Bernstein, Homophobia, Historiography.

24 Women & Music Volume 13

who pursued frequent and intense relations with other men (not only in the years before and after his marriage) and who proselytized on behalf of homosexuality to all who would listen and even many who would not?

In connection with the latter relations and identity Bernstein may be understood as kin-dred with the myriad homosexual artists with whom he had close ties from his late teens on. These included his mentors (the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos and the composer Aaron Copland), composer colleagues (Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, and David Diamond, to name just a few), and musical theater collaborators (the dancer-choreographer Jerome Robbins, play-wright-novelist Arthur Laurents, and composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim). All these men were signifi cant to Bernstein professionally as well as personally. All, in various ways, fi gured impor-tantly in his life and career.

By the general agreement of both his champions and his detractors, Leonard Bernstein (1918–90) was American clas-

sical music’s fi rst megastar, an international icon whose celebrity transcended his fi eld. Perhaps this extraordinary popularity somehow accounts for Bernstein’s long absence from the scholarly dialogues that shape offi cial musical knowledge. Or maybe such absence has to do with the diffi -culties of placing him in relation to the categories by which musicological discourse proceeds: Was Bernstein a conductor or composer, executant or auteur? Should we understand his creative work as composer and sometime lyricist under the ru-bric of “learned” or “vernacular”? And what about his life and person: Was it Bernstein the family man, as suggested by his role as husband in a twenty-seven-year marriage and devoted fa-ther of three? Or was this mere cover for Bern-stein’s “true” identity as a homosexual, a man

Bernstein, Homophobia, Historiography

Nadine Hubbs

Hubbs, Bernstein, Homophobia, Historiography 25

specially sexual, hence unseemly in certain offi -cial contexts, is a crucial factor in historical and historiographic homophobia. When identifi ed as gay, Bernstein and the other artists mentioned above have long been subject to a sexualized taint that had consequences in their lifetimes and of which later commentators and scholars, both friend and foe, have often steered clear.

Given this taint, and given musicology’s part in upholding the cultural status of music and musicians, the phrase “Don’t air your dirty laundry” may help to explain the long-standing musicological reticence toward homosexuals and homosexuality in U.S. musical modernism. This is not to suggest that homophobia and mu-sicology themselves have lacked for homosexual constituents; they have not. Indeed, the posses-sive in “your dirty laundry” points most specifi -cally here to homosexuals in the music world, and historically, queer-identifi ed composers, musicians, and scholars have had a signifi cant role and interest in conserving and controlling the circulation of knowledge about queer in-dividuals and infl uences in music. Throughout most of the twentieth century (and to a lesser extent up to today), such knowledge has been subcultural, shared exclusively among mem-bers of the minoritized queer group. Although identifying an esteemed musical fi gure as homo-sexual has frequently served to inspire a sense of pride and belonging among queer musicians, in the mainstream it long served to shame and discredit the fi gure in question and sometimes the people and projects associated with him or her.4 In this light it is easy to see why many queer (and queer-allied) commentators have long been

But so did his marriage and children and un-doubtedly the heterosexual identity credentials that attached to them. Bernstein’s longtime col-league, friend, and onetime lover Ned Rorem has written that “all homosexual conductors of the period (except Mitropoulos) . . . mar-ried,” adding that “male orchestra conductors . . . were and remain married worldwide, though most of them fool around: being absolute mon-archs, anything is permitted them, provided they are protected with a wedding ring.”1 Unlike his earliest conducting role model, Mitropoulos, Bernstein indeed, and fatefully, bore the pro-tection of a wedding ring—at least after 1951, the year he turned thirty-three. Bernstein’s conducting career had been frustratingly idled around this time and would remain so for sev-eral years. Only in 1957, when he got his own major orchestra, would Bernstein’s career take off and approach the heights he strove for. By then a husband and father of two small children, Bernstein, not yet forty, was appointed music di-rector of the New York Philharmonic. He was at the time one of the youngest men and the only American-born and -trained conductor ever ap-pointed to that post.2

There is much more history surrounding Bernstein’s rise to conducting glory, however, including a lesser-known story of treachery and shame buried beneath the well-known tale of all-American triumph. I will examine that shadow narrative and other instances from a dual per-spective, focused on the ways in which histori-cal homophobia in Bernstein’s life and career is intertwined with and compounded by historio-graphic homophobia in treatments that revise or omit “unseemly” details of Bernstein’s story.3 Twentieth- and twenty-fi rst-century American culture’s marking of gay persons and liaisons as

1. Ned Rorem, Knowing When to Stop: A Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 570, 346–47.2. News of Bernstein’s appointment as NYPO music di-rector was announced in November 1957. He assumed this post in September 1958 after serving with Mitropou-los as joint principal conductor for the 1957–58 season. See Meryle Secrest, Leonard Bernstein: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 223; Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), 282.3. My use herein of the term homophobia refers to acute

fear of homosexuals and homosexuality and assumes the phenomenon to be cultural and not merely individual.4. For further discussion of this safeguarding of queer knowledge and its history in the American music world see Nadine Hubbs, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 133–35, 145–46. For illustration of such identifi catory pride and its complexities in the late-twentieth-century U.S. classical music world see Nadine Hubbs, “On the Uses of Shame and Gifts of a Bloodmobile: Musings from a Musical Queer Apprenticeship,” in Gay Shame, ed. David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub, 115–20 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).


writings on Bernstein, connecting to the intrica-cies of his sexual life and persona. I intend this essay in part as an intervention into these inad-equacies, and a timely one, I hope, as scholarly neglect of Bernstein has ended, and various mu-sicological and other projects on Bernstein and his work are now under way.

My method in pursuing these inquiries and objectives is not to reveal any new archival dis-coveries about Bernstein but rather to recombine and reconsider existing evidence and narratives in relation to modern homophobia, its costs and benefi ts, and its shaping of cultural and musical knowledge. In the process we will note the in-stitutionalized—indeed, culturally constitutive—nature and varied results of homophobia in its infl uence on both queer and straight writers, read-ers, and historical subjects. We will also witness modern homophobia’s engendering of negative and positive effects and Bernstein’s fi nal assess-ment of his and his wife Felicia’s steep personal losses accruing to the same heteronormative and homophobic conventionalism that enabled rich gains to his career and hence the music world.7

The stakes in this antihomophobic project include individual biographical accuracy, but they extend further to issues of cultural histori-ography and the construction of our stories and beliefs about U.S. and broader cultures past and present. Bernstein’s adult life and career in the twentieth century’s supremely antihomosexual middle third and his fi nal two decades in the post-Stonewall era were fundamentally shaped by and provide a telling lens on the workings and reverberations of modern homophobia.8 It

silent on the connections between homosexual-ity and U.S. music culture.

Whether or not we should expect queer com-mentators’ reasons for silence to be less hetero-centric or homophobic than those of their non-queer-identifi ed counterparts (for surely being queer does not preclude one from internalizing a homophobic outlook), in other respects these reasons were identical.5 Indeed, whether one guards queer musical knowledge from or for the sociosexual or music historical status quo, the effort is a response to the same homophobic structures, which taint and discredit musical fi g-ures and projects perceived as deviant. In twen-tieth-century and later America such taint and discredit (and more violent reactions) around male homosexuality have been linked to the cul-ture’s reductive sexualization and feminization of gay male identity.

This essay aims to demonstrate that, however much respectable discursive sensibilities would have us avoid the sexually tainted, often back-channel information that fl ags the site of ho-mophobia, such information must be reckoned with in offi cial musical knowledge—particularly in the realm of American modernism and still more particularly in the case of Leonard Bern-stein.6 The examples presented here highlight some consequential inadequacies of existing

5. The late Paul Monette’s memoir Becoming a Man pow-erfully illustrates the ways in which queer people may in-ternalize heterocentric and homophobic social scripts, the effects this can have on their own and others’ lives, and how they might also challenge the same scripts, as Mon-ette did upon receiving a terminal diagnosis in middle age (Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story [1992; New York: Harper Collins, 2004]).6. Discredited discourses of rumor, gossip, and queer-ness have been explored and in some part rehabilitated in scholarly explorations, including Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Knopf, 1985); and James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry D. Harootu-nian, eds., Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Especially relevant to the present discussion is Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), an examina-tion in the context of the art world of the epistemology of gossip and rumor, evidential forms that “queer the very ways in which we think of the evidential” (7).

