When the subject of homosexuality ever came up in my household, the responses it evoked in my parents and siblings were ones of derision and repulsion. My mother once boasted how some male friends of hers had beat up a gay guy who had approached on of them on the street. That was the background I came from.

For some reason, however, I have never felt �threatened� by gays. When the furor broke in 1993 after Clinton tried to protect homosexuals in the armed forces, I just couldn�t understand the mentality on the other side. Some guys said that they would have felt threatened sharing a shower with a gay service man. Excuse me, but aren�t soldiers supposed to be �brave,� and what is so scary anyway? Might it have been fear of confronting their own unresolved notions of what is to be a man?

I guess I never �got� why people were so afraid of gays. Once when a boy, they showed the movie Sodom and Gomorrah on television. The Sodomites, dress in drag and make up, seemed like they were a fun-loving bunch. I couldn�t understand why God would send a person to hell for just cross-dressing. If that was a reason for eternal damnation, God would have had to start with my father, who, on a number of occasions, wore a dress to various costume parties he and my mother went to.

Still, though I did not feel threatened by homosexuals, I cannot claim to having been completely unbiased towards them. There was a straight pre-med student, named Jonathan Hodies, who lived whom I used to hang out with a bit. One Saturday night, we walked past Mark Zatorski�s room. Mark, Cynthia and a couple of others were preparing to go to a costume ball at the local gay bar. Mark, being an art historian, had fashioned an accurate recreation of Queen Nefrititi�s headdress and was installing it on Cynthia�s head. The other men in the room were helping with her make-up, her costume, and fashioning costume jewelry out of paper and Mark�s gold leaf for her.

When we saw what we going on in the room, we laughed, put our hands on our hips and said something like: �They�re so gay!� and we walked chuckling back to our respective rooms. A few seconds later, someone knocked strongly on my door. I opened it, and there stood one of the guys, David Thompson, who had been helping Cynthia in Mark�s room. David had lived in the French House the year before, and now had a house off campus. He always hung around, though, and was one of the most erudite people I�d ever met. He spoke fluent French, German, and was teaching himself Russian. He stood about 6 feet four inches tall, and had a jet black beard, and Despite this Rasputin-like appearance, he had a wickedly funny sense of humor.

�Kurt,� he said, when I opened the door. �I have to talk to you. I don�t expect much of that idiot Hodies, but you! You of all people. Haven�t we been nice to you? You have to realize that gay people are people, too, and that making fun of them is a kind of racism. And that is as bad as making fun of black people.�

I felt ashamed. He was right. Though I was fairly comfortable with my own sexuality, I found more people with tastes in art, literature and music among the gay community than among the straight. So I owed them a debt. I remembered my mother�s story about the beating of the homosexual in my home town. So I apologized. And he and I still correspond, these 25 years later.

David tended to like loud, brassy Russian, German, and Eastern European music. He also prided himself on being au courant on the latest works by avante garde composers. One piece he introduced me to was Leos Janacek�s Sinfonietta. Now I hate all that Canadian Brass crap, where they cleverly rework symphonic works for brass. Janacek�s piece, however, though, full of brass and timpani crashes really stirs me. Composed for a gymnastic festival in 1926, when the composer was 72, it is filled with themes, moods, and colors that evoke the passion and pride of the Czech people. Some parts are bombastic, others have passages filled with shimmering violins that fill the piece with light. It also contains a number of peasant-inspired passages, which shows, in a way that Janacek was a forerunner of Bartok, who studied and expanded Western music with the introduction of complicated �primitivistic� harmonies and rhythms.

Janacek experienced a second spate of creativity toward the end of his life, from which Sinfonietta comes. Supposedly that came from being inspired by a married woman, 38 years his younger with whom he formed a passionate, but platonic, relationship. A new lease on life. We�re always getting the opportunity to have new leases on life. Sometimes we�re lucky enough to find people who can point out when it�s necessary to abandoned old forms of thought or behaviors in favor of new and fertile ones. So thank you, David, for having done that for me.

Janacek bio

Midi (scroll way down)

Recording (George Szell

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