Karol Szymanowski

Celebrated Polish pianist and composer Karol Szymanowski was born in 1882 in a small village in Ukraine into a Catholic family of wealthy Polish nobles. His compositional style progressed from post-Wagnerian romanticism to impressionism, then orientalism, finally settling on inspiration from Polish folk music. Part of it was geography, with Protestant Germany to the west, Orthodox Russia to the east and Islamic Turkey to the south. All of these cultures were reflected in his music. Tracking this musical journey, Karol became the foremost Polish composer of the early twentieth century.

He was also a distinguished homosexual. Szymanowski fell deeply in love with a 15-year-old Russian boy, Boris Kochno (Бори́с Евге́ньевич Кохно́), and he wrote four explicitly gay poems for him. Szymanowski later rediscovered Kochno in Paris, learning that Boris had become the lover and collaborator of Diaghilev (see sidebar), before moving on to a torrid affair with the American song-writer Cole Porter (see sidebar). Szymanowski also authored a two-volume gay novel, Efebos (1918), of which only fragments survive. Following two visits to Sicily as the guest of a wealthy male friend and admirer, Szymanowski told the great Polish pianist Artur Rubenstein, “There I saw a few young men bathing, and I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They could have been models for Antinous (see sidebar).” Rubenstein related to others that Szymanowski had thus confirmed his homosexuality. At ease with his sexual orientation, Karol wrote some of the most ecstatic music ever composed for the opera house in “King Roger” (Król Roger, 1924), in which a Sicilian king falls in love with a shepherd.

Curiously, Szymanowski was more highly regarded outside of Poland during his lifetime. During the last two decades, however, there has been a renaissance of Szymanowski’s music, and his works are programmed all over the world. There are hundreds of YouTube videos of his music.

Szymanowski died from tuberculosis in Switzerland in 1937 at age 54.

Sources: Wikipedia, Interlude.hk, Queer Places, Bay Area Reporter

Gabriel Attal

Photo by Antoine Lamielle, 2017

Born in 1989, openly gay Attal (age 35) is a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France from January to September, 2024. As a member of the Renaissance party, he rapidly rose up the political ranks following his election to the National Assembly in 2017. He became the Junior Minister to the Minister of National Education and Youth in 2018, which made him the youngest person to serve in the French government; the Spokesperson of the government in 2020; the Minister of Public Action and Accounts in 2022; and the Minister of National Education and Youth in 2023.

On January 9, 2024, amid a government crisis, he was appointed by French president Emmanuel Macron to replace Elisabeth Borne as prime minister. At the age of 34, he became the youngest person and the first openly gay person to serve as French prime minister. He was outed by a former school associate in 2018. At the time, he was in a relationship with Stéphane Séjourné (b. 1985), Macron's former political advisor during his 2017 presidential election campaign. Attal and Séjourné were domestic partners (civil union) from 2015-2022.

 

Marcel Proust

 

French writer Marcel Proust was a novelist, literary critic and essayist who was known primarily as the author of the monumental novel “À la recherche du temps perdu” (“Remembrance of Things Past” or “In Search of Lost Time”) published in seven volumes (3,200 pages) between 1913 and 1927. This work featured many gay, lesbian and bisexual characters described in explicit encounters throughout all volumes.

Proust himself was gay, but he never publicly acknowledged it. He had relationships with men, including composer Reynaldo Hahn, novelist Lucien Daudet, and his chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli. Not to mention that, in 1918, Proust was identified by police during a raid on a male brothel. And most interestingly, in 1897 Proust fought a duel with writer Jean Lorrain after Lorrain publicly questioned Proust's relationship with novelist Daudet. The stuff of soap operas.

Love letters from Proust to Reynaldo Hahn were auctioned in Paris in 2018 by a grand niece of the writer. Those letters had never before been disclosed, and they were put on public display prior to the auction. Hahn was the first romantic partner of Marcel Proust, and the two remained close friends for the rest of their lives. They met in 1894 at the salon of Parisian painter Madeleine Lemaire, when Proust was 22 and Hahn 19. Their relationship was intense and lasted until the summer of 1896. They shared a love of music, painting, and literature. Proust wrote in a letter, "Everything I have ever done has always been thanks to Reynaldo". 

Proust is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His life, however, was marked by poor health (severe asthma from the age of nine) and the turmoil of the French Third Republic with its suppression of the Paris Commune. In later years his health continued to decline, and the last three years of his life were spent confined to his bedroom. He died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in Chaillot (Paris) in 1922, at age 51. He completed seven novels, short stories, translations of John Ruskin and left behind several unfinished works. His life has since been examined in a BBC television special, numerous novels, films and essays.