'Billy Budd' was subversively gay; new opera makes it explicit

Aix-en-Prevence Festival poster feat. Billy Budd. Screenshot: festiva-aix.com.

I was forced to read Billy Budd at both Moanalua High School and Loyola University Chicago. Not just read it: dissect it, analyze it, write papers about it from various angles. I thought it was academic torture. Looking back, it might have been exactly what I needed.

Ted Huffman and Oliver Leith have just given Benjamin Britten's opera a makeover in France that's got everyone talking. They've stripped it down from a massive production with 70 singers to just six people and some keyboards. More importantly, they've made all the gay subtext into actual text.

Photos: https://festival-aix.com/en/programmation/opera/story-billy-budd-sailor

When Billy kisses another sailor on stage, there's no hiding what's happening.

The reviews describe men in tank tops changing clothes where everyone can see them, synthesized sounds that mimic whales, and a version of the story that doesn't bother with the careful hints Britten used in 1951.

It's Billy Budd with the closet door ripped off its hinges.

Read: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/arts/music/billy-budd-ted-huffman-oliver-leith-aix.html

Reading about this production takes me back to those college seminars where we picked apart every line of Melville's story.

I knew I was gay (that much was clear), but there was so much more I couldn't name yet. The asexual spectrum didn't have vocabulary back then. There were desires in me that I could have acted on easily enough, but I held back. Partly because of religious guilt (I was very Catholic then), partly because of strategy.

See, when you know you're not the conventionally handsome guy, not the type that fits the "Abercrombie & Fitch catalog white gay ideal” (that was at its height in pop culture back then), you learn different games.

You learn that "maybe I don't know myself" can be more interesting than "here's exactly what I want."

You discover that restraint and mystery can be more powerful than desperation. At least that's what I told myself.

But then other people around me decided they knew me better than I knew myself. They wanted to show me who I really was, what I really wanted. The whole dance became about power and desire and identity in ways that Melville understood better than I did at twenty.

That's what made Billy Budd so unsettling to study.

Here's this beautiful sailor who doesn't fully understand his own effect on people.

Here's Claggart, twisted up with want and hatred.

Here's Captain Vere, making impossible moral choices.

Everyone's trapped by desire they can't quite name or act on safely.

Huffman's production sounds like it throws all that careful ambiguity out the window. Instead of Britten's ocean of hidden meaning, you get a small theater where everything's visible. No hiding behind big orchestras or naval tradition or Victorian restraint.

Maybe that's exactly right for 2025.

We don't have to pretend anymore that everyone's straight until proven otherwise.

We don't have to write academic papers about "subtext" when we can just say "these men want each other."

We can name things now that didn't have names when I was struggling through those college essays.

I'm different now than I was then: more Presbyterian and less Catholic (less Passion of the Christ intensity, more quiet certainty), more openly queer but still subdued, better informed about who I am and what I want.

Or don't want.

The vocabulary exists now for the spaces between desire and action, for the spectrum of attraction that doesn't fit neat categories.

I should pick up Billy Budd again and see how it hits me now, almost 25 years later.

Would I still find myself in those pages, or have I moved past needing fictional sailors to help me understand my own complications?

Do I need a new operatic interpretation of Billy Budd?

Maybe I do.

I think I'd like to see Huffman's production if it ever makes it to Chicago. Not for nostalgia, but to see what happens when you take a story about hidden things and perform it in full view.

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is stop hiding.