A Retiring 25-Year Old

He’s 25 and retiring.

Nah, that doesn’t sound right. How about “he’s 25 and he’s being driven out of his job?”

Still not right. Shouldn’t it be “he’s 25 and he’s driving himself out of his job?”

If you’re a normal person—which is to say not obsessed with soccer—you know that I’m talking about a Californian named Robbie Rogers who came out of the closet in February and is “stepping away” from the game.

I know about this because I succumbed to temptation and signed up for the online edition of the New York Times, and there Rogers was, saying “I’m a Catholic, I’m a conservative, I’m a footballer and I’m gay.”

Apparently, only three quarters of this equation works. And he’s just told The Guardian that it’s impossible to be an openly gay soccer player.

I have no interest one way or the other if he plays again or not. But after seeing the video of Rogers that’s on the online edition of a newspaper—has the world changed?—I’m seriously worried about Rogers.

He’s gotten a lot of support, he says. He’s happier than he’s ever been; the relief of not having to hide, to lie, to worry about getting discovered has been enormous. It wasn’t easy—he had to email his sister the news, then Skype her, tell her to read the email, and then Skype her immediately back.

I remember that one. I had to write a letter and walk around Boston for a week of agonized waiting. What would they say? Should I go into therapy? What would I say to my parents if they asked, “why? Why do you need therapy? What‘s troubling you, Son?”

And Rogers feels free for the first time in 25 years. In fact, from his perspective he’s been a liar for 25 years, something he seems to find an astonishingly long time.

Not from my point of view. Yeah, I started the process when I was 18 or so, but there were and are a lot of people who never come out at all. Sure, there may be some kids who have the insight to realize that they’re gay, but I’m also very sure that they have very different parents than Rogers. Telegraph to Rogers—you’re only about five years behind, and you’ve now completely caught up.

And the process of coming out is, I’m happy to say, the work of a lifetime.

Note that word “happy.”

Rogers is in the most acute phase, where everything seems to revolve around being gay. Later on, nothing seems to revolve around gay, since everybody has gotten over it and is busy doing other things. I proved that last year on “National Coming Out Day,” when I called Johnny to let him in on the news. Why Johnny? Short of coming out to a passerby, there was nobody left. So I had to start over.

But being gay has been a tremendous advantage. Having to fight worry and fear and then come out taught me a lot about self-love, self-worth. Passing for all those years taught me how to observe people, read the emotional landscape. I understand women in a way that many straight men do not. I am an outsider and an insider and that works for me.

And yes, I still have to come out. In those years when I was in airplanes every three months, I flew to Chicago; on exiting the plane I got cruised by the captain. ‘What!” I thought, “oh my God, the captain of this plane was gay!” I’m ashamed to say it, but for a moment I felt that I had rashly risked my life, those previous three hours.

Well, I sighed, made the mental correction, and was completely unprepared for the next flight, a weekend later, led by Captain Sue Miller.

But those corrections—and that continuing process of coming out—are vital; I don’t want to acquire my convictions at age 20 and die with them all unchanged 60 years later.

So Rogers is on the way. Here’s my worry—nothing about him on the video this morning looked happy. He looked like a guy who has given up something he loved for something he loved more. But he’s still feeling the loss, he still mourns what he won’t have—a World Cup, perhaps, or another Olympics.

He would be, he says, always the “gay footballer,” he would never again be like the other guys. It would always be there, spoken or not.

I don’t know, of course. Nor do I think that he should keep playing just to make a point, just to be a role model. I only think that Rogers has moved from the anguish of the closet into the joy of the open world, and is stunned by the light, the air, the space and the love.

And I think one of those spaces—for Rogers—is the locker room and the soccer field.

One Judge, Parts Missing

There’s only one way to explain it. While the rest of the world—or at least the world I know—has gotten over it, there are four or five guys in Washington that still get really jittery when the topic of homosexuality and gay and lesbian issues blows in the room.

Which is why a man whom everybody grants has a fine legal mind said something incredibly stupid. And here it is, courtesy of the New York Times:

He expressed irritation that the case was before the court, saying President Obama’s approach — to enforce the law but not defend it — was a contradiction.

