OVERTURE Love Love is a Pink Cake or Queering Chopin in Times of Homophobia

Abstract

An introduction to the three essays included in this section. The article highlights the right to know whether Chopin was gay and contextualizes this inquiry in a very long and pervasive historiographical tradition, essentially twohundred years long, dedicated to examine Chopin sexual orientation, on the one hand, and on the other the more recent tradition of queering western classical music composers. The main point is not to demonstrate categorically that Chopin was “gay” (a relative, modern identity marker in any case) but rather to highlight the discourses that have presented him as unequivocally heterosexual.