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from Part V - British Sociocultural, Religious, and Political Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 March 2022
The relation between Britten’s sexuality and his music has been an abiding fascination for biographers and music scholars in recent decades. The fact that homosexuality was illegal in the UK until 1967, and that he and his long-term partner, Peter Pears, therefore had to live a homosexual life as an ‘open secret’ for most of their lives, often lends this critical emphasis a kind of heroic poignancy. This chapter contrasts Britten and Pears’s upper-middle-class experience of forbidden sexuality with that of the overwhelming majority of twentieth-century British men and women, to paint a more rounded picture of the politics of the closet. It shows how early twenty-first-century ideas about sexual ‘identity’ obscure the differences between class experience, and distort our understanding of the issue.
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