“I don’t see why he doesn’t have the courage of his convictions,” the chief justice said. He said Mr. Obama should have stopped enforcing a statute he viewed as unconstitutional “rather than saying, ‘Oh, we’ll wait till the Supreme Court tells us we have no choice.’ ”

The White House took umbrage at the remark and said the president was upholding his constitutional duty to execute the laws until the Supreme Court rules otherwise. “There is a responsibility that the administration has to enforce laws that are on the books,” said Josh Earnest, a deputy White House press secretary. “And we’ll do that even for laws that we disagree with, including the Defense of Marriage Act.”

Ahh, Roberts? If the president decided that the two-term limit was unconstitutional and set about running again in 2016, would that be OK? If he decided to stop payments of Social Security, would that be all right?

And by the way, isn’t that what we pay you guys the big money to do? What are you doing up there if you’re not interpreting the law and ruling on constitutionality? Playing checkers, smoking cigars?

Well, what do I know, so I called the family lawyer, and got his take. And John’s reading is that Roberts was peeved, and probably peeved from the day before. Both cases, of course, are screwy. The state of California had no interest in defending the overturning of Proposition 8, so a bunch of archconservatives got in the act. And the big question is—do they have any right to appear before the court? How have they been harmed, which is another way of establishing standing?

That’s pretty much the same deal with DOMA—which Obama and his justice department also declined to defend. But in this case, there’s somebody with standing—an 83 year-old lady who got stuck with a inheritance tax for over $300,000 because her marriage wasn’t recognized. Right, but what about the screwy Republican legislators who hired the lawyers to defend DOMA—what standing do they have?

Short of stomping on the floor and having a nice good hissy fit, Roberts could not be shouting “why me” louder and more petulantly.

At one point, in fact, Roberts suggests that he will walk away from the fight and let the politicians take the heat.

Public opinion has been shifting rapidly over the past decade in favor of gay marriage, and Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that perhaps gays and lesbians don’t need special protection from the court anymore.

“As far as I can tell, political leaders are falling all over themselves to endorse your side of the case,” Roberts told the lawyers who would like to see the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, struck down.

Special protection? Did he really say special protection? Isn’t the DOMA case simply about asking the court to rule on whether the federal government can give benefits to one group of married people but not to another group of married people? What’s special about that?

Oh, and say that I’ve been transferred to Fort Hood, and like a patriotic soldier I go. And then I head for Iraq, where I’m killed. If I’m straight, my wife Dora gets the visit from the two soldiers carrying the folded American flag. If I’m gay, my husband Donald will have to read about it in the newspapers.

You know, I don’t know about anybody else, but seeing the Supreme Court squirm and try to pass the buck is making me crazy. That, of course, is of no consequence to the Supreme Court. What should matter, however, is that a group of people is legally disenfranchised, and suffers real consequences—read harm—as a result of a bigoted piece of legislation. Yeah—I’m married in Massachusetts but not in Puerto Rico. So am I supposed to move to Massachusetts in order to collect Social Security if Raf dies before me?

And does anyone really think that places like Georgia and Mississippi are going to legislate gay marriage on their own? There are states that would still have Jim Crow if not slavery if the courts hadn’t stepped in. We need the Supreme Court to rule on DOMA and on the constitutionality of the 40 states with “defense” of marriage laws.

Put your hand in the center of your back, Chief Justice. Feel that hard thing?

It’s called a backbone.

Letter to the Nine

Let me make it very simple for the nine men and women who make up the Supreme Court.

John and Mary have a lovely wedding in a quaint, white, tall-steeple church. The parents beam, the bride cries, the groom shifts nervously at the altar. The ceremony concludes, they sign the marriage license, and drive off to their honeymoon in the Bahamas, where John will be eaten by a shark.

Are they married?

John and Mary have a lovely wedding—this is a copy / paste of the previous paragraph, so feel free to skip it—in a quaint, white, tall-steeple church. The parents beam, the bride cries, the groom shifts nervously at the altar. The ceremony concludes, they forget to sign—and here the scenario changes—the marriage license, and drive off to their honeymoon in the Bahamas, where John will be eaten by a shark.

Are they married?

Or how about this—John and Mary plan to get married in that quaint-et-cetera church, but it burns down the night before the wedding (dear me, the dramatic things that are happening in the blog this morning….). So they get hitched at City Hall, and then go off to that fateful honeymoon.

