By: Rose

This makes me admire people who were out then even more. Like the composer Benjamin Britten, who was as openly gay as you could be back then in the UK, and in a relationship with tenor Peter Pears, who was basically Britten's muse (he wrote a lot of his great tenor roles, like Peter Grimes, specifically for Pears). When Britten died, Queen Elizabeth II actually sent Pears a telegram of sympathy like you would with a spouse...