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.

Ludmila Ulitskaya Wins Austrian State Prize for European Literature

Das macht mich sehr glücklich! I could sing Pharrell.

With past winners Auden, Pinter, Calvino, Beauvoir, Lessing, Kundera, Duras, Rushdie, Eco, Barnes, and, last year, John Banville, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature is always worth following, never more so than today's award to Ludmila Ulitskaya. The best book to begin with is the pure-Greek and mixed-Russian family tale Medea and Her Children [Kindle], which also provides a much-needed window into the Crimea. Follow that with the novel of exiles in New York, The Funeral Party, and then her ambitious Daniel Stein, Interpreter, bringing together Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Read Ulitskaya now -- as you know the Nobel committee is -- before all the December hoopla when FSG releases a major new work, The Big Green Tent spanning decades in the lives of three Soviet dissidents caught in the country's fall and rise and fall.

 

Born April 12: Slava Mogutin

Former enfant terrible Slava Mogutin, 40, 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 critic of Moscow’s leaders, Mogutin has written seven books in Russian, winning the Andrei Bely Prize in 2000. He aims for a similar shock value in his hatred of establishment gays, and he loves to antagonize his audience, once describing himself as a "cave-based, homo terrorist, pinko commie fag, and propagandist of brutal violence, psychic pathology and sexual perversions." Happily, he brings all that angry energy to his photography, which appears regularly in art, fashion, alt, and porn magazines. His best photo books are Lost Boys and NYC Go-Go. Last month he released his first book in English, Food Chain.

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 would be 142 today, or with Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman, 74, or a memoir by the Beverly Hills native and long-closeted mini-series sensation Richard Chamberlain, 80, or a cd from a lesbian comic who came out early, Suzanne Westenhoefer, 53.

Slava Mogutin's New Food Chain, Old Photo Diary of Crimea

Who else would combine a lace doily with a half-stripped, bound and gagged tough - the obviousness being another slap to the viewer? Favorite anti-bougie angry gay artist Slava Mogutin is known here for his arresting photography but in Russia, prior to exile, he published seven books of fiction, poetry, and essays, winning the Andrei Bely Prize. Culled from his whole writing life, from teenhood to now, his English debut is a "part memoir, part political satire, part magic realism" mashup called Food Chain, out yesterday from novelist Christopher Stoddard's brand new ITNA Press. 

(ITNA is dedicated to releasing "literature deemed too provocative for the mainstream." Its other two titles are La JohnJoseph's farcical orgy/apocalypse fantasy Everything Must Go and Stoddard's own second novel Limiters [Kindle], about Kyle Mason, seen first as a lost 16 year-old raver then as a 26 year-old "sexually compulsive copywriter living in New York City, hyperactively riding the crests of a narcissistic and self-destructive personality.")

Slava has posted a brief text with his photos of Crimea from 2004, when he returned to find a more rundown resort that had, in his youth on visits from Siberia, seemed a Soviet Paradise. His strongest work is Lost Boys and NYC Go-Go.

Born March 12: Randall Kenan, Sergey Nabokov

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, riffed on Baldwin in a 149-page essay called The Fire This Time, and edited Baldwin's uncollected writings in The Cross of Redemption. He teaches at his alma matter, UNC Chapel Hill.

Especially for the Nabokov family, fiction is truer than bare fact. Read Paul Russell's award-winning novel about Vladimir's gay brother, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov [Kindle] and his conversation about him with Christopher Bram over at The Millions.

Why Is No One Discussing the Cost of the Closet at Sochi?

All Olympians are expected to smile through inhuman amounts of pressure, fear, and doubt, yet certain athletes shoulder another terrible burden. Widely seen as closeted, 28-year-old skater Jeremy Abbott fell hard during his routine Thursday. Again. Asked about his pattern of choking on big nights, he lashed out in a way that may bring back memories of titanic, welling emotions before you were out: 

"I would just hold my middle finger in the air and say a big 'F you' to everyone who has ever said that to me because they have never stood in my shoes.

"They've never had to do what I had to do. Nobody has to stand center ice before a million people and put an entire career on the line for eight minutes of their life when they've been doing it for 20-some years. And if you don't think that that's not hard, you're a damn idiot.

"I'm proud to be standing here. I'm a four-time national champion and a two-time Olympian, and no one can take that away from me. So whatever people have to say about me, that's their own problem because I'm freaking proud of what I've done and I'm not going to apologize for any of it."

Maybe the media has more to cover in gay sports than the self-congratulating stories that they are "ready" for Michael Sam.

Failing at Home, American Antigay Zealots Win Overseas

Losing so many recent battles in the US, American antigay Evangelicals are taking their hate to countries with more receptive audiences, especially in Africa, South America, and the former Soviet Union. You know about the meddling in Uganda and Nigeria but did you realize Scott Lively toured fifty cities throughout Russia denouncing gaydom and urging them to criminalize LGBT advocacy. Last week Alex Seitz-Wald (left) reported on the growing export of Evangelical homophobia and today he talked to NPR's the Takeaway. Listen here. 

