Langston Hughes’ name is among the most recognizable in 20th-century American letters. The Harlem Renaissance poet par excellence, Hughes was the writer who brought blues to poetry, the visionary who spoke of knowing “rivers ancient as the world,” the author of the metaphor that gave Lorraine Hansberry’s great play A Raisin in the Sun its name. He toured widely on two continents, was quoted by leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., and lived what seemed to be a very public life. And yet, in a number of crucial respects, Hughes remains a mystery.

THE MYSTERY of the serial murders whose perpetrator came to be known as the Last Call Killer began when a maintenance man was cleaning up a rest area on the Pennsylvania Turnpike one spring afternoon in 1991, and he discovered in one of the garbage bags a freckled piece of human flesh.

            Everything in Purdy’s Malcolm may be described as “firmly evasive,” which no doubt enhanced the sexual mysteriousness of the novel for its original readers. Early in the novel, unable to follow Malcolm’s explanation of his relationship with Dr. Cox, Estel replies “Of course” by way of encouraging Malcolm to continue, only to reflect suddenly “that he had said of course to something he had not understood in the least.”

THE DOCUMENTARY Keith Haring: Street Art Boy, directed by Ben Anthony, takes the formulaic, rags-to-riches narrative and runs with it. Queer sexuality, which was fundamental to Haring’s æsthetic and to his iconographic vocabulary, is completely missing from the film. All phallic imagery—even the mere shadow or hint of it—is erased, even though it was utterly central to his art. There’s no mention or glimpse of his final, major work: a large-scale mural painted in 1989, the year before his death at age 31. Once Upon A Time is a mural across four interior walls above the white porcelain tiles and urinals of the second-floor men’s room in New York City’s LGBT Center.