Band of Thebes

Born May 7: Tchaikovsky

Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture, Symphonies 4, 5, and 6 — what would the world listen to without Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky? Unfortunately, his private life was less sublime than his music. At 37, although he knew he loved men, he agreed to marry a female fan, Antonina Miliukova. Within two weeks of their wedding he tried to kill himself, hoping to catch pneumonia by soaking himself in the Moscow River. At the urging of his doctor, he fled to St. Petersburg and never saw his wife again, although he continued to support her. (The cost of the closet can be seen all around him: Miliukova had several children by other men, gave each infant to an orphanage and spent her final twenty-one years in a home for the certifiably insane. Tchaikovsky's brother Modest was also gay, and he too made an unhappy marriage.) Tchaikovsky enjoyed great renown during his lifetime and among his countless honors two days before he turned 51, he was the conductor at the opening night of Carnegie Hall. When he died at 53, sixty thousand people applied for tickets to his funeral, which for only the third time in Russian history was paid for by the Tsar.

Born April 12: Slava Mogutin

Former enfant terrible Slava Mogutin, 39, still lives to provoke. Born in Siberia (and, according to Wikipedia, “the first openly gay personality in the Russian media”) now a New Yorker (after Amnesty International and American PEN helped get him political asylum), the writer and photographer is permanently at war with the establishment. A constant and often vulgar critic of Moscow’s leaders, Mogutin has written seven books in Russian, winning the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize in 2000. He aims for a similar shock value in his hatred of establishment gays and loves to antagonize his audience, describing himself as a "cave-based, homo terrorist, pinko commie fag, and propagandist of brutal violence, psychic pathology and sexual perversions." He brings all that angry energy to his photography, which appears regularly in art, fashion, alt, and porn magazines. His best photo book is Lost Boys followed by NYC Go-Go.

Born March 31: Diaghilev, Chamberlain, Frank, Westenhoefer

  

Celebrate with the brilliant biography of cultural impresario, founder of the Ballets Russes, and Nijinsky lover Sergei Diaghilev [Kindle] who turns 141 today, or with Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman, 73, or a memoir by the Beverly Hills native and long-closeted mini-series sensation Richard Chamberlain, 79, or a cd from a lesbian comic who came out early, Suzanne Westenhoefer, 52.

Born January 23: Sergei Eisenstein, Randolph Scott

It figures that the Russian supergenius whose innovations in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Oktober (1927) still dictate how movies are shot and edited today would have no trouble creating private visual diversions for himself in an age before internet porn: He drew sketches of gay sex. Re-entering the U.S. from Mexico in 1932, his drawings were discovered by American customs officials who were not "artistic" and not amused. Eisenstein was a Bolshevik after all, and had been run out of Hollywood on his first visit after a campaign against him by fascist Major Pease (and because Paramount hated his treatment of Dreiser's An American Tragedy). The customs debacle capped off a fifteen-month fiasco that was supposed to have been a four-month shoot to restore his reputation. Post-Paramount, Charlie Chaplin had introduced him to Upton Sinclair whose wife Mary Kimbrough financed the Mexican picture, which Eisenstein began filming without a script or even a concept. Complicating matters further, Mexico had no diplomatic relations with the USSR and therefore claimed rights to the film as it was being made, including the right to censor. Ordered home by Soviet authorities angry that he had overstayed his visa, Eisenstein realized that thus removed and having hugely antagonized the Sinclairs, he would never be allowed to edit his Mexican footage. He suffered a nervous breakdown. Worse was on its way. His next film, Bezhin Meadow, was plagued again by his ill-conceived grandiose schemes (this time to shoot simultaneously adult and children's versions) and by his dictatorial style. Soviet officials hated his movie. Eisenstein endured the horror of having his film destroyed, which was mild compared to the fate of the government's executive producer for film, Boris Shumyatsky, who should have been supervising more closely and was executed by firing squad. Eisenstein did triumph again with a biopic of Alexander Nevsky, famous for its beautiful, majestic build up to battle. He followed it with another success, Ivan the Terrible Part I, only to see his Ivan the Terrible Part II confiscated and Part III destroyed. Although he had two wives, historians say neither marriage was consummated. He wrote in his diaries about his endless infatuations with men. He died of a brain hemorrhage at fifty.

