In Love with Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

I have a terrible confession to make. For years and years I have been hopelessly in love with Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. I cannot even remember when it started, way before I knew anything about him—perhaps it was the first time my mother took me to the ballet in Savannah, Georgia, when American Ballet Theatre would hit town on one its yearly pilgrimages through the South, or the remains of the Ballets Russe would make a similar stop. The program was almost always the same—in fact, in a recent, wonderful talk the filmmaker Wakefield Poole did at the Donnell Library in New York, he explained it. Before he became a “pornographer” as he proudly calls himself, making the groundbreaking Boys in the Sand, with Casey Donovan, he was a young ballet dancer, touring with the always-touring Ballets Russe de Monte Carlo. “We always did the same ballets, to save scenery and costumes. There was ‘Graduation Ball,’ ‘Gaite’ [for ‘Gaite Parisian’] and the third act of Swan Lake.”

He went on to explain:

“The third act of Swan Lake made me know I was a dancer. All I did was stand there and move my arms a bit, but just seeing all those dancers in white with the blue light around them made me know that I was doing something very special and wonderful.”

Well, that did it for me, too. Just being this child in the audience (I think I was maybe eight or nine), and seeing this absolute magic floating on the stage—I was hit. I was smeared. I was . . . I was absolutely intoxicated with ballet and Tchaikovsky. I wanted to live inside it, and him. That feeling continued in my life, decade after decade, and I still have it. I cry my eyes out at the last act of Swan Lake—it has nothing to do with the story, but the fact that he is watching it, too. I’m sure of it. This handsome Russian man with all of his imaginative power, delight and wit is watching every single performance of it. I’m sure of it. I felt that way before I knew anything about him, when he was only some strange name most people can not spell, and his life seemed so remote as to be untouchable.

There are, I am sure, two Tchaikovkys: one is the popular composer who wrote all those engaging, marvelous ditties from The Nutcracker Suite and Sleeping Beauty, and lots of other music that seems almost destined to be lampooned, ridiculed, by a lot of highbrow critics, and even labeled as throw-away. But the really smart people will have nothing to do with that. The genius choreographer George Ballanchine said that Peter Ilyich was the world’s greatest composer for ballet, and if anyone knows, Ballanchine should. Yes, the smart people know that even under some of the sillier things he wrote, there was this brooding intensity; but under the other things—Tatiana’s fantastic letter scene from the opera Eugene Onegin, for instance; the Little Russian Symphony, among so many others—an emotional storm is unleashed and working. You are completely inside him and beside yourself. He has found the perfect expression of everything he could not express.

Then there are other things, like the wistful waltzes in Swan Lake, that seem so simple as to be simple-minded, but which truly haunt you. You realize inside them is the sadness of men who can never have what they want. And that was Tchaikovsky’s own sadness. He was gay—to use one of our many names for this—at a time when being that way was hell. It was knowing you were what was unnamable; it was knowing you were never going to be able to go, freely, inside that deep romantic heart of yourself and bring back the gold of your own feelings and lay it openly, kindly, at the feet of another man.

This was peculiar, too, in the fact that Tchaikovsky was so Russian and so loathed by so many of Russia’s other composers, because they felt that his never-descreet-enough homosexuality in their closed but gossipy society was an insult to a country trying hard to re-identify itself only a few decades before the Revolution exploded it. For two hundred years, Russia’s upper class had been under the dominance of French and English culture. It was impossible to be among the elite and not speak and write fluent French and adequate English—then Victorianism, from both sides of the English Channel, was considered the arbiter of the high taste. There were still the wild, hyper-religious masses of Mother Russia, but the enlightened upper classes rejected them as boorish for French or English refinement.

Countering this was an attempt at a “real” Russian music and culture based on folk tales and songs, coming from Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin, and Modest Mussorgsky. They wanted a hairy-chested, back-to-the-people, two-fisted Russianism, and Peter Ilyich’s very existence represented a spit in the face to that. He was too “light”; a pansy with gossip swirling around him. He was drawn to younger men—sometimes servants, sometimes men of his own class—and as much as he tried, through a disasterous false marriage, to hide it, this attraction dogged him.

In 1891 he sailed to New York to open Carnegie Hall. He was one of the world’s most famous composers, and I keep wondering, would he have been happier in New York, if that could have been possible? New York was known to be a more open city than most of Europe. It had a fairly accessible underground gay culture. But it was impossible for him to stay. He came back to Petersburg, and died there, in 1893, of cholera—and the question has always been, did he willingly drink a glass of water that was contaminated with it? Did Peter Ilyich kill himself in this almost untraceable way, or was he forced to kill himself, as the only way to keep gossip about him (and possible blackmail) from emerging, in the way that it broke out and destroyed Oscar Wilde?

