be who you really are, be who you really are. But we all take risks to be who we are in societies that aren’t accepting of certain things.”

He lobbied the Canadian government for years to allow trans people to change their gender on passports without intrusive tests. “He said, ‘It’s none of your business what I do with my body, it’s a question of my identity,’” says Elizabeth. It’s rough for them to see those rights reversed across the world. “We have a responsibility to continue to behave in hopeful ways,” she says. “Hope is a verb. It’s an action. It’s got muscle.”

“There are days when I could just weep,” Glenn says. “There are days when I get really angry. And then there are days when I think, well, that tends to be what happens. Things go forward and then they often get clawed back. It seems to be what us humans do. Unfortunately.”

Spiritual practice has helped keep him afloat. He was a Quaker who became a Buddhist in the 1970s and found that the two religions had much in common. “You chant to be able to overcome the things that are most difficult for you, but you also chant for other people’s happiness,” he says. “That’s the point, right?”

That same spirit of generosity and optimism infuses his music and performance. Having lived outside the music industry for so long, the couple see live shows in terms of fostering community. “It’s not the I’m-so-fabulous show,” says Elizabeth. “It’s: how can what we do in this room with these humans be of service?”

The musicians in the band also take on caring duties. The couple are candid about living “kind of on the edge” financially. When the pandemic forced the cancellation of their 2020 tour, they lost their house and would have been made homeless if their daughter hadn’t launched a crowdfunder. Life remains precarious.

“People say, ‘Don’t you sing just because you love it?’” says Elizabeth. “I sing because I love it but damn, the grocery store won’t let me sing for my groceries. Our landlord won’t accept a theme song. We enjoy the work but we also have to do it.” As Glenn puts it, “Elizabeth has been the person taking care of me but Elizabeth needs someone to take care of her.”

They hope this will not be Glenn’s last tour. His condition necessitates certain adjustments on and off stage, but, for the most part, he says, “not much has changed”. The couple also have a memoir, a musical and community workshops in the pipeline.

“We don’t want to be old people in that way that our culture tells us old people should be,” says Elizabeth, gazing around the autumnal garden. “Yes, we’re coming into the decay phase of life but when you watch the leaves turn from green to orange, often the decay phase can be the most beautiful.”

Glenn smiles up at her. “Mmm, that’s an interesting way to put it, honey. That’s true.” There will come a time for the rocking chair, he says, imitating its squeaking with a grin. “But this ain’t it.”