7. My perception of homophobia’s signifi cant infl uence on nonqueer and queer people and of its cultural productiv-ity owes to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 68–69 and elsewhere.8. Though we can legitimately speak of the workings of homophobia throughout the twentieth century, ho-mophobia became known as such only late in the cen-tury. The term is credited to the psychologist George H. Weinberg, who explicated it in his book Society and the Healthy Homosexual (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972) and claims to have fi rst conceived it in a 1965 speech delivered to a homophile group; see the 2002 Gay Today interview with Weinberg at http://www.gaytoday


vailing binaristic terms of gay and straight and to have placed himself—explicitly and in 1976 publicly—in the gay category. None of the bi-ographers just named offers any suggestion that Bernstein ever self-identifi ed as bisexual. But Burton and Secrest seem to apply the label in an empirical, quasi-clinical, and perhaps essen-tialist sense on the basis of Bernstein’s tallied—not to say equal—involvements with both men and women, and they apparently use it without regard to, or even despite, their subject’s own self-identifi cation.11

Undoubtedly, pervasive conditions of ho-mophobia would have exerted considerable pressure on all of these (non-queer-identifi ed) biographers in their word choice. The appar-ently euphemistic practice two of them deploy may connect to the stigma and explosiveness attaching to the label homosexual, especially when applied to a revered cultural fi gure. A number of celebrities in the 1970s and 1980s exhibited a coming-out pattern that consisted in fi rst claiming a bisexual identity, eventually de-claring themselves gay, and explaining their ear-lier revelations as stepping stones or evasions.12

was for U.S. purposes a thing that arose, like homosexuality itself, with the twentieth century, and it shaped American social, cultural, and po-litical life to a degree that our histories have yet to grasp and, indeed, at times uphold.9

Homophobia, History, and Historiography

One historical and historiographic question rel-evant to Bernstein and homophobia concerns the identity classifi cations that have been ap-plied to him in musicological and biographical discourses and their assumptions, implications, and effects. For example, of his three most recent biographers, Joan Peyser, Humphrey Burton, and Meryle Secrest, the latter two invoke the bi-sexual label with reference to their subject.10 By all these writers’ accounts, however, Bernstein appears to have viewed the world in the pre-

.com/interview/110102in.asp. The term is anachronistic in relation to pre-1965 histories, and many lesbian and gay scholars use “antihomosexuality” with reference to the mid-twentieth century.9. By now well known are the accounts by scholars in-cluding Jeffrey Weeks and, especially, Michel Foucault, placing the invention of homosexuality with European sexologists circa 1870. See Weeks, Coming Out: Homo-sexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977); and Fou-cault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), esp. 43. For a lucid and authoritative historical overview placing the U.S. inception of modern homosexuality and homophobia at the start of the twentieth century see the amicus curiae brief submitted by a group of ten promi-nent professors of U.S. history in January 2003 to the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Lawrence and Garner v. Texas (which struck down sodomy statutes). The brief is reprinted with an introduction by lead author George Chauncey in “’What Gay Studies Taught the Court’: The Historians’ Amicus Brief in Lawrence v. Texas,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 509–38. Chauncey et al. discuss the twentieth-century establishment of antihomosexual discrimination in state and other institutions (520–25) and identify the 1930s through 1960s as the most intensely antihomosexual pe-riod in U.S. history (522–25). In Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994) Chauncey demonstrates at greater length the divergence of U.S. and European histories of homosexuality and the later, twen-tieth-century inception of homosexuality in the context of New York male sociosexual culture.10. Burton, Leonard Bernstein; Joan Peyser, Bernstein: A Biography, revised and updated ed. (1987; New York: William Morrow, 1998); and Secrest, Leonard Bernstein.

11. See Secrest, Leonard Bernstein, 384. When Secrest cites Shirley Bernstein’s interpretation of Lenny’s “failures to establish [long-lasting] relationships with men” as evi-dence that “her brother was really a bisexual,” it seems to confi rm the deviation of this reading from his own self-interpretation (341, emphasis mine). In Burton, Leonard Bernstein, see esp. 211.12. Several examples—including David Geffen, Elton John, Boy George—are discussed in Marjorie Garber, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 145. Of course, “bisexual” is not always euphemistic in relation to “gay” or “lesbian.” Garber cites instances from various histori-cal and cultural contexts in which bisexuality is regarded as a socially acceptable “halfway point” (121) and oth-ers in which the valences are reversed—as in second-wave lesbian feminism, where the bisexual label could be seen as less politically correct than “pure” lesbianism and stig-matizing in its capacity to induce anxiety in hetero- and homosexual cohorts alike (44–45). Relatedly, the Brit-ish socialist writer Nicola Field argues that bisexuals are subject to homophobia in the contemporary mainstream and (again) hostility from gay- and lesbian-identifi ed counterparts and that bisexuality presents a more radi-cal challenge to late-capitalist society than do commodi-fi ed lesbian and gay identities (“Bisexuality,” in Over the Rainbow: Money, Class and Homophobia, 133–50 [East Haven, CT: Pluto Press, 1995]).


public statements in this regard were paranoid cold war press reports alleging a dangerous and conspiratorial homosexual takeover of the American arts.14 Secrest conjures this strain of discourse in her treatment here of the “dirty” business of American classical music. She cites claims but no evidence that the “cult” of homo-sexuality made it “a disadvantage not to be a homosexual in the music world,” that “careers of many heterosexuals had suffered . . . discrimi-nation,” that one “well-known composer” had “changed his sexual orientation [to homosexu-al] to improve his career prospects” (a change Secrest at one point curiously attributes to the young Bernstein), and that another composer rejected a homosexual proposition that was presented as the price for a performance of his music.15

This last instance readily links to a homopho-bic rumor thread that is taken up uncritically in Burton’s biography. It involves the League of Composers, an organization for the promotion and performance of new music in which Copland was prominent and many of his friends were active. Burton notes that the league “was once

Bernstein was not among them, however, and his designation as bisexual appears problem-atic from political, ethical, and historiographic perspectives.

Also problematic is the fact that, while these biographies show the young Bernstein from his teens through his early thirties both vigorously pursuing other men and ambivalently engaging with women, their treatments neglect to ad-dress the radically differing social and cultural statuses of the relationships. To be sure, their respective accounts show awareness of and sometimes even echo the tremendous social dis-approval and marginalization of homosexuality in mid-twentieth-century America. But none of the biographies registers historical, explanatory awareness toward the defi ning asymmetry of the available social-sexual “options” whereby other-sex relationships were mandated by Bernstein’s family, religion, and society, while same-sex re-lationships were subject to the same institutions’ harshest taboos and strictures. Indeed, though the term implies a matchup between equal de-sires, sexual ambivalence in twentieth-century U.S. contexts more often fl ags a cross-dimen-sional confl ict between homosexual feelings and heterosexual social imperatives.

Echoes of homophobia are audible in Secrest’s biography when, for example, in a discussion of exploitation and moral corruption in the classi-cal music business, she broaches the “role ho-mosexuals have played in the [U.S.] arts,” which is, she avers, “too obvious to need emphasis.” In fact, by 1994, when Secrest’s book was pub-lished, there had been little public discussion of homosexuals in the American arts, certainly in classical music.13 Some of the highest-profi le

13. Among relevant publications, Eric A. Gordon’s Blitz-stein biography had appeared in 1989, and Ned Rorem had published several of his diaries starting in 1966. Ap-pearing in the same year as Secrest’s biography, 1994 (thus, after she would have submitted her manuscript to the publisher), were the inaugural and now classic work of lesbian-gay musicology, Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas’s Queering the Pitch; Chauncey’s Gay New York, with its revelations on Charles Tomlinson Griffes; Gena Dagel Caponi’s Bowles biography; and K. Robert Schwarz’s landmark New York Times article on

gay U.S. twentieth-century composers, “Composers’ Clos-ets Open for All to See.” Works that had yet to appear included William R. Trotter’s Mitropoulos biography; Gay American Composers, the fi rst of CRI’s recordings featuring gay and lesbian American composers; Anthony Tommasini’s Thomson biography; Leta E. Miller and Fre-dric Lieberman’s biography of Lou Harrison; Howard Pollack’s Copland biography; my own Queer Composi-tion; and Michael S. Sherry’s treatment of Samuel Barber and others in Gay Artists in Modern American Culture.14. A list of press and media sources involved appears later in this essay. For an excellent history and analysis of antihomosexuality in cold war arts commentary and journalism, including the conspiracy theories around U.S. gay artists, see Michael S. Sherry, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).15. Secrest, Leonard Bernstein, 256–57. Secrest details the twenty-one-year-old Bernstein’s reference to disciplines and sacrifi ces he had made in preparation for a season in Minneapolis as assistant conductor to Mitropoulos—this in a letter to Diamond following Mitropoulos’s cancella-tion of their plans. The sacrifi ces included having “aban-doned” his “sexual life,” which Secrest puzzlingly reads as “conceivably” suggesting that Bernstein “had made the decision to abandon his heterosexual pursuits for the good of his career” (72).


faced in the literature on Bernstein and suggest how it has shaped knowledge about Bernstein’s life and career history. Before discussing further the ways in which Bernstein’s history has been written, I will fl esh out more of that history, its shifting cultural contexts over the years, and the place of historical homophobia within it.

