The Queer Russians Have Come and Are Coming

Executive Director of PhillyGayCalendar

I’m fascinated by achievements, especially when you’re at the top of your game. And, my guilty pleasure, too, is that I’m also fascinated by a certain type of celebrity.

So I’ve had my attention towards the resurgence of interest in Rudolf Nureyev, one of the most flamboyant queers in the history of ballet (and that’s saying a lot, a whole lot) considering how much homosexuality had dominated the world of dance. Nureyev fever has been instigated by the publication of yet another biography, “Nureyev: The Life” by Julie Kavanagh (Patheon Books) about the larger-than-life, charming, outrageous, sexy, performing, celebrated International superstar Russian defector. 

On film, “Nureyev: The Russian Years” was released in August, 2007, in this country by PBS WNET in New York. The BBC Production is a 90-minute documentary written and produced by British filmmaker John Bridcut, with a credited bow to Kavanagh who unearthed Nureyev’s relationship to ballet student-lover Teja Kremke, a shadowy East German, who upon meeting the Russian fell instantly in love with him.

When reviewed The New York Times (December 2, 2007) dance writer Toni Bentley she wrote insightfully of Kavanagh’s Nureyev, His magnetic allure (to both sexes) made him omnipotent. He didn’t walk onto the stage. He strutted with the air of a prince and a prowler, the pride in his own beauty offset by a knowing humor. He owned his audience before he even started dancing.”

“Energy made flesh, he brought sex to ballet like no one had before–or has since,” she explains. Extravagances were everywhere and everything to Nureyev, living the life that seem only genuine queers can understand and appreciate. At his death to AIDS in 1993, his estate was worth more than $21 million. His fame and his fortune were an astounding tribute to his determination never to be poor as he was in his humble beginnings in the small industrial town of Ufa. (My earliest memories of Nureyev were photographers of him with Margot Fonteyn in floor-length mink coats, probably appearing in every publication from “After Dark” to “Interview” to “Women’s Wear Daily”.)

Extremes were the hallmark of Nureyev’s life. Its the perfect fodder for an amazing feature film, complete with the K. B. G., the mother-son infatuation of Fonteyn to Nureyev (“her young lion”), his wild escapades with lovers, celebrities (he counted about his friends, Jackie Onassis, Lee Radziwell, Any Warhol, Richard Avedon, Mick Jagger, Marlene Dietrich and Peter O’Toole) and other dancers, his separation from his family and mother, his obsession with money and material goods, his never-ending appetite for attention, sex, adulation, applause, and his temper, bad behavior, and refusal to accept anything that he truly didn’t like–from food to choreography. Let us not forget all the sex with women and men–the affairs, the on-night stands, the lovers, the partners. Nureyev lived a queen’s life, a queer life. His concealment of his HIV status and his untimely death of AIDS were as controversial and shocking as almost everything else in Nureyev’s life. Perhaps he’s too big for the screen.

“He was wild, unkempt and impetuous, and needed to be loved with a fervor that matched her [Fonteyn’s] need to give love,” writes Bentley.

What’s his legacy?  Bentley concludes from Kavanagh’s book, “Nureyev, like Maria Callas (as Clive Barnes once noted) popularized and changed his art form forever, with a combination of technique, dedication and respect for its tradition, while simultaneously blowing it wide open with a kind of divine individual desperation.” Nureyev was the queer Russian badboy of his time, “The Brando of Ballet.”

(Editor’s Note: What It Looks Like From Here by Thom Cardwell appears weekly, on Fridays, in QUEERtimes. For more news, columns and features, visit www.queertimes.net)

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