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Several thousand came to gawk at the cross-dressing extravaganza as hundreds of mainly working-class young men showed up in over-the-top drag.ĭespite this kind of freedom and pageantry, homosexuality wasn’t universally accepted.
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Anyone who voiced disapproval risked being uninvited from her lavish and legendary parties.īut gayest of all: the Hamilton Lodge drag ball held every year on 155th Street. Bawdy blues singer Gladys Bentley presided over the raucous fun, all 250 pounds of her cross-dressed in tux and top hat.Ī’Lelia Walker, the Joy Goddess of the Harlem Renaissance and daughter of Madam C.J., was especially fond of homosexuals, notes award-winning author David Levering Lewis in his book When Harlem Was in Vogue. There wasn’t any closet.”Įverybody who was anybody - gay and straight, black and white, uptown and downtown - knew about the infamous homosexual haunt the Clam House on 133rd Street. Speaking about the LGBT presence in Harlem, Nugent noted, “You did what you wanted to. He contributed the blatantly homoerotic short story “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” to the black literary journal Fire!! in 1926. Nugent, known as the “perfumed orchid of the New Negro Movement,” didn’t hide his sexuality either in life or in print. Throughout the so- called Harlem Renaissance period, roughly 1920 to 1935, black lesbians and gay men were meeting each other street corners, socializing in cabarets and rent parties, and worshiping in church on Sundays, creating a language, a social structure, and a complex network of institutions. The 1983 essay “T’Aint Nobody’s Bizness: Homosexuality in 1920’s Harlem,” by Eric Garber, puts it in sharp focus:Īt the beginning of the twentieth century, a homosexual subculture, uniquely Afro-American in substance, began to take shape in New York’s Harlem. Being “in the life” was part of the landscape of the community. The Harlem of the 1920s, which produced a flowering of art, music and writing, was indisputably gay. Next month Cleis Press will re-release Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African-American Fiction, which includes a meaty section on the Renaissance.
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The movie won a Special Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. That same year, Anthony Mackie starred in the film Brother to Brother, a fever dream that linked present-day Harlem to its lyrical Renaissance past through the eyes of a young black man struggling with his sexuality. Christa Schwarz, puts the life and work of Cullen, McKay, Nugent and Hughes in an LGBT context. The book Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (2003), by A.B.
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In the last few decades, a number of authors and filmmakers have revised the revisionist history of the period and unlocked history’s closet. In a 1993 essay, “The Black Man’s Burden,” Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Root‘s editor-in-chief, notes that the Renaissance “was surely as gay as it was black.” Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Alain Locke, Richard Bruce Nugent, Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Langston Hughes, all luminaries of the New Negro literary movement, have been identified as anywhere from openly gay (Nugent) to sexually ambiguous or mysterious (Hughes). Quiet as it’s kept, along with Cullen, a number of the brightest lights of the Harlem Renaissance fell somewhere along the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rainbow spectrum. Three months after the wedding, Cullen sailed to Paris with his best man, and bride and groom officially split up shortly after. It dramatizes a black wedding of the early 20th century - the 1928 marriage of Harlem Renaissance poet laureate Countee Cullen and Nina Yolande Du Bois, the daughter of W.E.B.ĭespite a lavish event - she had 16 bridesmaids! - the marriage was short-lived. Next month’s National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, N.C., features a play called Knock Me a Kiss. Quiet as it’s kept, a number of the brightest lights of the Harlem Renaissance fell along the LGBT rainbow spectrum.?