This question has been asked over and over again; Ken Russell in his way- over-the-top Tchaikovsky movie starring an unbearably handsome young Richard Chamberlain, The Music Lovers, gives us the idea that he was forced to do it. This was so, even though his brother Modest, who was also his manager, was known to be “queer as the proverbial goose,” but able to stay in the background.

What brought me back to Tchaikovsky was reading the Rev. Mel White talking about his own “engagement” with of all people the loathsome Jerry Falwell, who I’m sure would have forced poor Peter Ilyich to drink that water at the drop of . . . anyway, it was so terrible reading Mel White talk about himself in these words:

“After I put myself through exorcism, electric-shock therapy, then slitting my wrists, and going to the hospital, my wife finally said, ‘You know, you really have a life of your own. I like gay people, but I just didn’t want you to be one.’ Eventually I met and fell in love with Gary Nixon, and as soon as I realized that my sexuality was a gift from God and got over my fear and guilt, I wrote Stranger at the Gate, in which I told the leaders of the religions right that they are doing terrible damage and they must stop.”

Unfortunately, Peter Ilyich did not get that chance. But every time I go to the ballet and see Swan Lake or Ballanchine’s Serenade, or at Christmas, when I hear the Nutcracker, I think of him, and imagine this handsome man sitting next to me, reaching for my hand.

Of the Dead Speak Only Good: Jerry Falwell is dead.

Good.
Falwell was an infuriating character, and I think a lot of the anger that is coming out now from the gay and/or progressive community is a logical extension of that. He had an amazing, homogenous stupidity: there were very few surprises that came out of him. It’s not like he had a good side, an endearing, kind, warm, charitable side. If he did, then these sides were certainly kept out of the “public discourse,” and the most that can be said of him is that he gave a face and distinctively repugnant voice to what a lot of close-minded Americans were thinking—that they had the answers, and the answers were simple, stupid, and usually what they had, too, had been taught by their families and parents.

But I think that there is another facet to the anger that is coming from Falwell’s death: that he actually instilled fear into the minds of a lot of gay men and women. That under that chubby, down-home, Ya’ll comeexterior was a really vicious man, and he could get away with that viciousness in ways that someone like the current Pope, Benedict XVI, can not. Pope Benedict is too transparently rigid, cold, and uningratiating. People may love him because he’s the Pope, but he’s not fooling anyone when he rails against homosexuality, birth control, freedom of choice, and all the other ills of “secularism.” But Falwell, whom one progessive said should go straight to Heaven, where he’ll be found lying between Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, could come off on TV as the cuddly uncle, the country uncle who told it like it was: and that was scary. That was worse than the skinny man in a dress leading the flock. This country is filled with anti-Catholic people who would still swallow every word Falwell said; they’d never believe the Pope, but they would “Amen” with Falwell all the way to the Inquisition.

37 Ways To Be Seductive With A Man,

Thirty Seven Ways to be Seductive with a Man—For Men and Women

One of my prime feelings lately is that too many gay men have lost the talent of being seductive. A generation or two ago, it seemed to go with the territory. Maybe too many of us had seen too many old movies and knew the moves that the stars of old used, to keep them stars—but seduction I feel has become a lost art, but one which a little practice we can bring back again.

So to reacquaint you with it, I offer 37 ways to be seductive. You might find more at my website, www.perrybrass.com, but these 37 are good ways to begin.

1) Repeat his name after you hear it. Then say, “I like your name.” Even if you don’t and his name is Jerky McSmirk, say it. Then smile a bit, but make sure he does not feel that you are laughing at him.

2) Ask him what he does with his time that is important to him. Almost every man loves to talk about his work, and even if he doesn’t he will have something that he likes to do with his time and is waiting for someone to ask.

3) Keep his hand in yours for more than moment, but not long enough to embarrass him if he is embarrassed by public displays of affection.

4) Touch him behind the ear or neck. Very gently.

5) Get close enough to him that he can smell your breath, and make sure that your breath is worth smelling.

6) Tell you like . . . the way he smells, his skin feels, his eyes look—something completely personal.

7) Invite him to sit down with you.

8) Invite him to stand up, go to the bar, go outside for a breath of air; anything, just invite him to do it, so he knows you are including him in your plans.

9) Ask him how he feels. And repeat the question often. In most of “normal” life, no one cares how men feel. It is considered uncool to ask. Don’t be afraid of being uncool. Cool is for kids. Warm is for men.

10) Ask him to taste what you are drinking. And then smile.

11) Offer to buy him a drink. Or, if not a drink, then something else. Don’t offer this to reciprocate for something he has already done; make it a freewill offering. If it is simply tit-for-tat (whatever the hell that means), it loses a lot of its seductive power and even your tit may start to pale compared to his tat.