Eclecticism and Omnivorism: Bernstein as Subject

The complexities in Bernstein’s personal and sexual life have often been viewed in parallel with his complexities as an artist. To engage with Bernstein the artist is to confront stylistic and methodological eclecticism in his juxtapo-sition of seemingly contradictory elements and aesthetics and in his grand and quasi-Mahleri-an embrace of forms, of mediums, and of high and low, elite and mass culture. Bernstein’s late composition and arguable magnum opus Mass (commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) illustrates these tendencies in its staging of a rock band, symphony orchestra and chorus, boy choir, rock singer, boy-soprano soloist, and more, all in a single work, as well as a range of musical styles and sacred and secular texts in various languages. Here is Bernstein the re-nowned omnivore, eager to partake simultane-ously of multiple, seemingly disparate banquets of musical and theatrical practice—much as, in the personal arena, he partook of both a con-ventional heterosexual family life and a heady mix of gay sex, romance, and high life. Further eclectic and omnivorous qualities of Bernstein’s social and professional persona are suggested by Rorem’s description of his friend as “madly competitive with everyone, mean, sweet, vulgar, tactful, rude and generous.”20

Bernstein fi rst stepped into the limelight with his legendary 1943 debut leading the New York Philharmonic. Barely twenty-fi ve, he fi lled in on short notice for an ailing Bruno Walter. Following his much-heralded triumph, the young maestro assumed, as did many others in the mu-sic world, that he would soon have a major or-chestra of his own. But Bernstein still did not

dubbed the Homintern” because there were so many homosexuals among the “leading musical fi gures in the New York left-leaning intelligen-tsia.”16 His statement revives and legitimates the word “Homintern,” a fusion of “homosexual” and “Comintern,” the latter term being an ab-breviation for Communist International, the Moscow parent group of the world Communist Party. With its sinister, conspiratorial connota-tions, this neologism was an effective tool in cold war antihomosexual rhetoric, used par-ticularly for maligning the infl uence of homo-sexual artists: “The arts are dominated by a kind of homosexual mafi a—or ‘Homintern,’” explained Time magazine in its 1966 exposé “The Homosexual in America.” Burton’s state-ment about the League of Composers echoes cold war homophobic “knowledge” concerning the American arts overall: “In the theater, dance and music world, deviates are so widespread that they sometimes seem to be running a closed shop,” Time apprised Middle America.17

Though never substantiated, such claims were widely and authoritatively circulated to dam-aging effect. Burton invokes the “Homintern” trope, with its scurrilous history and its confl a-tion of homosexual association with conspiracy, in support of his claim—rehearsing another ho-mophobic trope—that Copland “never fl aunted his homosexuality in the way certain of his friends did.”18 Peyser at one point cites and elab-orates on yet another homophobic trope, the psychopathologizing notion that homosexuality is a species of narcissism, which in this instance occasions comparison between homosexuals and postwar Viennese Aryans.19

Such examples illustrate some of the ways in which historiographic homophobia has sur-

16. Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 43.17. “The Homosexual in America,” Time, January 21, 1966, 40–41.18. Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 43.19. See Peyser, Bernstein, 465, quoting the wife of Bill Fertik on Vienna’s fascination with Bernstein owing to “an Aryan narcissism, a homosexual sensibility that is pervasive there.” Peyser then notes that “if that homo-sexual sensibility played [such] a role,” the attraction was mutual. 20. Secrest, Leonard Bernstein, 104.


During Bernstein’s time in Philadelphia, Mitro-poulos, whose generosity is legend, sent him a monthly stipend to supplement the meager al-lowance he received from his wealthy father Samuel Bernstein.24

In late 1937 Bernstein, now nineteen, met Aaron Copland in New York at the ballet. This chance meeting launched Bernstein’s entrée into an important gay creative circle. He was invited to Copland’s thirty-seventh birthday party that night, where he met another queer modernist, Paul Bowles, whom he would soon befriend and whose beguiling music he would absorb and emulate, and laud throughout his life.25 Bowles had studied with Copland and with Virgil Thom-son, who was also at the party. Bernstein himself soon began studies with Copland, who became and remained his principal compositional men-tor (another gay elder, Marc Blitzstein, had the next-greatest infl uence on Bernstein as compos-er).26 Apparently, Copland and Bernstein in the early years of their acquaintance were sexually involved—if we accept Secrest’s account of the trauma of one teenage daughter of a boarding-house proprietress in Lenox, Massachusetts (near Tanglewood Music Center), upon discov-ering them together in her bed.27

have an orchestra when in 1947 he was widely viewed as front-runner for the conducting va-cancy in the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. Here as elsewhere Bernstein was passed over in favor of a European candidate: the Rochester trustees appointed the Viennese conductor Erich Leinsdorf. Bernstein believed this rejection had to do with rumors of his homosexuality, and Bettina Bachmann, an associate whose parents sat on the RPO board, confi rmed that this was the case.21 It seems that young Bernstein’s career was thwarted here by just the sort of trouble Serge Koussevitzky had warned him about: ho-mophobia (though the term would only come into usage twenty-fi ve years later).

A decade earlier, in 1937, Bernstein had met his fi rst important mentors in conducting and composition. Both were homosexuals. Early that year the eighteen-year-old wunderkind met and was dazzled (and, some believe, seduced) by Dimitri Mitropoulos, a queer conductor-com-poser-pianist, Mahler proponent, and physi-cally theatrical performer who modeled the professional persona Bernstein would embrace for himself.22 It was Mitropoulos who opened the door to Bernstein’s conducting career, being the fi rst to encourage him in this pursuit. And Bernstein always credited Mitropoulos for hav-ing guided him as a young Harvard graduate in 1939 toward the Curtis Institute, where he be-gan his conducting studies under Fritz Reiner.23

21. Secrest, Leonard Bernstein, 145–46.22. Secrest, Leonard Bernstein, 50–51 (includes brief lists of Bernstein associates who did, and did not, believe that he had sex with Mitropoulos), 59.23. Burton, however, expressly contradicts this account. According to his biography, Copland was “the moving force” in Bernstein’s decision to seek training as a conduc-tor and provided the necessary connections with Reiner, who was a friend of his (Leonard Bernstein, 59). This may represent the version of events preferred by Bernstein in later life. Burton, who worked at BBC television, served for over twenty years as Bernstein’s TV and video director, and was granted exclusive access to the Bernstein Archive and extensive copyright permissions by the Bernstein Es-tate, emphasizes that his biography was not “authorized” and avers, “Nobody has told me what to say” (ix). But Bernstein commentators generally identify it as the “‘of-fi cial biography’ . . . commissioned by [the] estate,” as Paul R. Laird writes in Leonard Bernstein: A Guide to

Research (New York: Routledge, 2004), 92. Burton’s ac-count also apparently enjoys the approval of the Bernstein family: it is the only biography for sale in the “Shop” sec-tion of their offi cial site, www.leonardbernstein.com.24. Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 65.25. See Hubbs, Queer Composition, 109–10. Rorem vari-ously attests to Bowles’s important infl uence on Bernstein as composer; see, e.g., Knowing When to Stop, 192.26. Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 41–42. Bernstein met Blitz-stein in 1938, the year after he met Copland and the year af-ter the premiere of Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock (52).27. Secrest, Leonard Bernstein, 96. Burton also offers sug-gestive evidence in this regard. In correspondence from the summer of 1943, for example, Copland urged Bern-stein to visit him in Hollywood while his boyfriend Vic-tor Kraft was away in Mexico. Bernstein replied, “I don’t usually go in for being 2nd Fiddle but with you it looks good.” Elsewhere, discussing Bernstein and Copland’s earliest acquaintance, Burton wonders whether Bernstein might have temporarily displaced Kraft in Copland’s af-fections (Leonard Bernstein, 108, 43). Beyond Copland and Rorem, there is some evidence suggesting that Bern-stein as a young man also had sexual liaisons with Bowles and Blitzstein.


of U.S. homophobia, which (given its “birth” ca. 1900) might be termed homophobia’s mid-dle age, was its most vigorous, potent phase in American history.

