Thanks for the info, Annie. Â I just saw the name Purishkevich and copied and pasted it into my post. Â I don't think being unattractive would necessarily preclude someone from being attracted to members of his/her own sex. Â
  But it's clear that the claim about Purishkevich is wrong.
Here's the website I got it from if anybody's interested.
http://community.middlebury.edu/~moss/ROL.html
I will email Kevin Moss about the error.
Please do email him, I hate to see inaccuracies online because it misleads people who are trying to learn. The looks comment had nothing to do with them being or not being gay (though I assume most men, as most women, would prefer Dmitri's looks

) it was just kind of funny to me to see them confused, the tall, handsome, beautiful young Grand Duke, and the short, fat, unattractive middle aged politician. I don't know how that happened, the guy who runs that site needs to straighten out his facts for historical reasons. What if a school kid got the wrong info and flunked a test or report? Thanks for helping.
More on Dmitri- He was born in 1891, the son of the Tsar's Uncle Paul, youngest brother of Alexander III, and his wife Alexandra of Greece (she was also half Russian) Alexandra fell in a boat and went into early labor, had Dmitri and then passed away. Because of this tragedy, he and sister Marie were raised partly by his Uncle Sergei and Aunt Ella (who as you know had no kids of their own) They also spent a lot of time with the IF and were very close to Nicholas and Alexandra. Later, when their father Paul remarried a divorcee, he was banished from Russia for several years and Ella and Sergei were given custody of both children.
It was at the neighboring country estates outside Moscow in the summertime that Dmitri and Felix met as children. They were always friends, and as young men became very close and spent a lot of time together, partying around town in St. Petersburg until dawn in the years before the war. At one time Dmitri was mentioned as a possible husband for Grand Duchess Olga, and Dmitri also had interest in Irina and when she chose Felix it caused a strain on their friendship. But they made up and were very close again by the time of the murder of Rasputin.
Though both survived the revolution, they fell out in the 1920's due to Felix's constant bragging and telling of the murder of Rasputin story, and Dmitri had hoped to keep it all quiet and never speak of it. What this means to what really may have happened that night we may never know.
In the book "Flight of the Romanovs", it states late in the book that there are wax figures of Felix and Dmitri in the rooms of the clubs on the Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg where they played their guitars and partied all night. It said they are regarded highly by the intellectual homosexual community of Russia as 'a glamorously romantic homosexual couple.' Any other details, whatever they may be, were not recorded so we can only speculate.
Purishkevitch, a Duma representative and not royal at all, also left his detailed account of the murder story, closely matching Felix and absolving Dmitri of all guilt ('thank goodness the young grand duke's hands are not stained with the blood of the peasant') Some say this was because Dmitri did have a larger role than admitted, and there was at the time a faction who wanted to install Dmitri as Tsar if Nicholas fell and did not want the murder on his rep.
Purishkevitch fled St. Petersburg the night of the murder. He died in 1920 of Typhus, or was it Typhoid?
Dmitri, banished to the Persian front for his role in the Rasputin murder, ironically escaped the revolution because of his exile! He later married an American heiress, Audrey- Emery, and had a son, Paul. They divorced in the late 30's. Dmitri died of TB in 1941 in Switzerland. Audrey took the boy to America where he grew up to become Mayor of Palm Beach, Fl. , often joked as the "Tsar of Palm Beach" due to his royal roots. He passed away just last year at age 75.
Yussoupov, as you probably know, escaped on the HMS Marlborough with the Dowager Empress and others, settled in France, wrote his memoirs and lived a long life. He died in 1967 at age 80.