Posted June 1, 2026
June Theme | #TakeAStand
Classical music has always had queer composers. The difference, across the centuries, is how much of that truth was allowed to exist in the open.
Some composed in secret, hiding love letters, living double lives, writing music that encoded what words could not safely say, while others were open in private but silent in public, aware that acknowledgment could mean imprisonment, exile, or ruin. A few, in more recent decades, have been able to be fully, publicly themselves and have used that freedom to create music that speaks for those who came before them.
This June, for Pride Month, we celebrate five composers (and one remarkable pair) whose lives and work remind us that the history of classical music is, in part, a queer history… and that music is richer for it.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)
Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality was an open secret among those who knew him, and a source of profound, lifelong torment in a Russia where it was not only stigmatized but criminalized. His disastrous 1877 marriage to Antonina Miliukova, entered into partly as a cover, ended in a breakdown and an attempted suicide. His private correspondence makes his attractions unmistakable.
What makes Tchaikovsky’s story worth telling with care is not the certainty of labels, but the audibility of what he could not say. The yearning in his symphonies, the anguish in his later works, the emotional extremity that made audiences uncomfortable in his own time were not abstract artistic choices. They were the sound of a man composing his interior life when no other outlet was safe. His Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, premiered nine days before his death in 1893. Many who heard it described it as a farewell.
Benjamin Britten (1913–1976)
Benjamin Britten and tenor Peter Pears were together from 1939 until Britten’s death in 1976, nearly four decades during which homosexuality was illegal in England for all but the last nine years of their relationship. They were careful and discreet in public, but their music was not.
Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo were a clear proclamation of love for Pears, veiled only by the Italian words (written by Michelangelo for his own lover) which they conveniently omitted to translate at the first performance in wartime London. Britten wrote dozens of works for Pears’s voice. His operas (Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, Death in Venice) explored outsiders, isolation, and the cost of being different in ways that were unmistakably personal.
Toward the end of his life, Britten urged his biographer to “tell the truth about Peter and me.” Following Britten’s death, Pears described their archive as not “the story of one man. It’s a life of the two of us.” Their 365 surviving letters were finally published together in 2016 under the title My Beloved Man: a love story that had been waiting nearly a century to be told in full.
Henriëtte Bosmans (1895–1952)
Henriëtte Bosmans was openly bisexual and had serious, long-lasting relationships with both men and women throughout her life. She was also one of the most celebrated Dutch composers and pianists of her generation: in high demand as a soloist with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and recognized across Europe for her chamber and orchestral works.
Then the Nazis invaded.
One of the bisexual Bosmans’s great loves was Frieda Belinfante, a cellist who would become a conductor and a member of the Dutch resistance, eventually escaping on foot to Switzerland. Bosmans herself, as a half-Jewish woman, was banned from public performance in 1942. Rather than go silent, she played underground house concerts: gatherings that were raided by authorities, forcing her to flee on more than one occasion. When her elderly Jewish mother was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Westerbork transit camp, Bosmans fought relentlessly for her release. She succeeded.
One of her compositions became an anthem of liberation for the Dutch people at the end of the war — a song that celebrated the arrival of Allied forces and the end of occupation. She composed it not from safety, but from the middle of everything.
Bosmans remains little known outside the Netherlands. A prize in her name has been awarded to emerging Dutch composers since 1994. Her music, and her story, deserve a far wider audience.
Samuel Barber (1910–1981) & Gian Carlo Menotti (1911–2007)
Described by The Advocate as “classical music’s greatest gay power couple,” Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti met in 1928 at the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia. They were 17 and 16 years old. They fell in love, built careers side by side, and shared a home just north of New York City where they frequently hosted parties with academic and musical luminaries.
Barber’s most famous work, Adagio for Strings, was written during a summer he and Menotti spent together in Austria. It was Menotti who arranged the piece for string orchestra and sent it to conductor Arturo Toscanini, who championed it. The rest is musical history. Barber and Menotti went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes each, marking the only time in history that two life partners have each achieved that distinction in music.
Their partnership eventually fractured under professional pressures and shifting circumstances. Barber died of cancer in 1981. An empty grave plot beside him had been reserved for Menotti, but when Menotti died in 2007, he was buried in Scotland. The relationship was never publicly named during their lifetimes. The music they made together endures regardless.
Francis Poulenc (1899–1963)
Francis Poulenc was one of the first openly gay composers in classical music history, navigating his sexuality with candor at a time when homosexuality was often stigmatized. He once described himself as “part monk, part naughty boy,” a phrase that captured something genuinely true about his creative life. His catalog swings from the irreverent and playful (Les Biches, Mouvements perpétuels) to the profoundly spiritual (Stabat Mater, Dialogues des Carmélites), and the coexistence of those impulses was never fully resolved. Scholars have speculated that Poulenc associated aspects of his identity with impurity and could never fully reconcile an exclusively gay identity with his deep Roman Catholic faith.
That tension between desire and devotion, wit and grief defined his music. His opera Dialogues des Carmélites remains one of the most profound sacred operas of the 20th century. His La voix humaine, a monodrama for solo soprano playing a woman realizing, over a single phone call, that her lover has left her, is one of the most devastating pieces of musical theater ever written. A gay man wrote it. It is a piece about loss and the inadequacy of words. That is not a coincidence.
The Bigger Picture
Across these stories, a pattern emerges: queer composers have always been here, shaping the canon, writing the music we call timeless. What has changed—slowly, unevenly, incompletely—is whether they could be known as their full, authentic selves while doing it.
Pride Month is a celebration. For DPO, it is also a reminder that the freedom to be recognized (fully, publicly, without cost) is still not universal. The composers we lift up this month navigated worlds that tried to diminish them. Their music outlasted every obstacle placed in their path.
It’s our responsibility to honor their stories and keep pushing classical music forward.
Take a Stand with Us
- Listen Intentionally — Seek out Britten’s War Requiem, Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, and other queer composers we didn’t even mention here. Listen and reflect on the stories behind them.
- Learn More — Explore the LGBTQ+ Classical Music Archive and the Institute for Composer Diversity database, which tracks representation in programming across the field.
- Advocate for Diverse Programming — Encourage the orchestras and ensembles you support to include LGBTQ+ composers
- Share your story — Use #TakeAStand and tag @denverphilorch across socials. Download one of our Take a Stand badges and make it visible.
Sources:
Artsfile. “A Time to Remember: The Music of Henriëtte Bosmans Was Made in Defiance of Nazism.” artsfile.ca, Nov. 2017.
Bay Area Reporter. “‘Samuel Barber: His Life & Legacy.'” ebar.com, n.d.
Britten Pears Arts. “Britten & Pears.” brittenpearsarts.org, n.d.
Britten Pears Arts. “My Beloved Man: The Letters of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears.” brittenpearsarts.org, 2016.
Classical Music. “Henriëtte Bosmans: The Composer Who Bravely Took on the Nazis.” classical-music.com, Aug. 2025.
Classical Music. “Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears Were Gay Pioneers.” classical-music.com, Feb. 2025.
Deutsche Grammophon. “Francis Poulenc: Biography.” deutschegrammophon.com, n.d.
Gay Influence. “American Composer Samuel Barber.” gayinfluence.blogspot.com, July 2011.
Interlude. “Francis Poulenc (1899–1963).” interlude.hk, Jan. 2024.
Omaha Conservatory of Music. “7 LGBTQ+ Composers in History.” omahacm.org, June 2021.
San Gabriel Symphony. “Francis Poulenc.” sgsymphony.org, n.d.
Violinist.com. “Recognizing Three Trailblazing Women Composers of the Past.” violinist.com, 2024.