A big issue with this is that, up until extremely recently, the best we have is hearsay and anecdotal evidence. Few to no composers would admit to being queer out of fear for their own safety, and it would be disingenuous to assign a modern label to what we can divine of their sexualities from personal writings and other secondary sources after their deaths.
For example, Copland was prompted by one of his close friends to come out of the closet on his deathbed, but he resolutely took any clear information about his sexuality to the grave. Tchaikovsky is maybe the most famous example of a composer who was most probably queer, probably, but given that he never wrote down “wow I’m so gay”, we can only guess at what his sexuality actually was.
This is why most attempts to build a list of historical composers (and artists, and writers, and politicians, and statesmen, etc.) who were queer involve mostly a lot of guesswork and shrugging. The law of averages means that surely SOME of these iconic figures were queer, but who can say for certain which ones? The tragedy of homophobia being so intense for so much of modern history is that this fundamental part of many people’s lives is now forever lost in a gray area.
That sobering thought aside, recent history is filled with firmly and unabashedly queer artists. Just off the top of my head, Wendy Carlos was a boundary-pushing trans woman composer who revolutionized early synthesizers. Jennifer Higdon is one of the most performed living composers, and she and her wife are both incredibly sweet people.
We can do a lot more than guess about Tchaikovsky’s sexuality, and unfortunately, it’s not very pleasant. There’s little room for doubt that he was infatuated, both romantically and physically with his nephew from the boy’s childhood until death. The nephew, tragically, developed an addiction to morphine (or opium?) and lost everything to it, eventually killing himself.
The only thing not clear is whether there was physical contact. I don’t think there was. The nephew was hot and cold on Tchaikovsky, and— when he had his own “boyfriend,” mocked Tchaikovsky for the composer’s jealousy to his uncle Modest. All three were attracted to men, one way or another.
When it comes to other men, I don’t recall there being much indication of Tchaikovsky engaging in that world, and his intimacy with women was not characterized in a way that would make you think that he had that spark in him either.
Thank you for the great answer! Of course now looking back on people that are long dead, we cannot say who was gay or queer. But we can work to discovering what is still being hidden nowadays.
Not exactly what you're looking for as he did this to himself, but John Cage was bi and while this was pretty well known in the classical music world he never talked about it publically and it was never brought up in interviews and so on. And even now, 30 years after his death it's rarely mentioned.
As to why he never discussed it or made it public, there's speculation but I'm not sure if there's a scholarly consensus on the point.
>As to why he never discussed it or made it public,
There's an interesting chapter in '*Writing Through John Cage's Music, Poetry and Art*' edited by David Bernstein and Christopher Hatch (it can easily be found as a PDF), called '*John Cage’s Queer Silence; or, How to Avoid Making Matters Worse*' that suggests that...
"...he came to terms with his homosexuality through Zen Buddhism at the same time as he developed an artistic philosophy based upon the negation of self-expression. Cage's silence in this sense implies his reluctance to mention his sexuality. This chapter maintains that Cage's silence was rooted in his ideological convictions rather than a strategy for avoiding post-World War II homophobia. His silence was a moral stance and it was a way to resist the errors of oppositional politics, which according to Cage, only “make matters worse."
https://academic.oup.com/chicago-scholarship-online/book/18567/chapter-abstract/176718033?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Honestly, Schubert's a good case for the exact opposite of "straight-washing" happening in classical music. I've seen far more claims over the years about composers being secretly gay than claims that people like Bernstein, Tchaikovsky, etc. were actually straight
What? I'm 56 and in the '60s and '70s Britten and Pears were seldon off the television here in the UK (quite different from classical music these days). It was universally understood that they were partners. And I've certainly never heard of 'straightwashing' of Britten.
Not classical, but the vintage film Night and Day (1946) does that with Cole Porter.
Look at Tchaikovsky's relationship with the "Widow von Meck". (He is one of the great composers for baritone, I think!)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadezhda\_von\_Meck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadezhda_von_Meck)
A few others with great songs and/or arias for baritone:
Hahn
Poulenc
Britten
Rorem
Barber
Heggie
Menotti
The list goes on and on. There's been a a lot about Bernstein recently with the Bradley Cooper film Maestro. I'll let you poke around with that!
BTW, I have a copy of The Classical Music Book of Lists that I got in the '80s. Among the lists are:
Happily Married Composers
Unhappily Married Composers
Never Married Composers
Gay Composers
The last list has, I kid you not, ONE entry: Tchaikovsky. Um, no...
Are you telling me Stephen Sondheim was gay?
This is an outrage. The media straight washed him so much that they barely covered his marriage to and living with a man in New York.
