The black women’s club movement, and the NACW in particular, served as well to inspire the politics of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NACP). The organization was established in 1909 after white activists Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villard, and William English Walling issued a “Call” to commemorate the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth with a conference on race relations. “This government cannot exist half-slave and half-free any better today than it could in 1861,” the Call declared. “We call upon the believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty.” 8 Working toward the advancement of people of color, the NACP operated originally as a white-governed organization, though it became more fully African American–oriented in 1920 under the black leadership of James Weldon Johnson and later under Walter White. Of the three original founders, however, it was Ovington, a Socialist reformer from a privileged family background, who had first conceived of the group and persuaded her male partners to join her cause. For she saw the post-Reconstruction “Negro Problem” as a continuation of the abolitionist struggle, only infused with the implicitly feminist thrust behind the suffragist movement. “I believe that women for a long time to come, whether they have suffrage or not, will need to be banded together against oppression,” she remarked in “Socialism and the Feminist Movement,” a 1914 critique of the Socialist Party for failing to support a woman’s right to vote. “[T]hey will also recognize that as women they have an obligation to stand with all other women who are fighting for the destruction of masculine despotism and for the right of womankind.”9 Indeed, among the sixty names undersigning the Call, one-third were women’s. Moreover, Ovington ensured the inclusion of African American women, particularly leaders like Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, whose NACW motivated Ovington toward a broader incorporation of gender and race relations in the NACP. Writing of her visit to the NACW convention in 1919, Ovington commented, “I never saw anything like it before or since.” Part of what surprised her was black women’s political and social activism. She wrote: “[T]he white world, and white women especially, have no appreciation for the amount of social service work that colored women, without wealth or leisure, have accomplished.”10
Joining the Call for a conference on race relations was W. E. B. DuBois, the controversial author of The Souls of Black Folks (1903). In that landmark collection that presaged his formation of the militant Niagara Movement in 1905, DuBois openly attacked the powerful Tuskegee Machine, a gesture that marked a radical departure from the tradition of black conservatism in favor of “persistent manly agitation [as] the way to liberty.” Although poorly funded and short-lived, the Niagara Movement, with little support from whites, sought full enfranchisement of African Americans, proclaiming that “We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults.”11 Beyond the financial strains and political pressure applied by Tuskegee loyalists, members disagreed on “nonracial” issues, notably women’s role in the Movement. Cofounder Monroe Trotter objected even to their participation, which DuBois countered by creating the Massachusetts Niagara Women’s Auxiliary in 1906. When the NACP invited DuBois to join its fledgling white staff three years later, he was thus prepared to disband his work with Trotter to become founding editor of The Crisis, the NACP journal that would serve as the primary vehicle for his racial uplift polemic on the “Talented Tenth.”
While DuBois’s and the NACP’s racial platform was not unproblematic with respect to gender—Ida B. Wells, for example, was an early detractor, charging that she had been excluded by the organizing committee— The Crisis nevertheless became a vocal advocate for women’s rights. “The statement that woman is weaker than man is sheer rot: It is the same thing we hear about ‘darker races’ and ‘lower classes,’” DuBois put forth in a 1915 article that urged black men to vote on behalf of women’s suffrage in the forthcoming election. “Difference, either physical or spiritual, does not argue weakness or inferiority. That the average woman is spiritually different from the average man is undoubtedly just as true as the fact that the average white man differs from the average Negro.” The question for DuBois was whether and how these “differences” should matter. Differences between blacks and whites, he argued, are “no reason for disenfranchising the Negro or lynching him.” Nor, he reasoned, should differences between the sexes justify the subordination of women. In this sense, DuBois’s political project transcended race. He even went so far as to assert that “The meaning of the twentieth century is the freeing of the individual soul.”12