These were the decades of the Hays censor-ship code, which from 1930 to 1968 prohibited onscreen representation of homosexuals and homosexuality in Hollywood movies, arguably America’s preeminent cultural form.30 Medicine, government, and the media also increasingly imposed prohibitions on real-life homosexuals and homosexuality. For example, public assem-bly of homosexuals was effectively banned in New York circa 1933–69 through antigay regu-lation of bars in that state.31 Across the coun-try, sex-crime panics from the 1920s through 1960s helped to construct the homosexual in medico-juridical terms of an uncontrolled, in-discriminate “sexual psychopath.”32 World War II brought an intensifi cation of homosexual visibility and a backlash in antihomosexuality, which took new, more virulent forms at war’s end. Thousands of servicemen and -women, having honorably fulfi lled their wartime duties, were adjudged to be homosexual, issued “blue discharges,” and stripped of military benefi ts. Thus were large numbers of Americans labeled “homosexual” deleted from the history labeled “American”—in this instance, that illustrious chapter in which the benefi ts of the GI Bill dra-

There is speculation but no clear evidence as to whether Bernstein had sex with Bowles or Blitzstein. It seems clear that Bernstein had no carnal knowledge of Thomson, whom the famously beautiful Ned Rorem claims to have eluded, along with Bowles and Samuel Barber, when they variously made passes at him. By Rorem’s account, he and Bernstein did share a sexual encounter in 1943 on the occasion of their fi rst meeting in New York.28 As these in-stances might suggest, gay sex and desire were real and operative factors on the markedly queer scene of U.S. midcentury musical mod-ernism. It was, however, the tightly woven so-cial dimension (never fully separable, of course, from the erotic element) of midcentury gay composers’ circles that most shaped American artistic modernism and national culture.29 So what was it that bound these gay artists so closely together in social networks that were concurrently sexual, artistic, and professional? Desire played a role, but an even greater factor on this historical site, more powerful than de-sire, was homophobia.

Homophobia’s Constitution of Modern Culture

In twentieth-century and later America ho-mophobia has shown itself to be a dynamic and multifaceted cultural force. Historiographic reckoning with homophobia therefore requires attention to its varied aspects and shifting forms and fashions over time and in different loci. The homophobia most infl uential in Bernstein’s life—not to say the subsequent chronicling of it—is that which prevailed in his prime, from the 1930s (his teenage years) through the 1960s (his forties to early fi fties). This era in the life

28. See Rorem, Knowing When to Stop, 174–78, 193, 308, 383. Bernstein’s recent biographers concur regard-ing his encounter with Rorem (Peyser, Bernstein, 101–2; Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 105; and Secrest, Leonard Bernstein, 104). One associate also observed “odd [i.e., sexual] looks” passing between Bernstein and his “new friend” David Diamond circa the winter of 1939–40 (Bur-ton, Leonard Bernstein, 68).29. This is argued in Hubbs, Queer Composition, 5–6 and elsewhere.

30. For a pioneering study of the history and effects of such prohibition see Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (1981; San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987). A more up-to-date discussion of fi lm censorship in relation to homosexuality in this period is given in Richard Barrios, Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (New York: Rout-ledge, 2003).31. The insight is that of George Chauncey. See his discus-sion of the use of disorderly conduct charges in this regard in Gay New York, 337–47.32. See Estelle B. Freedman, “’Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920–1960” (1987), in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Chris-tina Simmons and Kathy Press, 199–225 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); also George Chauncey, “The Postwar Sex Crime Panic,” in True Stories from the American Past, ed. William Graebner, 160–78 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993).


ther blacklisting, now by the NYPO, and pos-sible imprisonment.36

Like others in his circle (including Blitzstein, Copland, and Robbins), Bernstein was doubly vulnerable in this period, subject to Red Scare scrutiny because of his involvements in Left political causes and to “Lavender Scare” scru-tiny because of his homosexual involvements.37 Bernstein, Blitzstein, and Copland were named in connection with suspect political involve-ments both in testimony to the House Com-mittee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and in the well-known blacklisters’ resource Red Channels.38 Queer-baiting was key among government information-gathering tactics, and Robbins purportedly feared exposure as a ho-mosexual when in 1953 he “named names” to congressional investigators.39

Another Bernstein contact, his close friend David Diamond, was subpoenaed while fi d-dling in a Broadway orchestra pit for Candide. According to Diamond, he was taken to a downtown federal building and questioned by HUAC members about politics and sexuality—

matically transformed the postwar educational, housing, and economic opportunities of millions of citizens.33

In the cold war fi fties and sixties antihomo-sexual suspicions and hostilities were given high-profi le expression in media ranging from cheap tabloids through revered cultural and journalistic bastions, including Partisan Review, American Mercury, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, Time, and CBS Reports.34 Alleged “perverts” were publicly ex-posed and purged from their government jobs in 1950 federal hearings. The U.S. Senate also held hearings and issued a report on the national se-curity risk posed by such individuals in govern-ment employ, and similar actions were carried out in state legislatures.35

It was around this time that Bernstein as conductor found himself idled for reasons that may include those newly reported by the politi-cal scientist Barry Seldes. Drawing on FBI fi les and other documents, Seldes notes that Bern-stein was blacklisted by the State Department and CBS in 1950 and took a sabbatical from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra (NYPO) to devote himself to composing from 1951 to 1955. Seldes hypothesizes that Bernstein’s time away from the CBS-affi liated NYPO served as a voluntary self-exile motivated by his fear of fur-

33. See Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The His-tory of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990); also Margot Canaday, “Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 G.I. Bill,” Journal of American History 90, no. 3 (2003): 935–57. On wartime changes in visibility and the postwar reaction see also John D’Emilio, “The Homosex-ual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in Cold War Amer-ica,” in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University, 57–73 (New York: Routledge, 1992).34. See Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis, 1940–1996 (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1997), 165; also Hubbs, Queer Composition, 157–59.35. See D’Emilio, “The Homosexual Menace”; Louise S. Robbins, “The Library of Congress and Federal Loy-alty Programs, 1947–1956: No ‘Communists or Cock-suckers,’” Library Quarterly 64, no. 4 (1994): 365–85; William N. Eskridge Jr., “Privacy Jurisprudence and the Apartheid of the Closet, 1946–1961,” Florida State University Law Review 24, no. 4 (1997): 703–840; and Hubbs, Queer Composition, 158.

36. Barry Seldes, Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).37. The quoted phrase originates in David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 2004).38. House Committee on Un-American Activities, Tes-timony of Walter S. Steele Regarding Communist Activ-ity in the United States, 80th Cong., 1st sess. (July 21, 1947), 99, cited in Jennifer L. DeLapp, “Copland in the Fifties: Music and Ideology in the McCarthy Era,” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1997, 156; Red Channels: The Report of Communist Infl uence in Radio and Televi-sion (New York: American Business Consultants, 1950), 16–17, 20–23.39. Rumors have long circulated that Robbins (1918–98) testifi ed before HUAC investigators under threat of such exposure (Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names [New York: Viking, 1980], 75). Robbins denied that he was black-mailed, and biographer Greg Lawrence concludes that there is no evidence for it (Dancing with Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins [New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001]). Deborah Jowitt shows, however, that Robbins circa 1952 may have feared such blackmailing, whether or not justifi ably (Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance [New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004], 545, 210n5: “He even would forbid”).


among those embroiled in the U.S. government’s cold war inquisitions and punitions, in which Red-baiting and queer-baiting were often mutu-ally inextricable. In the fi fties, when Diamond was whisked away and privately interrogated about his politics and his and other artists’ sexu-ality and Bernstein left the country, apparently to avoid such questioning and potential incar-ceration, Copland suffered government censor-ship and blacklisting and was subpoenaed and publicly interrogated by members of Congress about his politics.43 Homophobia’s infl uence is also evident in the major music-stylistic shift that emerged in this period. Anxieties about the muscular suffi ciency of Coplandiana and, on the other hand, admiring perceptions of virile, unsentimental objectivity in atonal “complex-ity music” appear as factors in the ascendance of postwar serialism over tonal Americana music.44

A striking instance of homophobia’s positive cultural effects in twentieth-century culture—however negative its origins and most obvious consequences—can be found in the extraor-dinarily productive Thomson-Copland circle of gay composers, which also encompassed Blitzstein, Bowles, Diamond, Bernstein, and Rorem. Like so many of their homosexual peers, these men found deep rapport, self-expression, and solace in the abstract, inscrutable art of mu-sic. But unlike most other queer music devotees, the members of the Thomson-Copland circle thereby forged close personal and professional

his own sexuality and that of his composer and writer associates.40 Governmental cold war-riors deemed homosexuals as threatening to U.S. national security as Communists. Their purges of thousands of suspected homosexuals in government employ led tragically to ruined lives and careers and suicides but also, as David K. Johnson notes, helped to galvanize the gay civil rights movement.41 This last point gives an example of how homophobic actions can have wide-ranging, including productive and positive, effects that may not be apparent in the moment and call for informed attention from subsequent scholars and writers.