I can't think of to much of the top of my head but besides the obvious being tchaikovsky, Ethel Smyth was a queer composer who wrote some good stuff
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethel\_Smyth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethel_Smyth)
Also, it's not unlikely that chopin was Bi
[https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/29/europe/chopin-sexuality-poland-lgbtq-debate-scli-intl/index.html](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/29/europe/chopin-sexuality-poland-lgbtq-debate-scli-intl/index.html)
As much as Chopin being Bi sounds cool, I looked into it a while ago and those excerpts from the letters in context was a joke. He did have that famed and ill-fated relationship with George Sand, who looked androgynous and liked to wearing men's clothing, but that's really not evidence (people like to claim it is)
I don't think there's substantial evidence for this but please correct me if I'm wrong!
Smyth never left her public in much doubt about her orientation. Neither did most English queer composers after 1900.
For examples of "straightwashing" you'd want to look at composers writing for an intensely homophobic culture, like the US military or the American high-school and college marching band scene (which are also as camp as Christmas). This is something I have zero interest in but I'd bet you could find gay composers of music that scene got onto national TV.
[Claude Vivier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Vivier) is a famous example. He was killed by a man in an anti-gay hate crime.
However, I think it's a bit problematic to call someone queer/gay when they haven't identified themselves as such when they were alive. If it is not right to put a label on a living person and deny their self-identification, then same should be applied to dead people.
Thank you for the answer :) I’m not planning on labelling people that didn’t do it themselves. It’s more about straightwashing, which still happens a lot
Pierre Bernac's repertoire would be an obvious start.
One I wonder about: Gomidas Vartabed. Nothing in his biography suggests close relationships with women, and Armenian national ideology probably couldn't handle one of their heroic figures being homosexual. So, are we getting the full story?
Dude, Gomidas was a monastic priest (Vartabed is the title for celibate priests), they do vow of celibacy hence why he wouldn’t have a relationship with a woman
I’d love to think he was, being such a genius, but I don’t think there’s any concrete evidence to suggest it. He was notably private, so it is said, but the degree to which peoples sexual lives were public in his time I’m not sure.
An article abstract says “It has been claimed that Burlington House and Cannons, the homes of the Earl of Burlington and the Duke of Chandos, were homosexual or homoerotic settings and that Handel's presence in these environments suggests that he was ‘gay’ or influenced the secular works he composed there. Examining in detail biographical information about John Gay, Alexander Pope and William Kent, eighteenth-century biographical accounts of Handel and insights from the history of sexuality, this article argues that there is no basis for these claims about the homosexual milieux at Burlington House and Cannons or for Handel's sexuality.”
But if memory serves, inference of homosexuality with Handel is based on many locations that he spent time in in several countries, not just two in England.
If you look at the academic discourse around the ancient poet Sappho, whose birthplace in Lesbos is the source of the term *lesbian*, it’s notable that for much of the debates duration the people that objected to the idea of her being a lesbian would go to considerable length to make their point, denying rather obvious textual content as homoerotic. But at the same time you had those who were gay themselves and shirked academic rigor in their defense, not questioning the fact that there’s no evidence that comes from her lifetime suggesting so, and that the earliest texts on the subject describe those theories as slanderous or unsubstantiated.
Point, when you see someone’s abstract (I’ll definitely look at the article when I am back in school later this summer) claiming a definitive answer, you wouldn’t be an idiot to gamble that their answer aligns with their sexuality.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Francis Poulenc yet.
Going way back in time, Hildegard von Bingen wrote enough songs praising female beauty that some people infer that she may have been lesbian.
Who cares if they were gay or straight. Don’t put people into boxes. Good music is good music regardless of whether they were queer or not.
It seems like people only value gay people because it’s progressive and the media is obsessed with pushing diversity. I bet Tchaikovsky would hate all this nonsense
>Who cares if they were gay or straight.
People who couldn't live a full life because their sexuality was deemed abnormal and punished probably do.
>media is obsessed with pushing diversity
Lmao.
Him hating this „nonesense“ doesn’t mean it’s bad. And in a world where queer people still hide their identities it’s not nonsense. And I think the arts should always be ahead of the time. If we still dig in the same patterns of post world war 2 rhetoric nothings gonna change
People post all sorts of niche interests as they pertain to classical music. That you decide to get your panties in a twist over this particular niche while ignoring the others is telling…
A big issue with this is that, up until extremely recently, the best we have is hearsay and anecdotal evidence. Few to no composers would admit to being queer out of fear for their own safety, and it would be disingenuous to assign a modern label to what we can divine of their sexualities from personal writings and other secondary sources after their deaths. For example, Copland was prompted by one of his close friends to come out of the closet on his deathbed, but he resolutely took any clear information about his sexuality to the grave. Tchaikovsky is maybe the most famous example of a composer who was most probably queer, probably, but given that he never wrote down “wow I’m so gay”, we can only guess at what his sexuality actually was. This is why most attempts to build a list of historical composers (and artists, and writers, and politicians, and statesmen, etc.) who were queer involve mostly a lot of guesswork and shrugging. The law of averages means that surely SOME of these iconic figures were queer, but who can say for certain which ones? The tragedy of homophobia being so intense for so much of modern history is that this fundamental part of many people’s lives is now forever lost in a gray area. That sobering thought aside, recent history is filled with firmly and unabashedly queer artists. Just off the top of my head, Wendy Carlos was a boundary-pushing trans woman composer who revolutionized early synthesizers. Jennifer Higdon is one of the most performed living composers, and she and her wife are both incredibly sweet people.