The topic of sexual orientation, however, lacked a forum in early black civil rights activism, even though one would presume that black lesbians, black gay men, and black bisexuals had been involved in American social protest struggle as long as blacks had participated in such movements. Sexual minorities had been silenced out of shame, fear of criminal retribution, and, importantly, a lack of understanding of the inherently political nature of sexual identity. Furthermore, many blacks had only recently become better acquainted with the politics of race, and the majority of African Americans, to no one’s surprise, prized black enfranchisement above all else. If the “freeing of the individual soul” had at last been enlarged to include black women, it had not been extended to homosexuals and bisexuals who were black. As DuBois’s “Talented Tenth” platform placed extreme emphasis on black respectability, the “outlaw” community of homosexuals early in the century, no matter their education or social status, were effectively sidelined. When the issue of homosexuality did in fact appear in the black political discourse of the time, it often surfaced in the context of “illegal” activity, from which even DuBois was not exempt. Writing in his memoirs, he remarked, “In the midst of my career there burst upon me a new and undreamed aspect of sex. A young man, long my disciple and student, then my co-helper and successor to part of my work, was suddenly arrested for molesting men in public places.”13 The young man in his charge was Augustus Granville Dill, whom DuBois’s biographer described delicately as “fastidious and a predestined bachelor.”14 Meeting for the first time during Dill’s undergraduate years at Atlanta University around 1900, the two scholars coedited several influential sociological studies, including Efforts for Social Betterment among Negro Americans (1909), a study of black women’s self-help organizations. So close was their friendship that when DuBois left his teaching position at Atlanta University to join the NACP, Dill replaced him on faculty until he too came on board The Crisis as business manager in 1913. Smooth working relations between the two continued for almost fifteen years, until, much to DuBois’s dismay, Dill was arrested in 1928 for having gay sex in a subway toilet. Although Dill’s mentor had never “contemplated continuing my life work without you [Dill] by my side,” he nonetheless terminated his protégé.15 Apparently troubled by this decision for the rest of his life, DuBois wrote in 1958, “I had before that time no conception of homosexuality. I had never understood the tragedy of Oscar Wilde. I dismissed my co-worker forthwith, and spent heavy days regretting my act.”16
Indeed, Wilde’s 1898 court trial and sentencing for violation of England’s Labourche Amendment (an 1885 law that had added oral sex to the list of homosexual offenses punishable by incarceration) was an internationally sensational scandal, cautioning, if not further suppressing, overt expressions of homosexuality. The tragedy’s impact reached as far away as the United States, where, according to Neil Miller, some nine hundred sermons against Wilde were preached between 1895 and 1900 alone. It was under the shadow of such dire circumstances that renderings of male homosexuality in American fiction began quietly to emerge. The first gay-themed novels of the twentieth century, such as Edward I. Prime-Stevenson’s Imre: A Memorandum (1906) and his study of gay pioneers John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter entitled The Intersexes: A Hi
story of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life (1908), were self-published or printed overseas in limited editions, often under pseudonyms. The first openly gay novel by an nationally recognized American author to appear under his own name, however, was Henry Blake Fuller’s Bertram Cope’s Year (1919). Following the armistice of the First World War, two notable authors addressing explicit gay subject matter were Robert McAlmond, whose self-published collection Distinguished Air (Grim Fairy Tales) (1925) features what some critics believe to be the first depiction of a gay bar in American fiction, and Richard Bruce Nugent’s homoerotic, bisexually themed short story “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” (1926).
