At the start of this LGBT+ History Month, Netflix unveiled its new series about Alexander the Great, only to see complaints that the streaming service had “turned him gay”. When these drew the response that Alexander is widely believed to have had same-sex relationships, a typical reply was that this was “unproven speculation”. As a patron of LGBT+ History Month, I see this as an opportunity to argue for the importance of knowing our queer history.
For centuries, LGBTQ+ history has been wiped from the record. Oppressors have found it all too easy to deny our existence because in most of the world – for most of history – our lives have had to be led in secret. Exposure could lead to familial rejection, social and professional ruin, imprisonment, torture and even execution. Any evidence of queer lives that did exist was often destroyed, sometimes by descendants keen to protect reputations.
The Renaissance artist Michelangelo, for example, was known to have had several relationships with men, but burned all his papers before he died. And in 1623 his great nephew published an edition of his poetry with many of the masculine pronouns changed to feminine ones (an act of cultural vandalism that wasn’t rectified until the 19th century).
Of course, labels such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender didn’t exist for most of history, making it impossible to know definitively how any figure would have identified in their own time. But it would be ridiculous to use this as justification for erasing us from the past. The understanding of our sexuality contributing to any sense of identity (rather than just sexual activity) may be a relatively modern one, but we have always been here.
It doesn’t help that, as queer people, we’re one of the few minority communities who don’t often have parents from the same minority, so little understanding of our cultural heritage is passed down through the generations. All of this has allowed historians to straightwash the past, to write off our relationships as passionate or intimate friendships, or to declare we were married to our work.
Years of campaigning – not to mention a Hollywood film – means that most people now know the name Alan Turing. But the story of Bayard Rustin is only just coming to prominence, thanks to another film: he was one of the leading organisers of the black civil rights movement and a key adviser to Martin Luther King, but he was kept in the background to avoid his sexuality damaging the movement.
And how many people have heard of Ben Barres, a transgender neurobiologist whose pioneering research at Stanford University revolutionised our understanding of brain cells?
Or that the astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, had a 27-year relationship with a woman?
And did you know that Florence Nightingale wrote in a letter in 1861: “I have lived and slept in the same beds with English countesses and Prussian farm women. No woman has excited passions among women more than I have”? Why historians ever believed she was celibate is beyond me.
In 19th-century Russia, Tchaikovsky lived life as a gay man with a degree of openness that was remarkable for the time, writing about his feelings in letters to friends and his brother, who was also gay. He even signed one of these using the female name he’d given himself, Petrolina. But although he enjoyed close friendships with gay men (one, Petashenka, used to pop round to his place to ogle the cadet corps opposite), other letters show that he never stopped wanting to change his sexuality, lived in fear of being outed and disgraced, and struggled with alcoholism and depression.
Like many gay men of his time, he briefly married a woman to maintain a respectable front, but she later accused him of using her to hide his “shameful vice”. Tchaikovsky found release in his music, and this could be why his work has such a joyous quality. Likewise, the range of emotions he experienced in life could have given his ballet scores the depth necessary to tell dramatic, sweeping stories.
Today, Tchaikovsky is considered a national treasure in Russia, but official accounts of his life remove all mention of his sexuality, as does the Tchaikovsky State House-Museum near Moscow. Meanwhile, the widespread persecution of queer people continues in the country, as does anti-queer legislation and the state-sponsored spreading of shame. When I visited Moscow in 2017, I met LGBTQ+ people and heard their shocking stories, visited queer venues and saw signs in shop windows announcing “No faggots allowed”. But if Tchaikovsky’s queerness was widely understood and acknowledged as part of his artistry, it would be more difficult for Putin and his government to continue their oppression – or at least to argue that queerness is a foreign import and somehow “un-Russian”.
For me, the response to Netflix’s series about Alexander the Great sums up why we need LGBT+ History Month, and the story of Tchaikovsky is a chilling illustration of the dangers of not knowing our queer history. Understanding history is empowering, and for too long queer people have been disempowered. History can teach us – and others – that we’ve always made a contribution to society, help us understand our place in the modern world and give us pride in who we are.
Matt Cain’s latest novel, One Love, is out now
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