The 6'3" Virginia stud -- an alum of Woodberry Forest and a vet of WWI in France at nineteen -- Randolph Scott was 34 when he met Cary Grant on the set of Hot Saturday. Soon they were sleeping together at their shared Malibu house winkingly named Bachelor Hall, which they kept even while married to women. In 1934 Grant married actress Virginia Cherrill from City Lights and divorced in 1935. In 1936 it was Scott's turn to provide cover and he chose heiress Marion duPont, whom he knew from having been best man at her first wedding. They spent most of their time apart and divorced in 1939. In 1941 copycat Grant married his heiress, Barbara Hutton, and also lasted three years before divorcing. Tall, debonair, funny, and radiating a steel-hard stoicism, the versatile Scott was cast in comedies, adventures, melodramas, and war movies, but he was at his best in the saddle. The star of dozens of westerns, Scott reached his widest appeal in his fifties when he was a top ten box office draw three years running. After making more than sixty westerns, ending with Ride the High Country in 1962, Scott retired at 64 with a fortune of $100 million from investments. He lived in Beverly Hills for another twenty-five years, dying of lung ailments at 89. He was still married to his second wife, Patricia, with whom he'd adopted two children, one of whom wrote books celebrating his dad and hotly denying the persistent homo talk. For a different opinion read Hollywood Gays: Conversations With: Cary Grant, Liberace, Tony Perkins, Paul Lynde, Cesar Romero, Randolph Scott... which also contains a chat with William Haines.

The Only Openly Gay Paralympian Wins Gold, Silver, and Bronze

Of 4,200 athletes competing in more than 500 medal events at the Paralympic Games in London now through September 9, only two are openly queer, both from Britain. Captain of the sitting volleyball team, lesbian Claire Harvey, lost her matches, but equestrian rider Lee Pearson continued his winning streak with a full rainbow of metal. After earning three golds at each of the previous games in Sydney, Athens, and Beijing, Pearson, who was born with a rare disorder called arthrogryposis multiplex congenital, won his tenth career gold medal this weekend, the most ever for a Paralympic rider. The silver and bronze mark his first time not being on top. He ended his civil partnership with Lincolnshire fireman Mark Latham and is now with an 18 year-old stable groom named Ben. Pearson, 38, says of his teen partner, "He's more mature than I am; he's the boring one."

Pearson speaks frankly about the "Aww, that's nice" attitude of non-disabled riders the first time they saw him on his crutches. He beat them all to win the 2003 British National Championships.

If you like stories about the triumph of the human spirit, read this profile of the US Paralympic mixed rowing pair, an unlikely Marine, Rob Jones, 26, who lost his legs in Afghanistan and Oksana Masters, 23, a Ukrainian orphan with severe side effects from nuclear power radiation exposure who was later adopted by a single woman in Buffalo. Amazing and unnerving.

(photo via)

IPPY Awards: Paul Russell, Larry Closs, Joan Opyr, Sally Bellerose

The Independent Publisher Book Awards announced their top three medalists in a ridiculous, self-defeating total of 94 categories (72 genres plus 22 additional regional honors) yet in the most important race, Literary Fiction, sense and sensibility triumphed: Paul Russell's The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov [Kindle] took the silver right behind the gold for Jaimy Gordon's National Book Award winner, Lord of Misrule. Is Paul's heavy title or the dim, creepily eyeless cover keeping people away from this fine novel? Trust me, you needn't know or care about any of the Nabokovs to relish the feast.

