Manos Hatzidakis (Μάνος Χατζιδάκις)

Today we visit Greece: Manos Hatzidakis (Μάνος Χατζιδάκις) (1925-1994) is considered to be Greece's top composer. Also, he was gay, everybody knew it, but apart from a few jokes here and there, it was more or less accepted by everyone. Funny thing is, Greece's most famous painter of the 2nd half of the 20th Century was also openly gay. At the time, if you were a great artist, they gave you a discrimination-free pass. If not, things weren't so rosy.

Hatzidakis started writing music for plays in the late 40s and by the mid 50s he was a household name. He was the first Greek composer to win the Best Song Oscar for "Never On Sunday". The song had a few gay coded references (At night I hang around the port in order to find a stranger).

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A year later, late 1961, the song The Postman Is Dead (Ο Ταχυδρόμος Πέθανε) is part of the soundtrack of a play. It tells the story of a 17-year-old postman who just died and the singer worries who will carry their letters to their true love. But we soon discover that the singer's true love actually was the postman. Finally in the last line we learn that the singer died together with the postman. (Double suicide? It is not clarified). The song was originally sung by a woman, but then Hadjidakis remade it in the mid 80s, using a male singer (as well he should), his protege Vassilis Lekas (Βασίλης Λέκας).

This is a good video. Underneath you can read the lyrics both in English and in Greek:

Street Of Dreams (Οδός Ονείρων) (1962, from the musical of the same title) also became a gay anthem. Sung by a young gay man called Giorgos Marinos (Γιώργος Μαρίνος), it includes the lyric "every house contains some love hidden in the silence and a young man thinks that his love is shameful."

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He lived in the US (1965-1972), where he worked with many notable musicians, Quincy Jones and Michael Kamen among others. There, he recorded "Gioconda's Smile" (Το Χαμόγελο της Τζοκόντα), a fully instrumental album, clocking just over 28 minutes, which eventually became his biggest-selling album in Greece.

Video Link of the album in its entirety:

In 1972 he returned to Greece and recorded "The Great Erotic" (Ο Μεγάλος Ερωτικός), in which he put great poetry from throughout the ages to music. The male parts were sung by Dimitris Psarianos (Δημήτρης Ψαριανός) and the female parts by Fleurie Dadonaki (Φλέρυ Νταντωνάκη). One of the poems that he used was Days of 1903 (Μέρες Του 1903) by great gay poet Kavafis (Καβάφης). The song describes a one-night-stand that left an indelible impression on the poet. He was, however, never able to find that person again.

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In the same record, there's a song based on a poem by Sappho (Σαπφώ), the famous Classical Greek woman poet from Lesbos, about woman to woman love.

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And here's the whole album, if you care to hear it:

In 1975, impressed by a beautiful Israeli singer with a heavenly voice called Uri, he writes Uri's Ballad (Η Μπαλάντα Του Ούρι), originally an instrumental. The lyrics were introduced in 1983.

Here, as sung by Vassilis Lekas (Βασίλης Λέκας):

In 1982 his last musical was staged, a surreal affair called "Pornography" (Πορνογραφία), which was much more tender and poetic than its title suggests. The song "The Ballad Of The Senses and Of Illusions" (Η Μπαλάντα Των Αισθήσεων Και Των Παραισθήσεων) describes a young man visiting a porn cinema in order to cruise for sex. The lyrics, however, don't describe a seedy experience. They rather describe a transcedental, almost religious experience: "Now I'm naked, I look like a God, luminous and powerful. I want you to love me, I want you to gift me with this moment, my body is just my excuse."

Here, sung again by Vassilis Lekas (Βασίλης Λέκας):

Hatzidakis was living together with a younger man for many years. Since gay marriage or variations thereof were not available then, he adopted his lover, so that he would inherit him after his death. The Greek parliament didn't like this: after the composer's death they voted in a law that would forbid a man adopting another man if the latter was over the age of 18. Which goes to show that politicians can be bloody bastards, wherever they are.