Neil Miller on the (Gay) Harlem Renaissance

This is an excerpt from Neil Miller's "Out of the Past"

"By the 1920s, Harlem had blossomed as a center of nightlife, for whites as well as blacks. It also emerged as a center of black American music, literature, and art, a cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Jazz Age Harlem offered a combination of license and sexual ambiguity that provided a comfortable environment for those attracted to members of their own sex. You didn't mention the word homosexual in Harlem in those years, even if you were a "mannish actin' woman" or a "skippin', twistin' woman-actin' man," as Bessie Smith sang in "Foolish Man Blues." Yet it was another bohemia where gays and lesbians could flourish.

For the new black migrants, Harlem was a place of promise, where they believed they could free themselves of racism and poverty of the South. "I was in love with Harlem long before I got there," recalled the poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967), who was born in Joplin, Missouri. For white visitors, Harlem represented the exotic, where social restrictions and personal inhibitions could be jettisoned...Whites went to basement speakeasies and cabarets such as the Cotton Club, where black entertainers performed..."And they went to Harlem to experience homosexuality as the epitome of the forbidden: they watched transvestite floor shows; they rubbed shoulders with homosexuals; they were gay themselves in mixed bars that catered to black and white, heterosexual and homosexual."

An aura of sexual ambivalence pervaded Harlem nightlife. Male impersonator Gladys Bentley performed at Harry Hansberry's Clam House; drag balls took at the Rockland Palace and Savoy ballrooms. Some places catered specifically to men interested in other men. There was an "open" speakeasy at 126th Street and Seventh Avenue, for example, that Renaissance figure Bruce Nugent described as attracting "rough trade" - "the kind that fought better than truckdrivers and swished better than Mae West," as he put it

...There were "rent parties," known for their wild, sexually charged atmosphere and bootleg liquor. Then, there were "buffet flats," apartments converted into sex clubs that featured shows and prostitution. Although they began primarily as a heterosexual institution, buffet flats spread to those interested in their own sex. Ruby Walker- niece of blues singer Bessie Smith- recalled one buffet flat where  there were "nothing but faggots and bulldaggers ....everybody that's in the life...everything goes...They had shows in every room, two women goin' together, a man and a man goin together...and if you interested they do the same thing to you."

Sexual identities were fluid in Harlem. Those who engaged in same-sex relations rarely defined themselves as homosexual. A concept of exclusive gay and lesbian identity was weak and was not socially acceptable. Men and women were expected to marry, even in bohemian circles. Yet, performers such as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, Jackie "Moms" Mabley, Josephine Baker, and Ethel Waters all cultivated a bisexual image....

The legendary blues singer Ma Rainey got into trouble with the police for her lesbian behavior in 1925, when she was arrested for taking part in an orgy at her home involving the women in her chorus...

One of the best-known performers of the time was Gladys Bentley, a 300-pound singer and piano player who dressed in white tuxedo and top hat performances at Harry Hansberry's Clam House...She married another woman in a New Jersey ceremony....

Many of the leading intellectual figures of the Harlem were primarily inclined towards members of their own sex. They were "in the life" as they called it in Harlem. This group included Alain Leroy Locke, the editor of the New Negro, the anthology that first brought black writers to a wider public; Countee Cullen, along with Hughes considered one of the leading poets of the Renaissance; poet and artist Bruce Nugent; and the journalist, dramatist, and novelist Wallace Thurman, whose play Harlem was a Broadway sensation. Thurman, Nugent, and Langston Hughes all rented rooms in a 137th Street roominghouse they called "Niggerati Manor."

The sexuality of Hughes, the most-admired black American poet of his generation, is less clear, however...In his later years, Hughes, who seemed always to be in the company of some handsome young man, was widely assumed to be gay, according to his biographer, Arnold Rampersad. (Hughes remained a lifelong bachelor.)...

If Hughes was in fact gay, his reticence about the subject is not surprising. For just as primarily blues singers had to appear bisexual, at least in their public image, the black gay literati were equally cautious. The poet Countee Cullen married W.E.B. DuBois's daughter, Yolande, before 3,000 people in what was the major social event of 1928. The marriage was over before it began, and two months later, Cullen sailed for Europe with Harold Jackman, his closest friend....

Despite the atmosphere of relative tolerance towards those "in the life," the emphasis of the Harlem Renaissance was on blackness, not sexuality. The idea of addressing same-sex love publicly was frowned upon. One man who did so was Bruce Nugent, whose story, "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade" in Fire!!, a 1926 literary quarterly, is believed to be the first to treat black homosexuality....Nugent wrote "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade" under the pseudonym of Richard Bruce out of deference to his family. But he claims that being a gay man in Harlem in the twenties resulted in very little social disapproval....

If Harlem provided a refuge for those "in the life," it had, nonetheless, no separate community based on shared sexual orientation; what united it was the revival and development of black culture. The emphasis on marriage made it more difficult for a distinctly gay and lesbian subculture to emerge."

Comments

[Chris Holden]

Fascinating piece, thanks much. Intriguing, how ahead of its time, regarding being Gay (in the life), was the Harlem community. And how many of those now legendary figures were, in fact, Gay.

[Chris Holden]

Fascinating piece, thanks much. Intriguing, how ahead of its time, regarding being Gay (in the life), was the Harlem community. And how many of those now legendary figures were, in fact, Gay.