It wasn’t love at first sight when Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the new music director of the Metropolitan Opera, and his partner, Pierre Tourville, met as students at the Montreal Conservatory almost 25 years ago.

“I felt I needed to emancipate, to get out of my parents’ place, as one does at 20,” Mr. Nézet-Séguin said recently at Julius’, the West Village gay bar. “And so we were just roommates.”

“You and your best friend,” he said, turning to Mr. Tourville, “she and you were looking, and I said, ‘I’m going to be your roommate.’”

Mr. Tourville, a violist, was dating, he admitted with a laugh, “many people at the same time.” Mr. Nézet-Séguin was in a four-year relationship — with a woman.

But did Mr. Tourville seriously think Mr. Nézet-Séguin was straight?

“Not for very long,” Mr. Tourville deadpanned. “It became pretty clear. Quickly.”

It’s not unusual to share meet-cute stories over cheap cocktails at Julius’, one of the oldest and coziest gay bars in the city. But it was an extraordinary conversation to be having with the music director of the nation’s largest performing arts institution.

While culture — particularly high culture — is indelibly associated with gay tastemakers, audiences and creators, it’s a sign of how outmoded our conception of authority is that remarkably few major performing arts leaders have been openly gay. In classical music and opera, even New York, the city that gave rise to the modern gay rights movement with the Stonewall riots 50 years ago this June, has been dominated since then by two conductors: Leonard Bernstein and James Levine, who both kept sexual relationships with men hidden. Read more via New York Times