Melville’s novel and Brten’s opera are poignant remrs of the bety and relevance of gay history.
Contents:
BENJAM BRTEN: THE LOVE AND DEATH OF A GAY GENI
Only the English seem pable of acknowledgg the brilliance of one of our own whout tryg to mmage about his life for somethg nocent that n be twisted to an all-nsumg flt. In fact, sounds fatly homophobic, as though we still n't have a natnal treasure who was gay. * benjamin britten gay *
In fact, sounds fatly homophobic, as though we still n't have a natnal treasure who was gay, particularly one whose gayns was central to his work. Brten's homosexualy was, for virtually all his life, crimal; rather than warn him off, this seems to have permted him to anatomize aspects of his persona like alienatn, celty, and sexual longg and fatuatn, properti that then remaed latent and unfulfilled, operas all the more psychologilly pellg for and mic all the more brilliant.
The nflict between his homosexualy and the hostile society he found himself was the source of his dramatic mic, more patently so than is the se of, say, Tchaikovsky. Forster, who were also gay. Whout he wouldn't have been Benjam 's remarkable about Brten's homosexualy is that he took so few measur to hi .
He even received a vis om the police 1953 when thoands of gay men were beg persecuted and high-profile "verts, " to e the jargon of the time, were fallg victim to blackmailers and police agents provotrs. When Brten died, the queen sent a personal letter of ndolence to Pears, treatg him exactly the same way she would have treated any other proment the answer to Brten's crics is simple: He was no sat, but he was no sner eher; he was an artist, a very great artist, a gay artist.