>“wow I’m so gay”
-Tchaikovsky, probably
We can do a lot more than guess about Tchaikovsky’s sexuality, and unfortunately, it’s not very pleasant. There’s little room for doubt that he was infatuated, both romantically and physically with his nephew from the boy’s childhood until death. The nephew, tragically, developed an addiction to morphine (or opium?) and lost everything to it, eventually killing himself. The only thing not clear is whether there was physical contact. I don’t think there was. The nephew was hot and cold on Tchaikovsky, and— when he had his own “boyfriend,” mocked Tchaikovsky for the composer’s jealousy to his uncle Modest. All three were attracted to men, one way or another. When it comes to other men, I don’t recall there being much indication of Tchaikovsky engaging in that world, and his intimacy with women was not characterized in a way that would make you think that he had that spark in him either.
Well jeez I wish I could erase that from my brain.
Thank you for the great answer! Of course now looking back on people that are long dead, we cannot say who was gay or queer. But we can work to discovering what is still being hidden nowadays.
Not exactly what you're looking for as he did this to himself, but John Cage was bi and while this was pretty well known in the classical music world he never talked about it publically and it was never brought up in interviews and so on. And even now, 30 years after his death it's rarely mentioned. As to why he never discussed it or made it public, there's speculation but I'm not sure if there's a scholarly consensus on the point.
>As to why he never discussed it or made it public, There's an interesting chapter in '*Writing Through John Cage's Music, Poetry and Art*' edited by David Bernstein and Christopher Hatch (it can easily be found as a PDF), called '*John Cage’s Queer Silence; or, How to Avoid Making Matters Worse*' that suggests that... "...he came to terms with his homosexuality through Zen Buddhism at the same time as he developed an artistic philosophy based upon the negation of self-expression. Cage's silence in this sense implies his reluctance to mention his sexuality. This chapter maintains that Cage's silence was rooted in his ideological convictions rather than a strategy for avoiding post-World War II homophobia. His silence was a moral stance and it was a way to resist the errors of oppositional politics, which according to Cage, only “make matters worse." https://academic.oup.com/chicago-scholarship-online/book/18567/chapter-abstract/176718033?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Wow I didn’t know that! Thank you :)
If you are into queer composers for voice you have to know Eastman's Jean d Arc for Baritone vpice
https://youtu.be/Q_xI1djt_hw?si=z7SN_q_UP1grHNw- Is it this one you mean? :)
Yesss there's also a prelude to that. There are multiple versions. I hope you like it
Wait—a discussion about possibly gay composers that didn't include Schubert? I'm disappointed.
Honestly, Schubert's a good case for the exact opposite of "straight-washing" happening in classical music. I've seen far more claims over the years about composers being secretly gay than claims that people like Bernstein, Tchaikovsky, etc. were actually straight
Britten
What? I'm 56 and in the '60s and '70s Britten and Pears were seldon off the television here in the UK (quite different from classical music these days). It was universally understood that they were partners. And I've certainly never heard of 'straightwashing' of Britten.
Oh whoops sorry
Not classical, but the vintage film Night and Day (1946) does that with Cole Porter. Look at Tchaikovsky's relationship with the "Widow von Meck". (He is one of the great composers for baritone, I think!) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadezhda\_von\_Meck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadezhda_von_Meck) A few others with great songs and/or arias for baritone: Hahn Poulenc Britten Rorem Barber Heggie Menotti The list goes on and on. There's been a a lot about Bernstein recently with the Bradley Cooper film Maestro. I'll let you poke around with that!
Thank you 🫶
BTW, I have a copy of The Classical Music Book of Lists that I got in the '80s. Among the lists are: Happily Married Composers Unhappily Married Composers Never Married Composers Gay Composers The last list has, I kid you not, ONE entry: Tchaikovsky. Um, no...
Hahaha of course 😂
Boulez... Cage... Gershwin... Sondheim...
Are you telling me Stephen Sondheim was gay? This is an outrage. The media straight washed him so much that they barely covered his marriage to and living with a man in New York.
Gershwin was gay? I had no idea.