You get—I’m sure—my point. Where a couple is married has absolutely no importance; what’s important is that famous or fatal signature on a legal document called the marriage certificate. So we have a problem, a language problem. And here it is….

Screw talking about civil unions, we should be talking about religious unions.

It’s another sign of how decades of fundamentalist battering have driven us into logical and linguistic corners. Nobody, of course, can claim to be a liberal—now we have to retrench under the term “progressive.” Nobody can come right out and say that marriage is a legal institution, and that no amount of fiddling with “civil unions” can grant exactly the same rights as marriage. And even if it could, why bother?

I live across the street from a man and woman who are, I believe (since I haven’t seen their marriage certificate), married. The man and the woman live across the street from two men—do I need to tell you who they are?—who were married in the state of Massachusetts in 2008.

So Raf and Julio go off to the beach, and guess what happens? Yes, we now have a very well fed shark, swimming happily in those bloody waters. Now then, what happens to the grieving spouses?

Well, it’s a very different story. There’s Social Security, there are the tax laws, there are inheritance and probate issues.

Two very different scenarios. But oddly, the two couples—from what I can see—lead quite similar lives. Couples do—they figure out who does the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry. They figure out where they’re going to live and how to pay the bills. They have pets and arguments and—sometimes—children.

And isn’t it time, at last, to get over it, to get on to other things?

Or maybe it’s time to get pissed. Because that’s where I am, this morning, as I read about the Supreme Court weaseling around the question of whether two guys who have been together thirty years, who spent thousands of bucks to travel hundreds of miles to get married are in fact married.

Maybe it’s time to get out on the streets and start screaming at the people who have screamed at us, who have held up the “God hates fags” signs—yes, they were there yesterday, exercising their free speech in front of the Supreme Court—and shout was should be obvious to everybody.

Oh, and what’s that?

Try this….

The people defining marriage as a heterosexual union are mean-spirited, petty bigots.

No, not strong enough.

Hate-filled, fear-filled, despicable bigots.

And remind me, again—why did we allow them to take over the discourse?

A Promise Kept

For a gay blogger, there isn’t much choice about what to write about, today. Yes, I could tell you that in Puerto Rico, a federal judge has ruled that Jehovah’s Witnesses must be given access to gated communities. My reaction, of course, is whether a community has the right to restrict access to ANYBODY. Weren’t public funds used to make the road, and aren’t they used to maintain them?

Right—I’m not gonna get very far with that….

OK—then there’s Michael Samis, whose campaign to raise funds for a forgotten cello concerto ended yesterday. And he—or we—did it! Wow—and he got 140% of his goal!

But all eyes, of course, are on nine men and women who have the chance to do something remarkable—rule on what one of the parties in the case called the “last civil rights issue.”

Today, the United States Supreme Court is hearing the case of California’s Proposition 8; tomorrow the court will hear challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act.

Good news—the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is so legally flawed that the president who signed it—reluctantly—has said it’s unconstitutional. So the justices are really gonna have to work hard to find any reason to uphold it.

Proposition 8 is different. The first big question is whether the party, ProtectMarriage, appealing the district court’s ruling has the legal right—called the standing—to appear before the court. California, you remember, is not appealing the decision—it’s a group of private citizens. If the court decides that ProtectMarriage has no standing, then federal district court’s overturning of Proposition 8 will go into effect. Or will it? Doing more reading, I find some “experts” saying that if the conservatives had no standing, then they had no standing to appeal in the first place. Therefore Proposition 8 stays in effect.

Such tortuous legal niceties would be lost, I suspect, on the lady who bought us lunch yesterday. She had wanted to do something nice for another lady, a Canadian who had spent the last month as an adopted tennis mom because of a series of family emergencies. So doña Ilia, Raf’s mom, worked the phone, corralled the family, and summoned us all to lunch.

And then sat down to give a virtuoso performance—the charm never stopped flowing, the social dexterity never waned. True, doña Ilia did stumble a bit when asked—after declaring that she adored, just adored, Canada—if she had in fact ever been there. Well, she had to admit no, but then recalled having met some very nice Canadian social workers, and had enjoyed meeting them very much.

Nor was the Canadian lady going to go unfed. “You’ll have to try a mallorca,” she said animatedly to her guest, “you can’t leave without a mallorca….” Also true for the flan de queso and the arroz con pollo.