The IPPYs have a separate ghetto for every kind of book, including LGBT, for which the winners are:

Gold: Beatitude by Larry Closs

Silver: Shaken and Stirred by Joan Opyr

Bronze: The Girls Club by Sally Bellerose

Born May 7: Tchaikovsky

Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture, Symphonies 4, 5, and 6 — what would the world listen to without Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky? Unfortunately, his private life was less sublime than his music. At 37, although he knew he loved men, he agreed to marry a female fan, Antonina Miliukova. Within two weeks of their wedding he tried to kill himself, hoping to catch pneumonia by soaking himself in the Moscow River. At the urging of his doctor, he fled to St. Petersburg and never saw his wife again, although he continued to support her. (The cost of the closet can be seen all around him: Miliukova had several children by other men, gave each infant to an orphanage and spent her final twenty-one years in a home for the certifiably insane. Tchaikovsky's brother Modest was also gay, and he too made an unhappy marriage.) Tchaikovsky enjoyed great renown during his lifetime and among his countless honors two days before he turned 51, he was the conductor at the opening night of Carnegie Hall. When he died at 53, sixty thousand people applied for tickets to his funeral, which for only the third time in Russian history was paid for by the Tsar.

Born March 12: Vaslav Nijinsky, Randall Kenan

By the time Vaslav Nijinsky was nineteen the formerly impoverished youth had already enjoyed exquisite teenage affairs with the forty-something Prince Pavel Dimitrievitch Lvov who drenched him in luxury, a rebound fling with Count Tishkievitch, and had begun his great romantic and professional partnership with Sergei Diaghilev, under whose tutelage Nijinsky was early known as the God of Dance. One of the very few male ballet stars to perform en pointe, his reputation in Russia and Paris grew with each successive role in Cleopatra, Sleeping Beauty, and Giselle. At Diaghilev's urging, Nijinsky began to choreograph his own works and the radical results remain the stuff of legend: at twenty-two, Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun which ended with him masturbating, and a year later Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring which ended with the audience rioting (possibly at Stravinsky's prompting, for the publicity).

Later the same year, impulsively, stupidly, tragically, Nijinsky married Romola de Pulszky, a Hungarian countess who had been chasing him across continents and oceans, finally landing him in Buenos Aires. Enraged, Diaghilev fired him. Nijinsky tried and failed to start his own dance troupe. Stumbling in a new and ill-fitting role, the star who was used to being petted and lavished with gifts now had to support a wife and child with no money and no employment. When his stress was its highest, World War I broke out, and he, a Russian in Hungary, was considered an enemy and held as a prisoner. In 1916 Diaghilev rescued him and got the family to New York, to join his Ballets Russes. From the instant of their joyous kissing reunion, Romola came between the lovers. Predictably, Nijinsky's mental state declined. Imagine performing on stage with a fear of the other dancers and a uncontrollable terror that the trap doors would open. Diaghilev removed himself back to Europe; Nijinsky was the wrong person to be left in charge of the company. Later Diaghilev again tried to reconcile, and again Romola "protected" her husband from him, thwarting any more reunions. Nijinsky's depression turned to delusions and Romola, with his doctors, had him committed to an asylum in Switzerland. It was 1919 and he was twenty-nine. For the next thirty-one years he was in and out of institutions until his death in London in 1950.

Randall Kenan dazzled the literary world with his 1989 debut novel, A Visitation of Spirits, about the inhabitants of a Southern rural black community, including a gay man whose internalized homophobia leads him to tragedy. Three years later his first collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, earned even greater acclaim for another empathetic look at the townsfolk of his imagined Tims Creek, North Carolina. Kenan has won a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Writers award, a John Dos Passos award, a Sherwood Anderson award, and a Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but he hasn't published any other books of fiction in 18 years. Instead, he wrote a short YA biography of his idol James Baldwin, collected 200 interviews for his 688-page oral history Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, and riffed on Baldwin in a 149-page essay called The Fire This Time. Forty-nine today, he teaches at his alma matter, UNC Chapel Hill.