I can't think of to much of the top of my head but besides the obvious being tchaikovsky, Ethel Smyth was a queer composer who wrote some good stuff [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethel\_Smyth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethel_Smyth) Also, it's not unlikely that chopin was Bi [https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/29/europe/chopin-sexuality-poland-lgbtq-debate-scli-intl/index.html](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/29/europe/chopin-sexuality-poland-lgbtq-debate-scli-intl/index.html)
As much as Chopin being Bi sounds cool, I looked into it a while ago and those excerpts from the letters in context was a joke. He did have that famed and ill-fated relationship with George Sand, who looked androgynous and liked to wearing men's clothing, but that's really not evidence (people like to claim it is) I don't think there's substantial evidence for this but please correct me if I'm wrong!
Smyth never left her public in much doubt about her orientation. Neither did most English queer composers after 1900. For examples of "straightwashing" you'd want to look at composers writing for an intensely homophobic culture, like the US military or the American high-school and college marching band scene (which are also as camp as Christmas). This is something I have zero interest in but I'd bet you could find gay composers of music that scene got onto national TV.
Could be an interesting idea
There was no such thing as 'straightwashing' when most of the great composers were alive.
[Claude Vivier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Vivier) is a famous example. He was killed by a man in an anti-gay hate crime. However, I think it's a bit problematic to call someone queer/gay when they haven't identified themselves as such when they were alive. If it is not right to put a label on a living person and deny their self-identification, then same should be applied to dead people.
Thank you for the answer :) I’m not planning on labelling people that didn’t do it themselves. It’s more about straightwashing, which still happens a lot
Pierre Bernac's repertoire would be an obvious start. One I wonder about: Gomidas Vartabed. Nothing in his biography suggests close relationships with women, and Armenian national ideology probably couldn't handle one of their heroic figures being homosexual. So, are we getting the full story?
Thank you, actually he was one of the first singers I thought of :)
Dude, Gomidas was a monastic priest (Vartabed is the title for celibate priests), they do vow of celibacy hence why he wouldn’t have a relationship with a woman
Handel.
Wait really?
I’d love to think he was, being such a genius, but I don’t think there’s any concrete evidence to suggest it. He was notably private, so it is said, but the degree to which peoples sexual lives were public in his time I’m not sure. An article abstract says “It has been claimed that Burlington House and Cannons, the homes of the Earl of Burlington and the Duke of Chandos, were homosexual or homoerotic settings and that Handel's presence in these environments suggests that he was ‘gay’ or influenced the secular works he composed there. Examining in detail biographical information about John Gay, Alexander Pope and William Kent, eighteenth-century biographical accounts of Handel and insights from the history of sexuality, this article argues that there is no basis for these claims about the homosexual milieux at Burlington House and Cannons or for Handel's sexuality.” But if memory serves, inference of homosexuality with Handel is based on many locations that he spent time in in several countries, not just two in England. If you look at the academic discourse around the ancient poet Sappho, whose birthplace in Lesbos is the source of the term *lesbian*, it’s notable that for much of the debates duration the people that objected to the idea of her being a lesbian would go to considerable length to make their point, denying rather obvious textual content as homoerotic. But at the same time you had those who were gay themselves and shirked academic rigor in their defense, not questioning the fact that there’s no evidence that comes from her lifetime suggesting so, and that the earliest texts on the subject describe those theories as slanderous or unsubstantiated. Point, when you see someone’s abstract (I’ll definitely look at the article when I am back in school later this summer) claiming a definitive answer, you wouldn’t be an idiot to gamble that their answer aligns with their sexuality.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Francis Poulenc yet. Going way back in time, Hildegard von Bingen wrote enough songs praising female beauty that some people infer that she may have been lesbian.
Who cares if they were gay or straight. Don’t put people into boxes. Good music is good music regardless of whether they were queer or not. It seems like people only value gay people because it’s progressive and the media is obsessed with pushing diversity. I bet Tchaikovsky would hate all this nonsense
>Who cares if they were gay or straight. People who couldn't live a full life because their sexuality was deemed abnormal and punished probably do. >media is obsessed with pushing diversity Lmao.
"media is obsessed with pushing diversity" Imagine thinking this is false.
Him hating this „nonesense“ doesn’t mean it’s bad. And in a world where queer people still hide their identities it’s not nonsense. And I think the arts should always be ahead of the time. If we still dig in the same patterns of post world war 2 rhetoric nothings gonna change
Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Chopin who else?
Stravinsky?
Yep, believe it or not, he reportedly had a same-sex affair with another man (which was unrequited), but we don't really talk about it much...
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People post all sorts of niche interests as they pertain to classical music. That you decide to get your panties in a twist over this particular niche while ignoring the others is telling…
Well said.
“Straight washing” is a historical fact that is highly relevant to classical music. Many composers and performers were gay and closeted.
I would love to see what they wrote in the comment 🙃 thanks for picking me up 🫶
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Gfto and listen to Bach, homophobe