Nugent, who published this landmark story under the pen name Richard Bruce to protect the privacy of his socially established family, was a self-described flamboyantly gay bohemian—“the perfumed orchid of the New Negro Movement”—who has come to be more closely identified with the queer spirit of the Harlem Renaissance than perhaps any other author.17 His story “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” was widely considered the first identifiably gay work of fiction by an African American male. “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” depicts transgressive black sexuality in a way that shook the foundations of DuBois’s “Talented Tenth” philosophy. Indeed, merely calling another man “beautiful,” as Nugent had done by naming the love interest Beauty, was a bold act. For as the author remarked in an interview during the 1980s, “You didn’t call a man beautiful. I did.”18 Originally, the story was undertaken on a dare, when it was first proposed for the debut issue of Fire!! (1926), a radical but short-lived New Negro magazine started by Nugent, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman. “Wally [Thurman] and I thought that the magazine would get bigger sales if it was banned in Boston. So we flipped a coin to see who wrote bannable material. The only two things we could think of that were bannable were a story about prostitution or about homosexuality.” Nugent took the topic of homosexuality, while Thurman contributed a piece on prostitution in “Cordelia the Crude” (1926). Thurman, author of the gay-oriented novels The Blacker the Berry (1929), which also prominently considers skin color consciousness among blacks, and Infants of the Spring (1932), a merciless parody of the Harlem Renaissance written as the movement was winding down, similarly embraced the black counterculture, as demonstrated notably by his list of personal abhor-rences, which included all African American “uplift” propaganda, black novelists, morals, religion, and “sympathetic white folks,” among many others.19 Speaking to this rather sudden “visibility” of black male homosexuality in Harlem, Nugent added years later, “You did what you wanted to. Nobody was in the closet. There wasn’t any closet.”20
Speaking in 1968, Nugent remarked of “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” that he “didn’t know it was gay when [he] wrote it,” 21 illustrating the caution that must be exerted in equating gay men’s nonconformism in the 1920s with their willingness to self-identify as homosexual or bisexual in the modern context of gay liberation politics. For many celebrated black gay or bisexual writers of the period succumbed to societal pressures to the extent that many married in spite of ongoing attraction to men. Each writer, however, managed “heterosexual” relations in his own way. Thurman, for example, who was arrested for public sex with a man just two days after his first visit to New York in 1925, apparently hid his homosexuality from his wife during their six-month union, whereas Nugent, who claims to have loved the woman he wed in 1952 (though he does not say what forces motivated him to marry a woman whom he admits he did not love physically), continued affairs with men openly throughout their seventeen-year marriage. As if concealing his sexual orientation were not cover enough, Thurman took the additional step of announcing publicly that he was not a homosexual, adding that the rumor was an attempt by the black establishment to tarnish his reputation and undermine his career.
Perhaps most noteworthy was Countee Cullen, the young poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, who in 1928 wed Nina Yolande DuBois, the only daughter of W. E. B. DuBois. Cullen, who was familiar with the nineteenth-century “homophile” writings of gay men like Edward Carpenter, appears to have recognized his gayness in childhood. Moreover, Cullen’s postmarital preference for his best man and intimate friend Harold Jackman, to whom he dedicated his only novel One Way to Heaven (1932), was borne out for everyone to see when, just three months after the wedding, the two men sailed to Paris without Yolande. Significantly, DuBois, whose recounting of the Augustus Dill incident demonstrates his near-complete ignorance of homosexual matters, perhaps optimistically (or maybe more in the interest of politely avoiding opprobrium) attributed the couple’s 1930 breakup not to Cullen’s obvious sexual orientation but rather to his own daughter’s troublesome nature.