In the midst of this unceasing flow of food and charm came a denouncing: I had completely failed my task, which was to be there early and greet the guest. “Men!” cried Ilia, “they can never do anything right, socially speaking. There she was for five minutes, sitting alone, and you were in a corner with your back to the door!” It was no use to point out that the café was tiny, and that the guest had not walked the twenty feet to the end of the room. “Of course she wouldn’t do that!” exclaimed Ilia. “She’s a refined woman—walking around searching for her host, indeed!” She was holding the guest’s hand, and patting her shoulder simultaneously.

The legal minutiae perplexing the Supreme Court also may not interest Paul Katami, one of the parties challenging Proposition Eight. All he wants to do is marry his husband-emotionally-if-not-yet-legally, Jeff Zarrillo. And the two make a terrific case—it’s pretty hard to imagine better spokespeople for a cause. And Katami has quite a history himself—an actor turned fitness expert, he had a nightmarish accident that led to his elbow being completely broken. Then, he endured two surgeries—both of which were horrific botches that led eventually to the recommendation that Paul have surgery to fuse the bones, leaving him with an arm at a permanent, fixed 90 degree angle.

He opted instead to find a new doctor—smart move, Paul!—who did a third operation involving a bone graft from the hip, titanium rods and screws. This, in addition to using a device he had invented for one of his clients, did the trick. Check him out on YouTube—you’d never know.

And he’s a guy of character—he chose not to waste his time and energy pursuing a malpractice suit against what was clearly a quack. He takes a settlement—just enough to pay his medical expenses and surgery.

And the legal question of standing might not be too interesting for his partner’s father, Dominick Zarrillo, who wrote a moving op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled “A Father, a Son and a Fighting Chance.” He talks about seeing his son get bullied as a kid, and going over to protest to the father of the lead abuser. Unbelievably, the bully’s father takes the attitude—let the kids fight if out between them. Sure, says Zarrillo, one-on-one is OK, but five against one? The bully’s father shrugged and shut the door.

Jeff did what I did, came home to his parents for years with the intention—this time I’m gonna come out. What happened? The time was never right—read, I never seized the chance—and there we were at the airport, with the words burning in the gut, not blazing in the air. When Jeff finally did it, he gets the reaction so many of us got: right, we knew all along, it’s OK.

So then it was Jeff and Paul, not just Jeff. They all go to Hawaii together, and decide to take a boat ride. Not wise—the weather turns nasty, the waves are three times the size of the boat, the elder Zarrillo grabs his wife’s hand, looks over at his son, who is holding Paul’s hand. It turns out OK, and they go to celebrate at dinner. Zarrillo writes:

I realized then that I was crying instead of laughing. I couldn’t explain it except to say there is nothing more overwhelming than seeing your child experience true love.

It works both ways, Dominick. I see an eighty-year old lady navigate her walker into the café, cheerfully give me her cheek to kiss, insist I order the steak, berate me for rudeness to a guest. My parents are dead, my two brothers thousands of miles away. But another mother, doña Ilia, is a tabletop away, beaming at me, scolding me, feeding me. A lady who twenty-five years ago wouldn’t speak to me on the phone.

A columnist for the New York Times who supports marriage equality wrote this morning that it might be a good thing if the Supreme Court didn’t come out with a sweeping ruling asserting that all fifty states must allow gay marriage: it could trigger a backlash. And I can see the logic.

I also see the enormous courage of parents who struggle and then come out to their gay and lesbian children. Because it’s not just us coming out. It’s you brave and loving parents, who are being asked to do something uniquely difficult.

You made a promise when you held us, that first day of our lives in the delivery room. You kept it when you opened the door, put a beer in a stranger’s hand, and set another place at the table.

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War Criminals and Heroes

Looking back at it, it was a time when George Orwell took charge of the script, and we all reacted accordingly.

No one I knew thought that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No one I knew favored bombing the hell out of Iraq, or believed that we could do it, put a government in place, and then leave. No one I knew thought this was about anything more than oil, or possibly saving the US dollar (a report in Vanity Fair suggested that Hussein might change oil payments from dollars to the Euro, striking a crippling blow to the US currency).

Unfortunately, what we knew made no difference. Because in the months following the September 11^th attacks, a half-witted American president was cajoled / coerced / convinced to engage in a war with Iraq that was and is illegal and immoral.

