United Voice: The Wyoming Equality Magazine
June 2023 Issue
Welcome
Namey name name
to our Pride Issue of United Voice!
by Sara Burlingame
I.
The composer Tchaikovksy just seems to keep cropping up in my life.
The first classical CD I ever bought, with my very own money, was (yes, unironically) entitled Tchaikovsky’s Greatest Hits. Titles like this recalled the compendiums my parents bought of favorite artists from their youth. I did things in reverse, though. I bought the greatest for an artist whose works would later become something of a lifelong obsession. Of course, it’s hard to have nostalgia for an artist who died almost a century before I was born. So I started with the retrospective, and as I moved through my life, he became more and more current to me.
Naturally, I started with the perfunctory shallowness that usually marks nostalgia. The first piece of Tchaikovsky’s that I loved was big, and it was loud. Marche Slave (1876) rattled the house with its patriotic bombast, and as a perennially Misunderstood Teenager, this suited me perfectly. (Frankly, I still get a kick out of it, and you probably will too.)
II.
Marche Slave
Violin Concerto
I already had an inkling that I loved classical music - that I was one of “those people.” Marche Slave, more than any other, cemented that initial impression.
But, of course, I also knew I was growing into my identity as another one of “those people.” That status as a Misunderstood Teenager was compounded by what promised to be a long-term residency in the closet. I was coming of age in Sheridan, Wyoming. There are some incredible people doing incredible work in Sheridan now. But in the 90s and early 2000s, it was a different story. My gayness was shared with me and me alone.
Well, me, and Tchaikovsky. I like to think that I somehow knew that Tchaikovsky was gay before having it confirmed, but that’s probably not true. What probably happened was that a composer’s work resonated with me in a big way, and our similarly closeted lives under repressive regimes (if you’ll forgive my comparing Imperial Russia to Sheridan Junior High School at that time) felt like it explained that resonance.
(I’ll only pause momentarily to note the debate still occurring over Tchaikovsky’s sexuality. Russian authorities continue to deny his homosexuality; the rest of the musical community now recognizes it. It is abundantly clear that the former only hold their view out of homophobic authoritarian expediency.)
Now, being in the closet involves more than a little unrequited love. Adolescence in general does, even without the closet. So when I learned that his violin concerto, a piece I’d been listening to more or less on repeat, was an expression of unrequited and unrequitable infatuation with a nephew nicknamed “Bob,” the significance of Tchaikovsky to my life only increased.