Midcentury homophobia sometimes took particular local forms in the American music world. Purges of homosexual students and fac-ulty at the Eastman School of Music in the 1930s and 1940s altered the course of musical careers and of music history. Gay men’s prominence and success in U.S. composition made them targets of music world rumors and conspiracy theories from at least the 1930s through the 1960s, and their associations with tonal music linked to the emergence of gendered and sexually coded connotations around tonal and atonal idioms, respectively.42 As just noted, gay musicians were

40. This in 1956; David Diamond, interview by the au-thor, November 13, 2001.41. Johnson, Lavender Scare, 10. For historical perspec-tive on the overall phenomenon of cold war antihomosex-uality see D’Emilio, “The Homosexual Menace.” See also U.S. Congress, Senate, Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government (Report to the Com-mittee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments), 81st Cong., 2nd sess., 1950, S. Doc. 241, in Government versus Homosexuals, ed. Leslie Parr (New York: Arno Press, 1975); Robbins, “The Library of Congress”; and Eskridge, “Privacy Jurisprudence.”42. See Hubbs, Queer Composition, 225n25, for sources on the Eastman purges and for partial summary of my November 2001 interview with David Diamond, who provided signifi cant new information on the purges. I ar-gue for the midcentury sexual coding of tonality (as femi-nine and gay) and atonality (as masculine and straight) in “A French Connection: Modernist Codes in the Musical Closet,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6, no. 3 (2000): 389–412; a later, longer version of this argu-ment appears as chapter 3 in Queer Composition. Writ-ing of the 1920s New York composition scene, Carol J. Oja similarly notes the emergence of ascriptions linking

consonant music and tonal neoclassicist composers with French (female) composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, femininity, homosexuality, and “impotence” as well as as-sociations of dissonance with manliness and virility (Mak-ing Music Modern: New York in the 1920s [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000], 125–26, 225). On con-spiracy theories surrounding gay modernist composers see Hubbs, Queer Composition, 155–59 and elsewhere.43. Copland’s testimony and censoring—of Lincoln Por-trait from the fi rst Eisenhower inaugural—both took place in 1953. As for blackmail prospects, Diamond re-ported that he outed (to invoke the current term) only himself, unequivocally and without hesitation (interview, November 13, 2001). His recollections are summarized in Hubbs, Queer Composition, 240n38.44. This claim is argued at length in Hubbs, Queer Com-position, chapter 4.


queer people unique among minoritized groups in exhibiting what Erving Goffman analyzed as the “ambivalence of stigmatized identity”).49 Comparably, Thomson’s biography contains a chapter entitled “I Didn’t Want to Be Queer,” and Rorem has confessed in his memoirs, “I am a little bit anti-queer.”50 Nor was it unusual for self-identifi ed homosexuals to wed in this era, producing unions that were often referred to as “marriages of convenience.” Within Bernstein’s circle he, Blitzstein, Bowles, and others made queer marriages (Thomson’s term), and even the ultracamp Thomson proposed such a marriage, albeit unsuccessfully.51

The Mitropoulos Affair: Homophobia,

Marriage, and the Making of a CareerAll three Bernstein biographies cited above sug-gest that the young Bernstein “proselytized” for the advantages of homosexuality, effusing circa 1943 about the particulars of gay sex even to his former girlfriend (and, by her account, reluc-tant recipient of such knowledge) Kiki Speyer. Bernstein had dashed their marriage plans in 1942 on the day before they were to have been announced by their mutual friend and his cur-rent mentor, the Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Koussevitzky. Bernstein failed to show for a date with Speyer, and she found him the next day at Tanglewood, unshaven and ac-companied by another male student. Bernstein told Speyer he had seduced the boy and was in love with him and that she would have to ex-plain things to Koussevitzky.52 Already in 1942

associations, shared knowledge and resources, and created a rich musical subculture that gave birth to an important national music culture. Their individual diligence and talent were in-strumental here, but so was their collectivity, which was rooted in their shared social minority status as homosexuals. Thus, homophobia con-tributed not only to the fall of Coplandian tonal Americana in the fi fties but to its initial rise in the late thirties.45

For purposes of historiography it is crucial to recognize that modern homophobia, though it could be expressed and reproduced by individu-als, was much more than an individual trait or attitude. Homophobia was and remains a vast sociocultural infrastructure, and so we should not expect to encounter it only in certain kinds of persons—say, bigots or, for that matter, het-erosexuals. Queer subjects have never been ex-empt from the homophobic views and behav-iors endemic in and signifi cantly constitutive of modern Anglo-American culture.46

The gay playwright Tennessee Williams re-corded in his memoir a 1945 incident in which he and Bernstein joined a pair of “piss-elegant queens” for lunch whom Bernstein (to Williams’s professed embarrassment) then attacked for their effeteness: “When the revolution comes,” he told them, “you will be stood up against a wall and shot.”47 Secrest notes an “intractable contradiction” here in that these men belonged to the same type Bernstein tended to pursue sexually.48 Bernstein was not alone among mid-century homosexuals in exhibiting homophobic ambivalence or even contempt, however (nor are

45. The arguments here recap certain arguments pre-sented in Hubbs, Queer Composition, and summarized on 168–73.46. Among the scholarship demonstrating the degree to which homophobia constitutes modern Western culture see Sedgwick, Epistemology; D. A. Miller, “Secret Sub-jects, Open Subjects,” in The Novel and the Police, 192–220 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1.47. Tennessee Williams, Memoirs, with an introduction by John Waters (1975; New York: New Directions, 2006), 93–94.48. Secrest, Leonard Bernstein, 147–48; Diamond evoked this type with the phrase “dreadful girl-boys” (399).

49. See Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Manage-ment of Spoiled Identity (1963; New York: Touchstone, 1986), esp. 107–8.50. Thomson’s biographer Tommasini variously chroni-cles the gay composer-critic’s ambivalence toward homo-sexuality, especially in chapter 6, “I Didn’t Want to Be Queer,” in Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle (New York: Norton, 1997). Rorem quote is from Knowing When to Stop, 556.51. Blitzstein was openly homosexual in his marriage with the straight-identifi ed writer Eva Goldbeck, and the sexu-ally ambiguous Bowles was married to the frankly lesbian writer Jane Auer Bowles. On Thomson’s bizarre proposal to Theodate (sister of architect Philip) Johnson see Tom-masini, Composer on the Aisle, 315–16.52. Secrest, Leonard Bernstein, 96, 111, 95.


the scene, Sam Bernstein as Jewish patriarch had made it perfectly clear that his eldest son was expected to shun homosexuality and take a wife and, moreover, to father children.57

Bernstein himself, not surprisingly, appears to have harbored a desire for normalcy and for a tra-ditional home and family life.58 Unquestionably, he desired a conducting career. These two paths of desire would converge in 1957, when he man-aged at last to win a major orchestra post with the New York Philharmonic. Bernstein’s prede-cessor there was his former mentor Mitropoulos, now to be sacked by the board because of his alleged ineffectualness as a strongman of the podium, which was pivotally linked to damning perceptions about his sexuality.

According to an account that circulated wide-ly among insiders and that Mitropoulos report-edly heard from Bernstein himself, Bernstein in the late forties had already (as we now say) outed Mitropoulos to the Boston Symphony board when both men were eyed as possible suc-cessors to Koussevitzky (Charles Munch won the directorship and took over in the spring of 1949). Now with a beautiful, aristocratic wife and two adorable, photogenic children to his credit, Bernstein needed only to refer pityingly to Mitropoulos’s “sweet, relaxed relationship” with the Philharmonic and its putative result in “the men taking advantage of him” or to sug-gest that the orchestra would be better off with a married man, a family man, at its helm—both of which he reportedly did for several years lead-ing up to Mitropoulos’s dismissal—to feed the already corrosive homophobia that appears as

Koussevitzky had begun to push Bernstein to marry so that his young protégé could succeed him in the Boston directorship. By late 1946 the position was open, and Koussevitzky shrewdly advised Bernstein to announce his engagement and to marry lest the directorship be barred to him.53

The woman in Bernstein’s life at this point was Felicia Montealegre, whom he would in-deed marry but not until fi ve years later, after a broken engagement and relationship and after his having been rejected for both the Rochester and Boston posts. Bernstein and Montealegre fi rst announced their engagement on the last day of 1946. By the end of the summer of 1947, however, it was off. Secrest cites an actress col-league and friend of Montealegre’s who thought that the end of the engagement was brought on by Montealegre’s discovering her fi ancé with an-other lover. Kiki Speyer had made a similar dis-covery in 1942; at another point of relationship punctuation, in 1976, Felicia Bernstein would discover her husband in bed with Tom Cothran in the Bernsteins’ Manhattan apartment.54

In the early fi fties, while he labored as “Amer-ica’s number one guest conductor,” Bernstein fervently sought to build a career in what was an exclusive, European-dominated fi eld. Hav-ing predicted a brilliant future for his prize pu-pil, Koussevitzky lectured him furiously on the hazards of dissipation, which could take such forms as composing for Broadway and homo-sexuality.55 Bernstein did stop writing musicals (for a while) and marry and is thus described in Burton’s biography as having made an “un-conditional . . . surrender to Koussevitzky” and the conducting world.56 But in fact, long before Koussevitzky or conducting ambitions came on

53. Secrest, Leonard Bernstein, 160–61.54. The actress was Bethel Leslie. See Secrest, Leonard Bernstein, 161, 166, 152–53, 339, 340.55. As a composer for the American musical theater Bern-stein had two huge hits in 1944, Fancy Free and On the Town. His greatest Broadway hit would come with the phenomenal success of West Side Story (1957), which al-most immediately became a classic.56. Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 116–19.

