ABSTRACT
One day in the middle of the twentieth century, the composer Marc Blitzstein observed to fellow composer Ned Rorem that ‘sooner or later all queers meet each other’.1 Looking at the côteries of Tchaikovsky’s St. Petersburg, or at the Paris of the Ballets Russes era, it can seem as though all the homosexual men in the arts, at least, were known to each other, or knew of each other through friends. This book traces out a transhistorical version of ‘all queers meet each other’, in that it looks at patterns of meeting or affiliation from one generation to the next, from Tchaikovsky to Diaghilev, from Diaghilev to, in this chapter, Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996). But it is probably as well to acknowledge that the notion that ‘all queers meet each other’ is a delusion. Perhaps most male homosexuals within certain privileged social and intellectual cadres meet each other. It might be tempting to romanticise such meetings as constituting a tight-knit, mutually supportive ‘brotherhood’. But ‘all queers’ inevitably turns out to be a loose and incomplete agglomeration, and one that contains animosities as well as friendships. To outsiders in early to mid-twentieth-century America, though, homosexuals could seem to form a unified, exclusive, and dangerous new group. Thomas Hart Benton, the well-known regionalist painter, presented the idea in lurid terms in his autobiography, An Artist in America (1938):
If young gentlemen, or old ones either, wish to wear women’s undergarments and cultivate extraordinary manners it is all right with me. But it is not all right when, by ingratiation or subtle connivance, precious fairies get into positions of power and judge, buy, and exhibit American pictures on the base of nervous whim and under the sway of those overdelicate refinements of tastes characteristic of their kind.2