12) If you offer him a business card (and people do nowadays), write something on the back of it that is personal, even if it’s just your signature and “call.”

13) Touch his hair or forehead lightly with your fingers and smile while you’re doing this.

14) Sophia Loren was once asked who was the most seductive man she had ever met. “Cary Grant. We met on a plane. What struck me immediately was how he smelled, with a very subtle citrus cologne, and how nice his manners were. So many men use bad manners to seduce, and that’s bad.”
Learn something from that.

15) Wherever you are, find an excuse to invite him outside for a moment. Then enjoy the fact that the two of you are breathing the same air without a lot of other people breathing it.

16) Invite him to your—whatever. Apartment, palatial estate in Hoboken, hotel room, or even the curb where your car is parked, or the curb next to the subway entrance. But make sure he knows this invitation comes from you personally.

17) Ask him out for something. If he asks if this is a “date,” say, “No, but I just thought we’d get to know each other and have fun.”

18) There is nothing so seductive as a man who knows when to laugh at the right time. Never laugh at him, unless of course the whole situation at some point becomes so absurd that even while laughing at him, you are really laughing at yourself.

19) At some point make sure that your cheek is close to his. You can do this by getting close enough to him to whisper into his ear. There is something tingling and nice about having someone whisper into your ear anyway, but having your cheek next to his cheek means that you are inviting intimacy, something that most men find appealing, even if they are not capable of doing it themselves.

20) When he shows up at your apartment, tell him how much nicer he looks without a lot of people around him.

21) Don’t expect him to sit next to you his first time in your “space”; allow him to have some other alternative seating. And don’t take offense if he does not sit with you. He may be too shy to plump down next to you when he hardly knows you.

22) But this should not keep you from approaching him and smiling.

23) Always offer a man something to eat. It may be light, but it should have some texture to it. If he’s nervous at your first meeting, having something like celery or carrots around for munchies can be good. Don’t just offer him a drink. Although “liquor is quicker,” it often makes men feel out of control.

24) Sex and intimacy are great appetite suppressants, which is probably the reason why so many people are over-weight now: they don’t get enough of either. So if things heat up, dinner can wait.

25) Admire something he’s wearing, then tell him, smiling, how much better he might look without it.

26) Don’t jump all over him. Let him have a moment to enjoy the intimacy of physical closeness with you. Sexual dysfunction is now on the rise, and part of that may be that people expect too much to happen too fast, in an already stressful work-driven culture. So no matter what “deed” happens, enjoy the fact that he is there enjoying you.

27) Ask him, “Is there anything we can do that would make you more comfortable?” If he hesitates, then tell him what would you more comfortable.

28) Try taking off your shoes, and then his.

29) Massage his shoulders. Most men carry huge tension in them. Use a light touch, and don’t try to do anything unexpected that would surprise or bother him.

30) Point out something around the apartment or space that interests you, and talk about it in a way that can bring him into the picture. (“Do you have anything like that? What do you usually show your friends?”)

31) Turn the music to something that is soft, no matter what your taste in sound is. Never make either of you talk over the music, and if the news is on turn it off.

32) Bring out some pictures to look at it. And invite him to sit closer to you.

33) When you are sitting closer, have at least one part of your body (an elbow, knee, hand, or shoulder) touch his.

34) If you offer him something to eat, give him a moment to try it without being all over him. Seduction requires a moment for him to enjoy being near you without you being aggressive about it. So, draw away from him for a moment while he eats. Or drinks.

35) If you feel that he is withdrawing from you (and sometimes this happens from nerves or self-consciousness), then take a breather. Don’t get into his face, but back off a bit, and then come back with (in a nice, non-threatening way): “What’s your day been like?” Get him to talk. Again, most men are never asked about their feelings or themselves unless it has to do with work and is done in a threatening or threatening way. (My most loathed question is, “How’z-it goin’?” Instead of “How are you feeling?” It’s OK for street morons to reduce each other to that; you don’t have to.)

So the fact that you are not asking in a threatening or challenging way is wonderful.

36) Touch his shoulders gently. And then work your way up to his ear or face: gently. Kiss him, but not on the lips. Now start to touch his chest, and unbutton a button or two. After unbuttoning a few buttons, stop, kiss him, then begin unbuttoning or removing more.

37) Tell him you did not expect him to look so good with his clothes off. And then say, “I really like your shoulders (or chest, or neck, or arms, or . . . ). Most men love having their bodies complimented. And, if he does have a great body, and it’s obvious that he’s spent a lot of time on it, tell him, “You should keep your clothes off all the time.” In other words, you are not so foolishly “cool” and self-involved that you are going to ignore something that means a lot to him.