Cullen, who boasted, “I am going to be a poet—not a Negro poet,”22 as he embarked on his writing career in 1924, famously employed lyrical African American themes throughout his successful if short lifetime, winning favorable comparisons even to luminaries such as Keats and Whitman before his death in 1946. Raised as a child prodigy, Cullen strove to impress his gifts on others by means of his tastefully poetic renderings of New Negro moral values. Many of his ostensibly race-based works, however, also contain pronounced homosexual overtones. Beginning with his debut collection, entitled Color (1925), Cullen alludes indirectly to gayness in both “The Shroud of Color” (“I strangle in this yoke drawn tighter than/The worth of bearing it, just to be man/I am not brave enough to pay the price/In full; I lack the strength to sacrifice”) and “For a Poet” (“I have wrapped my dreams in a silken/cloth,/And laid them away in a box of gold”).23 Curiously, both poems are dedicated to men whose names are unknown to Cullen’s editor, Gerald Early, who nevertheless concluded in his footnotes to My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen (1991) that these men are merely friends or neighbors, even though it is equally plausible, absent any biographical information and in light of the homosexual currents beneath the poems, that these two men might have been Cullen’s lovers. Gay traces may also be found in his next book, Copper Sun (1927), particularly in “More Than a Fool’s Song” (“In Christian practice those who move/To symbols strange to us/May reckon clearer of His love/Than we who own His cross”).24 Alain Locke, an influential black gay Howard University professor and “Talented Tenth” champion who served as one of the guiding forces behind Cullen’s literary output, proclaimed, “Ladies and gentleman! A genius! Posterity will laugh at us if we do not proclaim him now.”25
Apart from his dedicated mentoring of young writers like Countee Cullen, Locke gained his own notoriety with The New Negro (1925), his groundbreaking anthology of stories, poetry, and essays by the most prominent and promising names in the field of African American literature of the 1920s. Although Zora Neale Hurston, whose story “Spunk” appears in the anthology, attributes the original discovery of many New Negro writers such as herself and Cullen to the pioneering work of Charles S. Johnson, Locke nevertheless established his reputation as one of the foremost arbiters of the Harlem Renaissance with the publication of this book. Aristocratic by birth and the first black Rhodes Scholar, Locke espoused an elitist view of race representation that favored “high art” over so-called “lower forms” such as jazz and blues music. Writing in his foreword to The New Negro, Locke commented, “So far as he is culturally articulate, we shall let the Negro speak for himself.”26 Locke’s position on artistic expression was that blacks should rely on their African past as a source of art, illustrating how New Negro artists could take up a much maligned ancestry and elevate it to the level of high art. If he considered his part in the New Negro movement to be one of mentorship, or in his words “a philosophical mid-wife to a generation of younger Negro poets, writers, and artists,” Locke’s handling of gifted youth, particularly young men such as Cullen and Langston Hughes, extended as well into the realm of sexual interest.27 A letter to Hughes (whom Locke sought to enroll at Howard University, where Hughes had been invited to share the professor’s home) was sent “to tell you [Hughes] how much
I love you.”28 Hughes, unlike Cullen, with whom he was often paired as literary competitor, avoided the role of acolyte to Locke, maintaining an aloof but friendly distance from the man of letters. Despite his preoccupation with promoting a movement of social respectability, Locke nonetheless seems to have understood the dilemma of a black gay man aspiring to be integrated into a society that finds black homosexuality unwelcome. In another letter to Hughes, he wrote, “My tragedy is that I cannot follow my instincts—too sophisticated to obey them, not too sophisticated not to hear them….”29
Langston Hughes, widely considered the most popular male writer of the Harlem Renaissance, if not among the most esteemed authors of twentieth-century America, established a popular reputation with his first book, The Weary Blues (1926), a poetry collection that includes the much-quoted verse “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (“I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow/of human blood in human veins”)30 and whose overall traditionalist content impressed New Negro advocates as a hopeful new addition to their fledgling literary canon. With his next volume, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), however, Hughes disappointed these admirers, incorporating instead risqué themes in poems like “Red Silk Stockings” (“Put on yo’ red silk stockings,/Black gal./Go out an’ let de white boys/Look at yo’ legs”).31 As this latter poem indicates, Hughes’s writing style was accessible to the ordinary reader, often employing black dialect, while addressing themes of social and economic concerns especially familiar to working-class blacks. If Hughes’s work occasionally engendered controversy, so too did his enigmatic sexual orientation. Although he confessed to a 1926 sexual encounter with a sailor, close friends and colleagues such as Cullen, Locke, and Nugent have described the author as “asexual.” Careful readings of his later poetry nevertheless suggest a homosexual voice, whether or not Hughes himself was gay. Particularly noteworthy is his collection Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), which includes “Cafe: 3 a.m. ” (“Detectives from the vice squad/with weary sadistic eyes/spotting fairies./ Degenerates,/some folks say./But God, Nature/or somebody/made them that way”) and “Tell Me” (“Why should it be my loneliness/why should it be my song/why should it be my dream/deferred/overlong?”).32
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