57. See Secrest, Leonard Bernstein, 96.58. Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 200. Bernstein’s youngest child Nina saw social convention as having guided even his late-life choices: “I think about the year when my par-ents were separated and my father made an active effort to live as a gay man in the world. And, you know, he just couldn’t do it. There was some part of him that needed to have that sort of middle-class sensibility. It was too hard for him.” Quoted by Sue Fox, “Relative Values: Nina, Ja-mie, and Alexander Bernstein, Children of the Composer Leonard Bernstein,” Sunday Times Magazine, April 11, 1999, 14.


icized for writing about these events in his 1995 Mitropoulos biography (though not so often by journalistic critics, who engaged the material positively or neutrally in many reviews).61 It is, of course, a writer’s responsibility to apply criti-cal scrutiny to all information he or she engages. Circulating unsupported rumors and stereotypes has been a means of reproducing homophobia, as we saw above. But homophobia is also perpetu-ated by the censure of writers who engage topics outside the boundaries of heteronormativity (a

a signifi cant factor in the humiliating fall that crushed Mitropoulos’s career (and may have hastened his death).59

These episodes are infrequently discussed in musicological discourse. That Peyser included them in her biography apparently contributed to the musicological reception of her book as “cheapened by what seems an obsession with the prurient.”60 William R. Trotter was also crit-

Fig. 1. Felicia, Leonard, Alexander, and Jamie Bernstein, 1956. Library of Congress, Music Division, Leonard Bernstein Collec-tion. Copyright © WHITESTONE PHOTO/Heinz-H. Weissenstein.

59. Quotes are from Bernstein, speaking retrospectively of Mitropoulos, as quoted in John Gruen, The Private World of Leonard Bernstein (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 26–27; see also William R. Trotter, Priest of Music: The Life of Dimitri Mitropoulos (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1995), 396, 409. Trotter discusses Mitropoulos’s loss of the NYPO directorship and Bernstein’s role in it in chapters 28 and 29. He also argues that the episode may have hastened Mitropoulos’s death, which came in 1960; see chapter 31 for an account of the effects of this loss on Mitropoulos and his declining health. In 1963 Bern-stein founded an international conducting competition in memory of Mitropoulos (Peyser, Bernstein, 389).60. Laird, Leonard Bernstein, 107. See also Leon Bot-stein’s review of Peyser (e.g., his critique of “gory details

. . . that leave an unsavory impression” [3]), “Psychobi-ography of a Maestro,” New York Times, sec. 7, May 10, 1987, 3, 27; and Leonard J. Lehrman, review of Bern-stein: A Biography, by Joan Peyser, American Music 7, no. 2 (1989): 207–9.61. Laird notes that “others have disputed Trotter’s in-terpretation of these events” (Leonard Bernstein, 138). It would be useful to know the sources of any such disputa-tions in order to facilitate further scholarly investigation. (Professor Laird graciously replied to an e-mail inquiry I made in this connection on November 23, 2008, but did not identify any sources.)


Peyser similarly reports that Mitropoulos told “several of his close friends” that Bernstein had both informed on him in this way and later actu-ally told him about it, explaining to his former mentor and patron that he had done the deed “because he wanted the post so much for him-self.”65 Peyser dates the informing to “the period when [Bernstein] was fi rst engaged to Felicia”—thus, between December 31, 1946, and Septem-ber 10, 1947—and vaguely dates Bernstein’s self-incrimination before Mitropoulos to “a few years” after his (late 1945) guest-conducting ap-pearance with Mitropoulos’s Minneapolis Sym-phony Orchestra.66 Concerning this issue and others throughout his book, Trotter made exten-sive use of tape-recorded interviews by Daniel, a former producer of the BSO radio broadcasts who had gathered materials for a Mitropoulos biography from 1983 until his fi nal illness and 1990 death.67

Mitropoulos, like so many conductors Bern-stein competed against, had the advantage of a European and “foreign” identity. But Bernstein in the New York Philharmonic instance sought and won advantage over these credentials, for-merly insuperable for U.S.-born conductors. He was apparently helped in this effort by his ac-quisition of heterosexual credentials, which al-lowed him to trump Mitropoulos’s queer-tainted Europeanism and to build upon the new celeb-rity persona launched by his own heroic 1943 debut as the young, handsome, all-American, boy-next-door (not ballplayer or movie star but)

term that encompasses not only heterosexuality but monogamy, “vanilla” sex, and conventional gender role performance, among other possibili-ties).62 Interpersonal encounters, associations, and discourses of various kinds, when speci-fi ed (or suspected) as queer, have been subject to hypersexualization and reduced to singularly sexual meanings, and the writers who treat of them have been subject to high-handed—albeit frequently displaced—reproach and dismissal. The effect of the dirty laundry taboos thus in-voked is to privatize and individualize the mani-festations of homophobia, obscuring its broad workings and history.

Trotter adduces evidence for his account of the Mitropoulos affair. He reports having heard, in whole or fragments, the story of Bernstein’s out-ing Mitropoulos to the BSO board from dozens of interviewees in the course of researching his biography.63 His book, Priest of Music: The Life of Dimitri Mitropoulos, reports two versions of the story: one in which Bernstein on his own ini-tiative outed Mitropoulos to Koussevitzky and another in which Koussevitzky asked Bernstein to tell him “from [his] own lips” that Mitrop-oulos was homosexual. In both versions Kous-sevitzky received the damning information from Bernstein, conveyed it to the Boston board, and thus eliminated Mitropoulos from the running. Trotter credits the fi rst version of the story to an account given by Bernstein himself to Mitrop-oulos and the second version to an unidentifi ed BSO board member who recounted it to the pia-nist Jack Lowe, who in turn related it to the mu-sic critic Oliver Daniel in a 1984 interview.64

62. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner in an oft-cited passage defi ne heteronormativity as “the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality—but also privileged.” My litany of monogamy, vanilla sex, and so on invokes some of the extraheterosexual conditions attending heteronor-mativity. As Berlant and Warner note, in certain contexts “forms of sex between men and women might not be het-eronormative” (“Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 [1998]: 548n2).63. William R. Trotter, interview by the author, January 16, 2006.64. Trotter, Priest of Music, 240.

65. Peyser, Bernstein, 187, 333.66. Peyser places this guest stint in the 1944–45 season (Bernstein, 282), but MSO programs record no such en-gagement until December 21, 1945 (Minneapolis Sym-phony Orchestra, The Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, Forty-third Season, 1945–1946 [Minneapolis, 1946], 251). This date for the broken wedding engagement fol-lows that announced in a newspaper gossip column; ac-cording to Burton, Felicia offi cially broke off the engage-ment a few months later in a December 1947 letter to Bernstein (Leonard Bernstein, 167, 171).67. See Trotter, Priest of Music, 9–10, 240, 445n1 (in notes to the preface), 455n5 (in notes to chapter 17). Dan-iel’s interview tapes are held in the Archive of the Perform-ing Arts, University of Minnesota.