Born January 23: Sergei Eisenstein

It figures that the Russian supergenius whose innovations in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Oktober (1927) still dictate how movies are shot and edited today would have no trouble creating private visual diversions for himself in an age before internet porn: He drew sketches of gay sex. Re-entering the U.S. from Mexico in 1932, his drawings were discovered by American customs officials who were not "artistic" and not amused. Eisenstein was a Bolshevik after all, and had been run out of Hollywood on his first visit after a campaign against him by fascist Major Pease (and because Paramount hated his treatment of Dreiser's An American Tragedy). The customs debacle capped off a fifteen-month fiasco that was supposed to have been a four-month shoot to restore his reputation. Post-Paramount, Charlie Chaplin had introduced him to Upton Sinclair whose wife Mary Kimbrough financed the Mexican picture, which Eisenstein began filming without a script or even a concept. Complicating matters further, Mexico had no diplomatic relations with the USSR and therefore claimed rights to the film as it was being made, including the right to censor. Ordered home by Soviet authorities angry that he had overstayed his visa, Eisenstein realized that thus removed and having hugely antagonized the Sinclairs, he would never be allowed to edit his Mexican footage. He suffered a nervous breakdown. Worse was on its way. His next film, Bezhin Meadow, was plagued again by his ill-conceived grandiose schemes (this time to shoot simultaneously adult and children's versions) and by his dictatorial style. Soviet officials hated his movie. Eisenstein endured the horror of having his film destroyed, which was mild compared to the fate of the government's executive producer for film, Boris Shumyatsky, who should have been supervising more closely and was executed by firing squad. Eisenstein did triumph again with a biopic of Alexander Nevsky, famous for its beautiful, majestic build up to battle. He followed it with another success, Ivan the Terrible Part I, only to see his Ivan the Terrible Part II confiscated and Part III destroyed. Although he had two wives, historians say neither marriage was consummated. He wrote in his diaries about his endless infatuations with men. He died of a brain hemorrhage at fifty.

Agent 6

Somewhere between Martin Cruz Smith and John Le Carré is Tom Rob Smith, the gay writer of excellent Cold War thrillers that really ought to be considered novels first and espionage books second. His phenomenal debut, Child 44 [Kindle], was longlisted for the Booker Prize, won several thriller awards, and has been optioned by Ridley Scott. His follow-up, The Secret Speech [Kindle], again featured detective Leo Demidov, but, inevitably, could not duplicate the same level of media frenzy. Two weeks ago, Smith released the third novel in the Demidov series, Agent 6 [Kindle], which is partly set in New York. It earned starred reviews in Kirkus, Booklist, and PW. Smith lives in London with his partner Ben Stephenson, the controller of BBC drama commissioning.

Paul Russell Reads from The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov

Tonight at the B&N on Broadway at 82nd St., Paul Russell reads from The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov [[Kindle]], his sixth novel and his first to reimagine the life of a gay historical figure. From St. Petersburg to England to Paris to Berlin, Sergey meets Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Magnus Hirschfield, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Cocteau, and Picasso, yet remains eternally overshadowed by his brother Vladimir. PW said, "With compelling characters and steady prose, the reader will breeze through this pleasurable, heart-breaking account of the other Nabokov." Fifteen authors have blurbed the book, including Christopher Bram who knows a thing or two about using fiction to rescue forgotten gay figures of the 1920s-50s: "A miraculous novel, witty, sexy, dramatic, and profound, the deeply involving story of a young man who experiences too much love, beauty and history in the first half of the twentieth century. It is Paul Russell's masterpiece."

 

If you can clone yourself, also see Chic superstar Nile Rodgers tonight at the Union Square B&N reading from his memoir of writing, producing, and performing megamonster hits with Diana Ross ("Upside Down"), David Bowie ("Let's Dance"), Peter Gabriel ("Walk through the Fire"), Duran Duran ("The Reflex"), Sister Sledge ("We Are Family") and Madonna ("Material Girl," "Like a Virgin"). Rodgers says he was in a Manhattan bar's restroom with five Diana Ross impersonators when he realized he should write a song specifically for her gay fans. The result was "I'm Coming Out." His book is called Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny [[Kindle]].

Born May 7: Tchaikovsky

Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture, Symphonies 4, 5, and 6 — what would the world listen to without Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky? Unfortunately, his private life was less sublime than his music. At thirty-seven, although he knew he loved men, he agreed to marry a female fan, Antonina Miliukova. Within two weeks of their wedding he tried to kill himself, hoping to catch pneumonia by soaking himself in the Moscow River. At the urging of his doctor, he fled to St. Petersburg and never saw his wife again, although he continued to support her. (The cost of the closet can be seen all around him: Miliukova had several children by other men, gave each infant to an orphanage and spent her final twenty-one years in a home for the certifiably insane. Tchaikovsky's brother Modest was also gay, and he too made an unhappy marriage.) Tchaikovsky enjoyed great renown during his lifetime and, among his countless honors, two days before he turned fifty-one, he was the conductor at the opening night of Carnegie Hall. When he died, at fifty-three, sixty thousand people applied for tickets to his funeral, which for only the third time in Russian history was paid for by the Tsar.