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.

Gessen's Pussy Riot Book Out Early & Gay Propaganda Event in NYC

Riverhead has rushed an early release of Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot [Kindle] by Masha Gessen, the lesbian journalist who fled Russia with her children last summer. If you missed her tv takedown of the ever-worsening situation there, watch it now. Her critical biography The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin is considered to be among the best. 

Next weekend, Cooper Union is hosting Propaganda: A Celebration of Russian Voices, which will feature Masha Gessen's first public appearance since expatriating from Russia. Her panel is the capstone session of the two-day event, on January 19th at 6:30pm in Cooper Union’s Great Hall. See the full lineup here.

Hip readers will already know Masha's brother Keith Gessen, cofounder of the journal n+1 and author of All the Sad Young Literary Men.

Bilingual Queer Anthology 'Gay Propaganda' To Be Distributed Free in Russia

    

Defiantly shoving back against Putin's antigay laws, Masha Gessen and Joseph Huff-Hannon have compiled an anthology of queer Russian love stories, interviews, and testimonials called Gay Propaganda, intending the dual English-Russian print edition to be smuggled into the country "via underground activist networks" and a Russian eBook to be distributed free. The U.S. edition from upstart OR Books will ship in January, ahead of the Sochi games. 

Gessen, a lesbian journalist and mom in Moscow, moved her family to Brooklyn last summer, explaining the necessity in this op ed and on this talk show. Her much respected bio The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin [Kindle] was a Slate and Chronicle book of the year. I also can't wait for her February 25 release, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot [Kindle].

Huff-Hannon is one of the founders of the global group All Out.

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Even ahead of Lyudmila Ulitskaya my favorite contemporary Russian writer is Tatyana Tolstaya whose White Walls is unsurpassed perfection of every stripe. Many of her stories are subtle heirs to Chekhov but her more vivid classic "The Poet and the Muse" hooks you with this opening:

"Nina was a marvelous woman, an ordinary woman, a doctor, and it goes without saying that she had her right to personal happiness like everyone else. Of this she was well aware. Nearing the age of thirty-five after a lengthy period of joyless trial and error -- not even worth talking about -- she knew what she needed: a wild, true love with tears, bouquets, midnight phone vigils, nocturnal taxi chases, fateful obstacles, betrayals, and forgiveness. She needed a -- you know -- an animal passion, dark windy nights with streetlamps aglow. She needed to perform a heroine's classical feat as if it were a mere trifle: to wear out seven pairs of iron boots, break seven iron staffs in two, devour seven loaves of iron bread, and receive in supreme reward not some golden rose or snow-white pedestal but a burned-out match or crumpled ball of a bus ticket -- a crumb from the banquet table where the radiant king, her heart's desire, had feasted. Well, of course, quite a few women need pretty much the same thing, so in this sense Nina was, as has already been said, a perfectly ordinary woman, a marvelous woman, a doctor."

If you're getting too much holiday sugar, try Ludmilla Petrushevskaya: There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories [Kindle] or There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales [Kindle].

Born December 8: Norman Douglas

Roughly every twenty years, in 1896, 1916, and 1937, novelist Norman Douglas had to flee another nation in the wake of another gay scandal. At 27, after two years in the British foreign service, he was forced to leave St. Petersburg in 1896. The next year, to cheer himself up he bought a villa outside of Naples. Still bored the year after that, he married his first cousin, had two sons, and divorced his wife within five years on the basis of her infidelity. Working at Ford Maddox Ford's literary journal The English Review he met, befriended, and feuded with D.H. Lawrence whose revenge was to render him a character, James Argyle, in Aaron's Rod. Amid the frenzy of the Great War in 1916, Douglas at 45 was charged with "indecent assault" on a 16 year-old lad. Douglas later explained it was "for kissing a boy and giving him some cakes and a shilling," but the youth was angry enough to press charges and Douglas was anxious enough to skip bail and live in exile in Capri. It's the setting of his best known novel, published the next year, a hedonistic farce called South Wind whose purported lightness I found a touch heavy. David Higdon says, 'The novel stands in a tradition of such works as Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, the Marquis de Sade's Justine, Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, and W. H. Mallock's The New Republic." His travel books include Siren Land: A Celebration of Life in Southern Italy and Old Calabria. Unreformed in his late sixties, Douglas faced another sex scandal and left Italy for France in 1937. He died in 1952 with the last words, "Get these f---ing nuns away from me." His language was even saltier in his book of limericks, for years said to be among the most pirated writings in English.

Photo by Carl van Vechten, Florence, 1935

Masculin / Masculin Image of the Day #7

Alexander Deineka (or Aleksandr Deyneka, 1899-1969) created huge paintings and mosiacs in which the Russian ideal is embodied by vigorous beauty, often in clusters of athletic men. Twice married, he is said to have "always kept his private life secret." He painted this work, After the Battle, in 1942.

Other images of note are his mosaic Fine Morning (1960), On the Beach (1961),  and this scene below, The Boys Start Running Out from Water (1930-35).

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.