Russian Culture Minister, Vladimir Medinsky, says Peter Tschaikovsky wasn't gay, he was just a lonely man who failed to find the right woman

Medinsky (Photo: Wikipedia)

The Guardian's Shawn Walker, has the complete story about how Russia's new antiLGBT "propaganda" laws may now be affecting films made in that country.

     Medinsky was asked about the composer's sexuality after news emerged that a film biopic of Tchaikovsky being made with Russian government funding would ignore the composer's sexuality.
     The script was apparently revised to remove references that could have made it vulnerable under Russia's controversial new "gay propaganda" laws.
     The film's screenwriter, Yuri Arabov, denied that Tchaikovsky was gay, and told the newspaper Izvestiya that the composer of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty was "a person without a family who was stuck with the opinion that he supposedly loves men".
     "Arabov is actually right – there is no evidence that Tchaikovsky was a homosexual," said Medinsky, when asked by the Interfax news agency if the climate of homophobia in Russia was forcing film-makers to censor the issue.
     Historians, however, say there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
     "In the case of Tchaikovsky his homosexuality is so well documented by his own writings and the writings of others that it is simply ludicrous to suggest otherwise," said the author Konstantin Rotikov, who has written a history of gay Saint Petersburg. "It's a historical fact. History doesn't change just because we are trying to push a certain agenda today."

     Timothy Kincaid, of Box Turtle Bulletin, couldn't resist the urge to mock all this:

Experts agree that Tchaikovsky is much pleased with his new status as a lonely man and gives praise to the most excellent President Putin and Minister Medinsky. Bolstered by this astonishing news, the ghost of Rudolf Nureyev has put in a petition with the culture minister to see if he too could qualify for reorientation.