PeterRS Posted 7 hours ago Posted 7 hours ago The Last In The Series Marking LGBTQ-History Month LGBTQ-History month is celebrated in many countries, although the months are different. I chose that celebrated in the UK and a few other countries since the low season has approached in Thailand and there is less being written about. I believe our gay history deserves to be remembered. Wherever it falls where you live, this is my final contribution on the subject. Our LGBTQ history is almost certainly as old as recorded time. Even just going back as far as the Greek and Roman worlds, when much male to male sexual activity would almost certainly today be called pederasty, there were genuine homosexual bonds. Arguably the one we recall most often today was between Alexander and Hephaestion. We could add Achilles and Patroclus, and more. The most famous Roman-era gay couple was the Emperor Hadrian and Antinous. This started out as an older man/younger man relationship but Hadrian became besotted with the young man. When he was around 20 Hadrian took him on an expedition to Egypt where he drowned in the Nile. Hadrian ensured his name continued long after his own death and so it has continued throughout history, Even Oscar Wilde makes mention of Antinous in The Picture of Dorian Gray. “What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinous was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me.” The trailer for the 2009 movie version of The Picture of Dorian Gray Antinous’ death was regarded as highly suspicious and murder by persons unknown as jealousy of the relationship was considered. Hadrian was bereft. He declared Antinous a deity and ordered a city to be built at the site of his death. Throughout the history of most peoples there have been famous personalities who either proclaimed themselves gay or later became known as gay. Emperor Ai of China’s Han Dynasty, famous for having cut off the sleeve of his tunic rather than wake his male lover; a host throughout the first millennium; King Edward II in England in the early 1300s; leading to a near tidal wave during the Renaissance. Less seems to be known about famous gay personalities in the 19th century, at least in the English speaking world where the most obvious is Oscar Wilde. One reason perhaps was the nature of English society where underneath the prim and proper surface anything seemed to be tolerated. Punishment for homosexuality was also severe. Between 1810 and 1835 a total of 46 people were hanged for sodomy in Britain and almost 750 imprisoned. The situation in Germany was somewhat similar. Richard Wagner’s patron, the tall, handsome and gay King Ludwig II of Bavaria was so enthralled by Wagner that he virtually bankrupted the country to finance his ever more ambitious compositions. He has often been called “Mad King Ludwig” but there has never been much evidence of any mental condition. Government officials used his ‘paranoia’ about castles and Wagner as an excuse to depose him, along with his “abhorrent homophilic behaviour”. His younger brother Otto was definitely mentally ill and had been confined for most of his life to an asylum. Ironically after Ludwig’s death, Otto became King and was to reign in name from that asylum for 27 years An early postcard showing Ludwig II Ludwig is as remembered today for his famous castles. It was during imprisonment after abdication at Schloss Berg on Lake Starnberg that he was found drowned in what still remain mysterious circumstances. The lake was shallow and Ludwig was a good swimmer. The intrior of the most famous of the castles is in an austere German medieval style, Schloss Neuschwanstein Nearby Schloss Linderhof, a much smaller castle, is in the style of Versailles with sumptuously decorated rooms and formal gardens. In the vastness of the Imperial Russian Empire, homosexuality was illegal for most of the 19th century. As in England, though, all this did was consign it to its own underground where many, particularly those in the nobility, were able to indulge their passions. One of the most passionate was Grand Duke Konstantin, grandson of Tsar Nicholas 1 and uncle of nephew Nicholas II. Yet his homosexuality was not revealed until 1994, some 80 years after his death, when his frank diaries were published. Another was Prince Vladimir Meshcherskii, a close advisor to both Alexander III and Nicholas II, and equally well known to the Imperial family as one of the city’s most notorious homosexuals. Later, we know of the gay lifestyle enjoyed by the impresario Serge Diaghilev, founder of Les Ballets Russes. He belonged to a gay clique in St. Petersburg where young mostly underpaid male dancers from the Maryiinsky Ballet (known during the Soviet years as the Kirov Ballet) were prized. Partners were often swapped between members of this clique. One who was part of this trade was 18 year old Vaslav Nijinksky, regarded as arguably the finest male dancer who has ever lived. Nijinsky was a protege of 30-year old Prince Pavel Lvov who showered his poor family with all manner of gifts. When lent out to Diaghilev, Nijinsky realised that the older man could do much more for his future as a dancer than Lvov. So he switched partners. One of the few formal portraits of Nijinsky, a handsome if shy young man – copyright Alamy Even before then however, Russia was home to one homosexual who was to become not merely a national figurehead but one still known and revered all around the world. Personally I hate the term “classical music” but it is one that we just have learned to live with. For me it conjures up images of courtly palaces and gaudy churches, the two institutions without which over the last few hundred years what we term classical music might never have existed. Throughout these years there have been musicians, conductors and composers who have been gay. Like movie stars, most kept their sexuality private for it was important when mixing with society and the church hierarchy to fit in with their ideas of societal norms. Frederick the Great, the first King of Prussia was a noted composer and also gay. Camille Saint-Saëns, best known probably for his Organ Symphony where the organ dominates the final movement, and Carnival of the Animals was also gay. Siegfried Wagner, son of the very promiscuous Richard Wagner who enjoyed a considerable amount of female flesh, was very gay yet was persuaded to marry a young innocent Welsh girl Winifred aged only 17. He was 45. They remarkably produced four children before he resumed his gay life. And is it not one of the 20th century’s great mysteries that Winifred Wagner was to become a totally rabid Nazi who almost certainly had a long term affair with Hitler and remained a lifelong fan of Hitler till her death in 1980. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3623uF8XwA Part of Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s fascinating 5-hour 1975 documentary The Confessions of Winifred Wagner which youtube does not permit to be embedded 20th century composers perhaps understandably have been less concerned about being openly gay – and there were many of them. Aaron Copeland, Samuel Barber, John Cage and a host of other young Americans including Leonard Bernstein were quite open in the 1940s and 50s. Since he desperately wanted to conduct, Bernstein was advised he had to get married. Elsewhere Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears were together for nearly 40 years, latterly quite openly a couple. But the one composer lodged in most people’s minds as gay was the composer Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky. His ballets Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker are regularly performed all over the world, as are his symphonies and concertos. He is Russia’s most recognised and beloved composer. In 2013, after a century of Russians denying he was gay, even Putin spoke out on television about the composer basically saying Russians adored him for his music, not his sexuality. This was at a time when Putin was passing anti-gay laws! The young Tchaikovsky Born in 1840 and growing up in Tsarist Russia, Tchaikovsky’s early life was far from easy. A sensitive child, he was sent to St. Petersburg for schooling. The death of his mother from cholera when he was 14 deeply affected him. As a boarding student at the School of Jurisprudence, like many boarding establishments, he became intimately acquainted with homosexuality. The School itself boasted a number of prominent gay alumni. But life as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice bored him. As a young man about town, he quickly found a set of gay friends with whom he expended most of his energies. But Tsarist Russia was not a country where scandal could be accepted and once he had been threatened with exposure as gay, he limited his activities. We know this from the autobiographical account of his brother Modest who was also homosexual. By 1863 he decided to change his career and carve one out as a composer. Here he came under the spell of the gay composer, Vladimir Shilovsky. As the years passed he had affairs with many young men, including prostitutes. In 1876 he fell deeply in love involving a “passion with unimaginable force” with one of his students Iosif Kotek. As he wrote to Modest the following year – “It is impossible for me to hide my feelings for him, although I tried hard to do so at first . . . can you imagine how artful I am in hiding my feelings? My habit of eating alive any beloved object always gives me away. Yesterday I gave myself away completely... I burst. I made a total confession of love, begging him not to be angry, not to feel constrained if I bore him, etc. All of these confessions were met with a thousand various small caresses, strokes on the shoulder, cheeks, and strokes across my head. I am incapable of expressing to you the full degree of bliss that I experienced by completely giving myself away.” But like so many others, that love was not to last. Significantly, though, Kotek had already introduced one if his friends, an extremely wealthy widow with eleven children Nadezhda von Meck. For 13 years she was to become Tchaikovsky’s patron thereby enabling him to spend all his time on composition even though the two had decided – surely extraordinarily - that they would never meet. Even before these years of financial security and endless affairs with young men, he was happy. Yet he was about to enter a disastrous period in his life. Antonina Milyukova, a former conservatory student of his had a deep crush on him and bombarded him with letters. So persuasive was she, and so deeply did Tchaikovsky consider marriage could be the one way of maintaining respectability in St. Petersburg society, without his initially remembering who the lady was (!) that the marriage took place in 1877. It only took him days to realise he had made a huge mistake. After 20 days the marriage had still not been consummated. He spent a total of just one month with Antonina before leaving her for good. Finally he realised he could not change his sexuality. He accepted he was gay. Since then, many commentators have considered he became a rather sad man who spent much time reflecting on his fate. Although he never divorced and always looked after his wife financially, nothing could be further from the truth. Always promiscuous, he continued to have affairs although he never did find long term happiness, no doubt an outcome that would have placed his position in Russian society and as a composer at considerable risk. Of all his affairs, arguably the most meaningful would have been scandalous at the time – with his nephew Vladimir Davidov nicknamed ‘Bob’. Tchaikovsky was 31 years his elder. After his sister died, the two became considerably closer, no doubt because like his two uncles Bob discovered he was gay. A 1892 photo of Tchaikovsky with his nephew ‘Bob’ Despite Tchaikovsky’s adoration for him, Bob was often and understandably conflicted. But Pyotr did not give up. His Sixth and final symphony is dedicated to Bob. Many regard this Symphony as Tchaikovsky’s own death notice since, unlike almost all other symphonies by any composer, this one ends with a very slow requiem-like movement. It also includes a phrase from the Russian Orthodox Mass for the Dead. But there is absolutely nothing to indicate that he was contemplating suicide. Yet a few days later aged 53 he was dead. Allegedly he had drunk unboiled water in a restaurant (a reason for his death that is regularly cast in doubt - with cholera common, what restaurant would offer patrons unboiled water?). Pyotr left his entire estate to Bob, a considerable amount in those days. Not even Bob could escape from his famous uncle’s shadow. He struggled with morphine and alcohol for years, eventually taking his own life aged just 35. Long after the names of most well-known gay men of their time have been forgotten, that of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky will remain. When many decades hence audiences flock to hear concerts of his symphonic works and mothers take their young children to delight in the Christmas excitement of The Nutcracker, perhaps a few will recall that he remains one of the most famous gay men in history. Image from The Nutcracker – photo Royal Opera House mima_bk 1 Quote