Moscow Pride

After enduring five years of arrests and assaults for defying Moscow's ban gay pride, international hero Nikolai Alexeyev announced last week that his application for Moscow Pride 2011 has been approved by the government if he reduced it to 500 people from 5,000. Now city officials say no decision has been made and they are "studying" his proposal. In October, the European Court of Human Rights fined Russia over $41,000 for banning the parades. The previous mayor said gay pride was "satanic." The new mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, also has said he's against pride. Although the gay marches have failed, the campaign for visibility is succeeding. Across the country, 33% of all Russians polled said they had heard of the gay demonstrations and in Moscow 56% said they knew about them. This year's event is schedule for 1:00 - 5:00 pm on May 28.

Born March 31: Diaghilev, Chamberlain, Frank, Westenhoefer

 

Celebrate with recent biographies of cultural impressario Sergei Diaghilev [[Kindle]] who turns 139 today, and Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman, 71, or a slightly older memoir by actor Richard Chamberlain, 77, or a cd from comic Suzanne Westenhoefer, 50.

Sara Wheeler on The Magnetic North

The writer Sara Wheeler is the flipside of Lucy Jane Bledsoe: nonfiction, British, mother, big jewelry -- but the opposites end there; both authors have exquisite taste for adventure, particularly in frozen climes, and are able to bring wide swaths of humanity and landscape to life on the page. Wheeler's breakthrough book was Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica. The continent appealed to her younger self for its emptiness, lack of any native mammals, and the fact it has never been owned or subjected to wars. She came to see it as a symbol of what the world could be. As she approaches fifty this year, she's more interested in the way the world actually is, and turns her attention to The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle [[Kindle]], just out from FSG.

Wonderfully, Wheeler is both chatty and brisk. She finds the typical "frozen beards" of polar exploration "a bit of a bore," because mainly "their point was just to show how slow the other bloke was." She was droll and moving in discussing her time in the Russian Arctic, 250,000 square miles with no roads and one supermarket. Until they were forced to switch to Russian, the locals' language had only four numbers, "1, 2, 3, many." Today she says there's nothing sadder in the world than poor people in Russia. By comparison, she was impressed with Barrow, Alaska. And dismayed that even well-meaning Canada has botched its relations with its native people. One of her five favorite places on Earth is the top of the icecap in Greenland and she strongly recommends you read the modern classic An African in Greenland.

In discussing the warming oceans, and the subsequent changes in water currents, she said that shift would be "a big part of the cessation of humanity." She admitted when discussing the book she "finds herself telling a lot of negative stories and it has to be that way." Yet she admired the spirit of dignity she saw so often in the Arctic, even now. She said, it was a "writer's duty to find hope, I think. What else is there?"

Wheeler's other books include a travelogue of Chile and biographies of explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard [[Kindle]] and Isak Dinesen paramour Denys Finch Hatton [[Kindle]]. She appeared last night at McNally-Jackson with Simon Winchester, promoting his new Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories.

