Why are musicologists so indifferent to their subjects’ love lives?

People often say that the battle for male gay rights has been won, at least in the West, and that may be true. But the drag of the past is still great, and I can think of only two major works between classical and recent times that celebrate same-sex love openly: Shakespeare’s sonnets and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Light began to break through after the Great War, but largely for fellow insiders. Auden and Isherwood were timid in what they published in their prime. Proust did gay, but stuck to sordid. Only Gide spoke out positively in Corydon, but the journals are almost mute on his sex life. It took Genet, Burroughs and Warhol to place a bomb under the whole culture-wide taboo and proclaim the news: that males could be magically sexy to other males.

Biography didn’t take long to catch up, and arrived in the late 1960s with Michael Holroyd’s life of Lytton Strachey, the first honest biography since Suetonius. After that, rather wonderfully, almost every biographer seems to have tried to demonstrate that their subject is not some dreary old straight but was lit up with a complex eroticism.

Except in music. Russia still insists that Tchaikovsky wasn’t homosexual. Poland’s solitary gay figure, Szymanowski, has been horribly disinfected. Accounts of Benjamin Britten’s life always have something virginal about them, while did you know that Cage, Copland and Lully were gay? And so to Francis Poulenc — hardly a squeak. Well, if anyone could put this right it would be Roger Nichols, the most distinguished authority writing in English on French music.

His new biography begins broadly with Poulenc’s birth in Paris in 1899, into a comfortable home supported by the family’s successful chemical business.