And the people who did speak up against it?

Well, one was Phil Donahue, who had the highest ratings for a talk show at the time. But an internal memo from his network, MSNBC, revealed that he was fired for opposing George W. Bush—not, as the network stated, for poor ratings.

Well, we know the rest of the story. Or rather, we don’t. It’s certainly true that there were no WMDs, and we’ve learned that taking a nation from dictatorship to anarchy doesn’t do much good. We’ve also seen that putting a generation of American soldiers through the agony of war tears lives and families apart.

We haven’t seen much of what it’s done to Iraqi families, and statistics vary—is it hundreds of thousands dead, or more than a million? Nor have we seen the campus riots that we did in the Vietnam War—we have outsourced the army to our poor, and who cares about them?

In a picture that is unimaginably cynical enters one man, Tomas Young, who believes, who trusts, who takes what he sees at face value. He believes George W. Bush, and enlists two days after the September 11^th attacks. He prepares to deploy to Afghanistan.

Instead, he is sent to Iraq.

And five days later, is shot by a sniper. He’s paralyzed from the nipples down, and will never walk again.

And things go badly for him—a pulmonary embolism leaves him slurring his words, he cannot feed himself, he suffers excruciating pain in his abdomen and has to have a colostomy. Oh, and his only food is liquid nutrition, which he receives by feeding tube.

He doesn’t, however, stop speaking out. And Tomas Young spoke out last week on the tenth anniversary of the War in Iraq. He said what should be said—that Bush and Blair were and are war criminals. He also announced that he’s had enough; he will stop taking any nourishment or fluids, and fast until the end.

Young is 33 years old.

Readers of Iguanas will know: my mother made the same decision as Young. He is, however, half a century younger than she was when she decided to die.

Which made it difficult—how to get the hospice care needed to support him through this process? Ironically, it was through the same term, “failure to thrive,” that ended up on my mother’s death certificate.

I completely get Young’s decision to die. And he’s not alone in thinking that justice has not been done in the case of two leaders who violated the 1945 UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

So says Michael Mansfield, a British lawyer who led the Legal Action Against War protest in 2003. Mansfield points out that the charter specifically forbids a preemptive strike on the basis of a perceived threat. Yet that’s what Blair and Bush did by manipulating flawed data.

And we, of course, let them get away with it. So now we have a new generation of vets suffering from brain disorders and shell shock. We have lives that are so much ruined that death becomes the only acceptable way out. And we have the moral responsibility to demand that the ICC—the International Criminal Court—try Bush and Blair for war crimes.

Oh, and Bush? What’s he up to, nowadays, as Tomas Young prepares to end a decade of suffering?

All of Washington is talking about it—he’s taken up painting.

Can’t tell—is it one step up or down from Ecce Mono?

El Nuevo Día Reviews the 30,000 Lives Project

Following is an excerpt, in English, of a review of my 30,000 Lives Project, by journalist Antonio Quiñones Calderón, published on Thursday, March 21 (yesterday) by the Puerto Rican daily newspaper El Nuevo Día. 

(For the full, original article in Spanish, please go here.)

(...) It is in such citizen-participatory spirit that the “30,000 Lives Project” is centered. The project was conceived and is being sponsored and performed personally by Marc Newhouse, a cellist, teacher of the English language and writer who has resided in Puerto Rico for many years; Newhouse, originally a Wisconsin native, has become another good Puerto Rican.

Marc was highly disturbed by a fact he had recently encountered: 30,000 people, on average, are killed every year in the US and its territories—including Puerto Rico—as a direct consequence of gun shots. He was specifically disturbed by the fact that approximately one in every 30 murders by gun shot—within the whole US jurisdiction—occurs in Puerto Rico alone, even when our island's population amounts to a mere 1.19 percent of the total national population. When his brain fully grasped this troubling fact, Marc was instantly convinced that nothing will be instrumental in halting such tragedies until, as he explained, “all of us who favor a strong gun control policy are vigorous and passionate enough as gun advocates are.”

A quote by the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin came to his mind then; Stalin said—cynically and cruelly: “One death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic.” This encouraged Marc to produce his project, hoping that those 30,000 deaths by gun shots in 2011 in the US would not end up becoming just one more statistic.