Born January 23: Sergei Eisenstein

It figures that the Russian supergenius whose innovations in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Oktober (1927) still dictate how movies are shot and edited today would have no trouble creating private visual diversions for himself in an age before internet porn: He drew sketches of gay sex. Re-entering the U.S. from Mexico in 1932, his drawings were discovered by American customs officials who were not "artistic" and not amused. Eisenstein was a Bolshevik after all, and had been run out of Hollywood on his first visit after a campaign against him by fascist Major Pease (and because Paramount hated his treatment of Dreiser's An American Tragedy). The customs debacle capped off a fifteen-month fiasco that was supposed to have been a four-month shoot to restore his reputation. Post-Paramount, Charlie Chaplin had introduced him to Upton Sinclair whose wife Mary Kimbrough financed the Mexican picture, which Eisenstein began filming without a script or even a concept. Complicating matters further, Mexico had no diplomatic relations with the USSR and therefore claimed rights to the film as it was being made, including the right to censor. Ordered home by Soviet authorities angry that he had overstayed his visa, Eisenstein realized that thus removed and having hugely antagonized the Sinclairs, he would never be allowed to edit his Mexican footage. He suffered a nervous breakdown. Worse was on its way. His next film, Bezhin Meadow, was plagued again by his ill-conceived grandiose schemes (this time to shoot simultaneously adult and children's versions) and by his dictatorial style. Soviet officials hated his movie. Eisenstein endured the horror of having his film destroyed, which was mild compared to the fate of the government's executive producer for film, Boris Shumyatsky, who should have been supervising more closely and was executed by firing squad. Eisenstein did triumph again with a biopic of Alexander Nevsky, famous for its beautiful, majestic build up to battle. He followed it with another success, Ivan the Terrible Part I, only to see his Ivan the Terrible Part II confiscated and Part III destroyed. Although he had two wives, historians say neither marriage was consummated. He wrote in his diaries about his endless infatuations with men. He died of a brain hemorrhage at fifty.

A New Biography of Diaghilev, The Man Who Made Ballet Gay?

Diaghilev with one of his dancing lovers, Serge Lifar

 Crowding a shelf already heavy with at least eight biographies of the Russian impresario, Oxford last week published Sjeng Scheijen's 552-page Diaghilev: A Life. Happily, Scheijen gives Diaghilev's homosexuality the attention it warrants because as a ballet master sleeping with his principal dancers, art, self, and sex were always entwined. NYT critic Alastair Macaulay argues

"Ballet was not Diaghilev’s first, second or third love. But he found in it the ideal vehicle to bring other arts together. It’s also likely that it stimulated, and sublimated, his sexuality. As he developed a taste for younger men, so ballet brought him the male beauties he desired; and his status gave him maximum casting-couch power.

"In several cases, his lovers — who included, successively, the star dancers Vaslav Nijinsky, Léonide Massine, Anton Dolin and Serge Lifar — needed no seduction from him; they were ambitious. And this gay Pygmalion was most galvanized when he could turn these male Galateas into artists the world would worship. Ballet had hitherto been essentially a heterosexual art glorifying femininity, but now a long series of Diaghilev ballets cast more luster on hero than heroine, while at least two of them (“Jeux,” “Les Biches”) actively encouraged homosexual nuances."

Sjeng Scheijen divides his time between Amsterdam and Moscow where he is cultural attaché at the Netherlands Embassy. Read an excerpt of his first chapter here.

London's Victoria & Albert Museum is hosting a massive exhibit, Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballet Russes, from September 25 - January 9.

30 Activists Succeed in Moscow's First Guerrilla Gay Pride Mini Parade

Outwitting a large and hostile Russian police force, thirty lgbt activists lied about the location of their illegal gay pride parade and very briefly marched carrying a sixty-foot rainbow banner along a sidewalk in Moscow. Among the participants were Russian organizing hero Nikolai Alexeyev, British Outrage activist Peter Tatchell, and German MP Volker Beck, all of whom sustained injuries during an ill-fated attempt at Moscow pride in 2007. Today's successful event lasted about ten minutes and was entirely peaceful, ending with a cluster of international media coverage and no arrests. I love the woman's sign drawn with triangle people in same-sex couples, and I love these activists' brave perseverance.

Born May 7: Tchaikovsky

Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture, Symphonies 4, 5, and 6 — what would the world listen to without Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky? Unfortunately, his private life was less sublime than his music. At thirty-seven, although he knew he loved men, he agreed to marry a female fan, Antonina Miliukova. Within two weeks of their wedding he tried to kill himself, hoping to catch pneumonia by soaking himself in the Moscow River. At the urging of his doctor, he fled to St. Petersburg and never saw his wife again, although he continued to support her. (The cost of the closet can be seen all around him: Miliukova had several children by other men, gave each infant to an orphanage and spent her final twenty-one years in a home for the certifiably insane. Tchaikovsky's brother Modest was also gay, and he too made an unhappy marriage.) Tchaikovsky enjoyed great renown during his lifetime and, among his countless honors, two days before he turned fifty-one, he was the conductor at the opening night of Carnegie Hall. When he died, at fifty-three, sixty thousand people applied for tickets to his funeral, which for only the third time in Russian history was paid for by the Tsar.

Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture, Symphonies 4, 5, and 6 — what would the world listen to without Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky? Unfortunately, his private life was less sublime than his music. At thirty-seven, although he knew he loved men, he agreed to marry a female fan, Antonina Miliukova. Within two weeks of their wedding he tried to kill himself, hoping to catch pneumonia by soaking himself in the Moscow River. At the urging of his doctor, he fled to St. Petersburg and never saw his wife again, although he continued to support her. (The cost of the closet can be seen all around him: Miliukova had several children by other men, gave each infant to an orphanage and spent her final twenty-one years in a home for the certifiably insane. Tchaikovsky's brother Modest was also gay, and he too made an unhappy marriage.) Tchaikovsky enjoyed great renown during his lifetime and, among his countless honors, two days before he turned fifty-one, he was the conductor at the opening night of Carnegie Hall. When he died, at fifty-three, sixty thousand people applied for tickets to his funeral, which for only the third time in Russian history was paid for by the Tsar.

Born March 12: Vaslav Nijinsky, Randall Kenan

By the time Vaslav Nijinsky was nineteen the formerly impoverished youth had already enjoyed exquisite teenage affairs with the forty-something Prince Pavel Dimitrievitch Lvov who drenched him in luxury, a rebound fling with Count Tishkievitch, and had begun his great romantic and professional partnership with Sergei Diaghilev, under whose tutelage Nijinsky was early known as the God of Dance. One of the very few male ballet stars to perform en pointe, his reputation in Russia and Paris grew with each successive role in Cleopatra, Sleeping Beauty, and Giselle. At Diaghilev's urging, Nijinsky began to choreograph his own works and the radical results remain the stuff of legend: at twenty-two, Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun which ended with him masturbating, and a year later Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring which ended with the audience rioting.(Possibly at Stravinsky's prompting, for the publicity.)

Later the same year, impulsively, stupidly, tragically, he married Romola Pulsky, a Romanian woman who had been chasing him across continents and oceans, finally landing him in Buenos Aires. Enraged, Diaghilev fired him. Nijinsky tried and failed to start his own dance troupe. Stumbling in a new and ill-fitting role, the star who was used to being petted and lavished with gifts now had to support a wife and child with no money and no employment. When his stress was its highest, World War I broke out, and he, a Russian in Hungary, was considered an enemy and held as a prisoner. In 1916 Diaghilev rescued him and got the family to New York, to join his Ballets Russes. From the instant of their joyous kissing reunion, Romola came between the lovers. Predictably, Nijinsky's mental state declined. Imagine performing on stage with a fear of the other dancers and a uncontrollable terror that the trap doors would open. Diaghilev removed himself back to Europe; Nijinsky was the wrong person to be left in charge of the company. Later Diaghilev again tried to reconcile, and again Romola "protected" her husband from him, thwarting any more reunions. Nijinsky's depression turned to delusions and Romola, with his doctors, had him committed to an asylum in Switzerland. It was 1919 and he was twenty-nine. For the next thirty-one years he was in and out of institutions until his death in London in 1950.

Randall Kenan dazzled the literary world with his 1989 debut novel, A Visitation of Spirits, about the inhabitants of a Southern rural black community, including a gay man whose internalized homophobia leads him to tragedy. Three years later his first collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, earned even greater acclaim for another empathetic look at the townsfolk of his imagined Tims Creek, North Carolina. Kenan has won a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Writers award, a John Dos Passos award, a Sherwood Anderson award, and a Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but he hasn't published any other books of fiction in 18 years. Instead, he wrote a short YA biography of his idol James Baldwin, collected 200 interviews for his 688-page oral history Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, and riffed on Baldwin in a 149-page essay called The Fire This Time. Forty-seven today, he teaches at his alma matter, UNC Chapel Hill.