His biographers also note signs by 1975 of Bernstein’s preoccupation with his own mor-tality and thus with a new calculus concerning the kind of life he would lead in the years he had left.73 We might well suspect Bernstein’s Beethoven identifi cation at work here. In 1975 Bernstein reached fi fty-seven, the age at which Beethoven died in 1827. It was also the age at which Brahms (more awed and intimidated by Beethoven than self-identifi ed or -confl ated) had ceased composing in 1890, apparently in antici-pation of his own death. By the time Brahms’s death actually came seven years later, he had long since resumed working: his fateful meet-ing with the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld altered Brahms’s course, and he blazed forth from his fi fty-seventh year with several new (clarinet and other) works of inspired brilliance.74

Bernstein, too, at about this age found his life and inspiration reignited and also, in part, by his signifi cant encounter with a younger man, Tom Cothran. At the same time, Bernstein, Cothran, and many other gay men active in this moment were part of a larger scenario of social-political ferment and historic change. These were the tur-bulent and exhilarating days of post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS gay liberation, and Bernstein resided at its New York epicenter. The 1970s’ new gay ethos distanced itself from the homosexual past, now fi gured in terms of a dark, repressive “clos-et,” and came out ecstatically into a sunny, liber-ated gay future. Bernstein embraced the moment unreservedly: “Ev’rybody out of the closet,” he sang in the Tanglewood cafeteria and effused similarly on various occasions elsewhere.75

maestro.68 By the 1970s Bernstein’s image would evolve into a rather different but also unprec-edented form. With his global stardom, polyglot cosmopolitanism, and international artistic as-sociations (including those with the Israel and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras), he was now a world citizen par excellence and, by virtue of his public stances and actions in the era of civil rights and Vietnam, a fi gure of “radical chic.”69 Bernstein’s fi nal years in the public arena played out largely within this frame of international ar-tistic megastardom and leftish celebrity hip.

Final Tally: Stakes, Costs, and GainsAs early as his 1951 honeymoon in Mexico, Bernstein reportedly spoke to friends of his marriage as being, for his part, a “calculat[ed]” arrangement.70 But he stayed with it for nearly three decades, honoring for some twenty years the “unspoken covenant” by which he was ex-pected to show discretion in his extramarital liaisons, which by all reports exclusively in-volved men.71 By the early seventies, however, this situation began to change. Bernstein’s for-mer discretion was notably eroded, for example, when he fell in love with Tom Cothran, a young poet, musician, intellectual, and onetime Berke-ley English major more than thirty years Bern-stein’s junior—this, evidently, in 1972–73, when Cothran was hired by Amberson Enterprises, Bernstein’s lucrative management-production company, to help Bernstein write his Norton Lectures for Harvard.72

68. On the construction of this image see Secrest’s chapter “All-American Boy” in Leonard Bernstein, 121–38; and Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 139.69. His humiliation in the press in January 1970, when he was portrayed as a dupe for hosting at his home a legal defense fund-raising event for the anti-Zionist and para-militaristic Black Panthers, endures as the most notorious moment in Bernstein’s “radical chic” career (a label con-ferred by the novelist Tom Wolfe). See Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 385–409; and Seldes, Leonard Bernstein.70. Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 215. Compare Rorem’s reference to Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti as a show “about an ill-fated marriage, composed on [Bernstein’s] . . . hon-eymoon” (Knowing When to Stop, 584).71. The quoted phrase is from Burton, Leonard Bern- stein, 434.72. This dating of the relationship is given in Secrest, Leonard Bernstein, 334.

73. Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 434–35.74. I have discussed Brahms’s awe vis-à-vis Beethoven and its apparent connection to his 1890 decision, soon aban-doned, to retire from composition (Nadine Hubbs, “So-nata-Allegro as Recapitulation: Brahms’s Op. 111 String Quintet, Movement I,” paper presented at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, Kansas City, October 1992).75. Burton claims that Bernstein’s singing this motto (to a theme from Tchaikovsky’s Fifth) in the Tanglewood cafeteria caused a “shock” for a journalist who was pres-ent. Burton also notes Bernstein’s oft-cited exhortation to Copland, when in his eighties, to come out (“I think I’ll leave that to you, boy,” was Copland’s reply) (Leonard Bernstein, 473).


and proclivities were well known. Undoubtedly, some NYPO audience members would have even known that Bernstein had by this point left his wife and set up house with Tom Cothran.

Seven months later Felicia Bernstein was diag-nosed with lung cancer; within eighteen months she was dead.78 His wife’s death at age fi fty-six in June 1978 inspired many subsequent confes-sions of guilt from Bernstein. He was still im-mersed in grief when his friend and now former lover Cothran wrote in the fall of 1980, propos-ing to Bernstein that his dilemma was not psy-chological but moral:

To me it seems that you are mourning not just

for Felicia, but for the life you don’t feel you

gave her, the deep sexual love which was the

only thing she really wanted. If you suspected

from the beginning that that were true, should

you have allowed her to marry you at all? And

if you did, wouldn’t you think that you might

feel some qualms, justifi ably?79

Cothran’s assessment, likely informed by inti-mate knowledge of Bernstein’s preoccupations and personal demons, suggests that Bernstein was tormented by a sense that he had never provided the eros his wife sought from him and, moreover, that he had never really believed he would—or, perhaps, would be able to—provide it. Indeed, speaking in 1989 to Mark Adams Taylor, a twenty-eight-year-old novelist from Alabama who would be his “last love,” Bernstein declared that “he had murdered his wife, torturing her to death by leaving her for a man.”80 From these and other indications we might infer that both Leonard and Felicia Bernstein came to pay a high price for what he deemed a false conventionalism or what we might call a complicity with homophobia, even as his career—to say nothing of the U.S. and larger music world—reaped enormous benefi ts from the same complicity.

The picture of this period that emerges from the 1987–94 biographies is of a kind of ongo-ing gay bacchanal—painted by reports of, for example, Bernsteinian soirées at which all the women were dismissed when the hour grew late, while the men were kept on for parties that con-tinued long into the night.76 Stories have circu-lated in classical music circles for years around Bernstein—probably more than any other fi g-ure—that comparably, sometimes more graphi-cally, chronicle his late-life excesses. However accurate the legends, it is clear that Bernstein’s uptown, globe-trotting glamour and his fame, power, wealth, and personal charisma combined to intense effect in this context. Also clear is that Bernstein in the 1970s became an even more vo-cal champion of gayness than he had been of homosexuality in his bachelor years. By all ac-counts, his voracious embrace of gay life and identity engendered considerable personal and family tumult. Even beyond its deep individual and personal reverberations, however, Bern-stein’s story here must also be understood as constituting and constituted by the pivotal social and cultural moment, now a matter of history.

Bernstein marked the turn in his personal life publicly with an announcement made and repeated throughout a series of New York Philharmonic concerts he led in December 1976. Discussing the symphony he was about to conduct, the fi fty-eight-year-old maestro told his audiences that Shostakovich was confront-ing death and Soviet authoritarianism when he composed his Fourteenth and that this work’s example helped him to see that “as death ap-proaches an artist must cast off everything that may be restraining him and create in complete freedom.” He continued, “I decided that I had to do this for myself, to live the rest of my life as I want.”77 A cryptic message this surely was not, for within music world and New York soci-ety circles Bernstein’s social and sexual exploits

76. Secrest reports details of Bernstein’s seventies era soi-rées and gives further evidence of Bernstein’s “embarrass-ing” insistence on declarations of sexual identity (Leonard Bernstein, 338, 386).77. Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 438.

78. Secrest, Leonard Bernstein, 342–44.79. Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 460.80. Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 507.


decoder ring but does require that we grant seri-ous attention to discredited discourses and in-terpret the available evidence with recourse to queer cultural history and historiography.

Reexamining Bernstein’s case in this light sug-gests that his achievements and fame owed not only to exceptional musical ability or privileged endowments in race, class, gender, and education but to important maneuvers—following at least one early setback in Rochester—vis-à-vis the ho-mophobia of his moment, particularly his acces-sion of heteronormativity through Montealegre and his apparent mobilization of homophobia against Mitropoulos. Of course, Leonard Bern-stein did not invent homophobia any more than he invented or controlled the race, class, and gender hierarchies in which he was enmeshed. Whatever agency he possessed vis-à-vis these forces was always limited and overdetermined—wealth, power, and celebrity notwithstanding. Still, it is signifi cant that Bernstein’s life and ca-reer unfurled more consequentially than most in an interlocked embrace, or stranglehold, with midcentury homophobia. Failure to account for this fact yields not only inaccurate biography, history, and historiography but perpetuation of the myth that every real story is a heterosexual story and that this view somehow constitutes scholarly objectivity or neutrality.84

Homophobia and heteronormativity played decisive roles in America’s musical and cultural past and call for counterhomophobic reckoning in our histories and theories of U.S. music and culture. Writing against homophobia in all its entrenchment and distortions requires active ef-fort and cultural-historical awareness, as exist-ing writings on Bernstein illustrate, sometimes negatively.85 We see this in the remarkable sus-

