“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 sweaterbar on Manhattan’s upper east side. “I stayed for 28 seconds,” he says.

That was long enough for a 38-year-old 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 in 1999.)

“We have a lot of friends in common, Steve Sondheim being one of them,” says Rorem of his new beau. “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 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 four other companies, from Aspen to Saratoga Springs.

“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,” says Rorem about the 1938 play. “We who are Quaker say ‘It speaks to my condition.’”

Were there any gays or lesbians in the fictional New Hampshire town of Grover’s Corners?

“There’s one, the choir master, who’s a drunk and commits suicide,” says Rorem. “He’s probably gay. That’s hinted at in the movie.”

But librettist J. D. McClatchy, who is also president of the Thornton Wilder Society, disagrees.

“Why would I make the one unhappy suicidal character gay? … Maybe (Ned) wanted to write a gay opera,” say McClatchy.

Actually McClatchy and Rorem talked about collaborating on an opera about Walt Whitman more than a decade ago. In the meantime, McClatchy, who is also gay and 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.

“Inevitably there were gay people in Grover’s Corners, (as well as in) in Hemingway and Tolstoy,” admits McClatchy. And as for that poor choir director, “he has a sadness and a secret,” says McClatchy.

“All choir directors (are gay), without exception,” deadpans Rorem. “No brass players, fewer tenors than you might think, 50 percent of baritones…”

Rorem came up with the formula decades ago—and probably based it on first hand knowledge, if his titillating diaries are any indication. He even shared his theories and finding with the great sex research 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 recent writings are to be published this spring, 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.”

A version of this story originally appeared in The Advocate.