So he decided to compile a randomly-generated list of 30,000 names symbolizing those lost lives. For this, he used an 8 1/2” x 11” sheet format for a single-spaced list, one name per line, written with normal font at 12 points. He ended up with 474 pages [sic.]. “Everyone who sees the printed document—tells us Marc Newhouse—has the same reaction: ‘Wow! Those are a lot of lives....”

The list will be read out loud on Saturday afternoons in public squares in the metro area of San Juan until next December. Marc, his friends, and citizens who find out about the project and recognize its merit meet each Saturday to read 100 names out loud and publicly. They then engage in a dialog to tackle the importance of finding ways to confront the violence that has taken large control of our society. This initiative, akin to that on Agenda Ciudadana, is, without a doubt, a valuable example of individual contribution to society. (For more information, please visit: http://lifedeathandiguanas.blogspot.com/) 

UPDATE: Please note this weekend's reading has been postponed for Sunday, March 24 at 1:00 PM (instead of the usual Saturdays) at Plaza de Armas, Old San Juan. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Only Lacking One Thing

Well, I nearly fell into the trap—and shame on me. For a fleeting moment, I thought about calling this post on Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn’s older sister, “The Other Mendelssohn.”

The problem being that, in a sense, she was. Not in talent, nor in creative power, nor as a pianist. She had all the goods her brother had, absolutely everything except for one thing.

He had a Y chromosome; she had none.

For all the culture in the Mendelssohn family, the highbrowed German Jewish cultural and intellectual firepower wasn’t enough to free Fanny from what was “most important.” And that would be running the household.

Here’s Fanny’s father, writing in 1820, when she was fifteen:

Music will perhaps become his [i.e. Felix's] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament.

Here’s Fanny brother, Felix:

From my knowledge of Fanny I should say that she has neither inclination nor vocation for authorship. She is too much all that a woman ought to be for this. She regulates her house, and neither thinks of the public nor of the musical world, nor even of music at all, until her first duties are fulfilled. Publishing would only disturb her in these, and I cannot say that I approve of it.

Ouch—all the velvet gloves in the world can’t take the sting away from that slap in the face.

She made only one appearance in public at the piano, and that was to premiere her brother’s piano concerto. And yes, her music was played at family gatherings, but when it came time to publish, Felix thought it really would be better if her work appeared under his name. And so it was a bit thorny, the problem that arose when Queen Victoria proposed to sing her favorite of Mendelssohn’s songs, Italien. But he confessed—it really was his sister’s song.

She was free until age 24, when she married an artist, William Hensel, and then had a child. At the end of her life, in 1846, she decided to publish her single opus, a group of songs. Tragically, she died at age 42 of a stroke; her brother, grief stricken, wrote his last string quartet, dedicated it to her memory, and then suffered the same fate six months later.

She was the granddaughter of a famous philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn. She in turn was the grandmother of a philosopher, Paul Hensel, and a mathematician, Kurt Hensel.

And no, apparently her husband wasn’t musical; he couldn’t sing the single note in a performance the family mounted. His talents were in the graphic arts; he became the royal court painter. Here is his sketch of Fanny.

I look at it and wonder—are we seeing Fanny, or the Fanny that her soon-to-be husband wanted to see? Was she really that demure, that conventionally pretty?

Sadly, unlike Clara Schumann, who had to get out there and work, Fanny had the comfortable life of a prosperous hausfrau. But she was by no means unproductive—she left over 460 compositions.

Most of which are songs, or small pieces for the piano. Yes, she has several sonatas, a couple of quartets, the piano trio, which you can hear below. But unlike Clara Schumann, no piano concerto, no larger works. One wonders—was the sexism so ingrained that a lady composer could write songs—the equivalent of embroidery or speaking a bit of French—but not symphonies? Or was it practical—who would perform a symphony by a woman composer?

She seems an enigma, does Fanny—much more difficult to read than Clara Schumann. Both were gifted pianists, gifted composers. Clara was the breadwinner, and toured Europe while taking care of Robert. Yet she stopped composing at age 36, before half her life had passed (she died at age 76). And yes, Robert might—and note that word “might”—have been the greater talent in composition.

Not being an artist, I’m in no position to say who was the more talented—Fanny Mendelssohn or her husband. But here’s the deal.

I also can’t say who was more talented—Fanny Mendelssohn or her brother.