Conclusion

Homophobia in its mid-twentieth-century prime launched productions and destructions that fundamentally shaped individual careers and lives—including those of Mitropoulos and both Bernsteins—and profoundly infl uenced U.S. so-ciety and culture at large. But inquiry into ho-mophobia’s culturally constitutive workings has been restricted by means of the public/private discursive divide governing hetero and homo knowledge and the respectability-preserving imperative evoked in the shaming and silencing fi gure of dirty laundry. Such bugaboos distort and falsify our knowledge and histories. They obscure our understanding of the cultural-his-torical conditions that spawned so many twen-tieth-century subjects matching the description Arthur Laurents once gave of Leonard Bernstein as “a gay man who got married.” By Laurents’s account, his friend “wasn’t confl icted about it at all. He was just gay.”81

The acute and overt homophobia of midcen-tury American culture dictated that gay truths and desires could not be expressed.82 Cold war-riors twisted themselves into knots over suspi-cions that these were being encoded in artistic and media products by homosexual artists, who thus posed a national security threat, as wit-ness contemporaneous media reports on the “Homintern” and the purported homosexual cultural takeover. In fact, artists could scarcely give broad cultural expression to something, like gay love, that their culture deemed nonexistent: such expression was impossible by defi nition. The possibility of covert or subcultural expres-sion can never be ruled out, however, and gay resonances are indeed perceptible in some mid-twentieth-century artists’ work as well as their lives.83 Perceiving them does not require a secret

81. Kaiser, Gay Metropolis, 89.82. See Sherry, Gay Artists; also chapter 4 in Hubbs, Queer Composition.83. An outstanding and sustained example of inquiry into gay resonances in the work of one midcentury artist, the British composer Benjamin Britten, is Philip Brett (post-humous), Music and Sexuality in Britten: Selected Essays, ed. George E. Haggerty, with a foreword by Susan Mc-Clary and an afterword by Jenny Doctor (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 2006). See also n. 42 above concerning Hubbs, Queer Composition, chapter 3; and see Sherry, Gay Artists, among other writings.84. Ellen T. Harris has discussed the nonneutrality and nonobjectivity of such methods and written against them in Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Cham-ber Cantatas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).85. Musicology has by now a broad and deep corpus of positive examples in this regard, of studies that write ac-


Place (1983). Such criticism appears to censure Peyser for acknowledging the opera’s principal themes, its obvious autobiographical resonances and pop-Freudian treatment of sibling incest and same-sex sexuality, and for exploring their interrelations.88 Here and elsewhere the discom-fi ture surrounding Bernstein’s life and work is telling. For future biographers, historians, and critics it might serve as a marker of hazard and opportunity.

When Michael Hicks published the fi rst can-did, well-researched account of composer Henry Cowell’s 1936–40 imprisonment on charges of oral copulation, he wrote that Cowell’s impris-onment had “become a metaphor for the state of his biography”:

Scholars have written about his life in a way

that goes beyond tact. Seeking to polish his

image . . . they have repressed the facts of his

crucial encounter with the justice system, leav-

ing their readers to believe untruths or imagine

the worst. . . . The attitudes that continue to

foster such repression threaten any attempt to

illumine the lives of men and women . . . [and]

will persist in musical biography: is there some-

thing to say about such things, something to

see, something to know? A verdict will come

only as biographers disentangle themselves

from myth and approach their task with . . .

simple candor.89

The motives and stakes Hicks identifi ed in 1991 are still key for the burgeoning fi eld of Bernstein studies and for musicology overall. If we hope by our writings to “illumine the lives of men and women” as well as their work and cultural contributions, our method must be to pursue candor over myth and to elevate inquiry above image making. If our investigations here reveal complexity and contradiction, they can help us to know these qualities in our art and

ceptibility of their central fi gure, a long-married, reproductive, gender-normative, and culturally exalted white man, to the normalizing, dehisto-ricizing grasp of compulsory heterosexuality.86 In biographies and cultural histories Bernstein has often been subsumed under the narratives of heteronormativity, with recent representations of a bisexual Bernstein acknowledging certain lapses, aberrations, in his performance of het-erosexual subjecthood—the excesses of omnivo-rous genius.

In this way Bernstein-the-cultural-object is re-cuperated for the sociosexual status quo and for “great American” status through disciplining or denying the boisterously queer actions and self-declarations of Bernstein-the-historical-subject. Such recuperation feeds and is fed by the neglect of certain historical circumstances of Bernstein’s life and career, including the culturally embed-ded workings of modern homophobia. Clearly, Bernstein poses particular challenges to writ-ers, academics, and classical music commenta-tors, as witnessed by the frequency of the words “shock” and “embarrassment” in the annals of Bernsteiniana, emanating sometimes from those who knew Bernstein, sometimes from those who write on Bernstein and those who knew him, and sometimes from those who write about the writings on Bernstein.87 For example, one musi-cological overview of Bernstein studies charges Peyser with “revel[ing] in the prurient” in her discussion of Bernstein’s late opera A Quiet

tively and inventively against current and historical ho-mophobia. Among other works, one could cite the essays by Lloyd Whitesell on Ravel, Sophie Fuller on Agnes Zim-merman, and Sherrie Tucker on World War II era female swing-band musicians in Fuller and Whitesell’s collection Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).86. Adrienne Rich formulated the notion of compulsory heterosexuality in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980), in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985, 23–75 (New York: Norton, 1986).87. The annals evince commentators’ discomfort around Bernstein’s physicality—as conductor, public mouth-kisser (e.g., of Jacqueline Kennedy at the White House), and pu-tatively promiscuous lover of men as well as the notorious “radical chic” episode and works like Mass and A Quiet Place, among other things.

88. Peyser’s discussion is in Bernstein, 469–78. The criti-cism is from Laird, Bernstein, 42n41.89. Michael Hicks, “The Imprisonment of Henry Cow-ell,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 44, no. 1 (1991): 95, 116.


stein’s history, these tactics will not serve in the same way in the present and future. Now, a gen-eration on from the advent of Peyser’s, Secrest’s, and Burton’s biographies and of a vast burgeon-ing and maturation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer scholarship, musicology’s reputation with regard to Bernstein studies will rest on its capacity to elucidate with insight, erudition, and sophistication the complexities of Bernstein’s life and times, not apart from but in all their imbrications with homosexuality and homophobia.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Paul A. Anderson, Mark Clague, and Beth Levy for inspiring this essay by inviting me to speak about Bernstein at “Criss Cross: American Music between the Disciplines,” a symposium at the University of Michigan hon-oring Richard Crawford on his retirement. For their critical input I am grateful to two anony-mous reviewers for this journal and my audienc-es at “Criss Cross” in April 2003; the Cleveland meeting of the Society for American Music in March 2004; and the Eastman School of Music in April 2005 by courtesy of Danny Jenkins, the Eastman Pride Network, and the Department of Musicology. This project benefi ted by critique and encouragement from Susan C. Cook, Nancy Yunhwa Rao, and Lloyd “Chip” Whitesell and by research assistance from Cookie Woolner, who tracked down an elusive source on short notice. I owe special thanks to William Trotter for kindly sharing information about his Mitropoulos research pathways. Finally, I am indebted and deeply grateful to Suzanne Cusick for her trenchant and generous critique and su-perb editorial guidance.

culture, ourselves and others. If they bring us into contact with homophobic shame, then they can help to elucidate this shame that all of us, queer, straight, and other, inherit as part of our cultural legacy and that must be docu-mented and dissected if we are to understand the cultural objects and histories that have been shaped by it.

There is no other fi gure in music history in whom the forces of homophobia converged with other vectors—including those of talent, ambition, and social and governmental repres-sion—so consequentially, dramatically (by turns triumphant and tragic), or epically as they did in Leonard Bernstein. The results were momentous for his family and intimates, his colleagues and rivals, and the U.S. and international arts and culture sphere. In past accounts historiographic homophobia worked to conceal historical ho-mophobia and its wide-ranging, often unpredict-able effects, and the two combined to construct a Bernstein suffi ciently bohemian to merit the title genius while suffi ciently heteronormative to merit national cultural-hero status.90 But if writ-ers once preserved their reputations and those of their cultural-intellectual projects—including musicology—through avoidance or euphemiz-ing of certain homo-entangled episodes in Bern-

90. Indeed, the genius concept carries distinct queer con-notations owing to its particular genealogy in European and American culture. According to the literary scholar Andrew Elfenbein, the exceptional outsider persona dubbed the “genius” in the eighteenth century was distin-guished by the same traits as, and morphed into, the ex-ceptional outsider persona known by the late nineteenth century as the “homosexual” (Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role [New York: Columbia University Press, 1999]).

Bernstein, Homophobia, Historiography.

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