THAT MANY OR MOST of the prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance were gay or bisexual has become such a commonplace that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. could assert in 1993 that the Harlem Renaissance “was surely as gay as it was black, not that it was exclusively either of these.” This gay revisionism of the Harlem Renaissance serves to highlight the tensions between homoerotic self-expression in New Negro literature and the “sense of mission of rehabilitating the race in world esteem” that Alain Locke claimed for the New Negro movement.
The center of that movement was New York, and its white American avatar was the homosexual novelist, critic, photographer, and patron (some would say exploiter) of the Harlem Renaissance, Carl Van Vechten. The contemporary reception of Van Vechten’s 1926 novel Nigger Heaven illustrates the divide in the black community over the social responsibility of the artist. Many Harlem African-Americans, including its prominent intellectuals, excoriated the book for its scandalous depiction of African-Americans in Harlem and considered it, in W. E. B. Du Bois’ words, “a blow in the face.” It was, according to Gates, “bad form among Afro-Americans to be caught reading Nigger Heaven.” And yet, the list of books on reserve in the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library, reported by Countee Cullen in his column “The Dark Tower” in the April 1927 issue of Opportunity, lists Nigger Heaven as number one on the fiction list. Wallace Thurman went so far as to predict that “Harlem Negroes … would erect a statue on the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, and dedicate it to this ultra-sophisticated Iowa New Yorker.” Thurman defended Van Vechten’s exploration of Harlem life and criticized his detractors, declaring that “the so-called intelligentsia of Harlem has exposed its inherent stupidity.” Thurman was being deliberately provocative, underscoring the rift between image-conscious, middle-class blacks and those who felt obliged to subordinate their artistic impulses to a broader social agenda.
Thurman was writing as editor of the only published issue of the literary journal Fire!!, which was to be a quarterly devoted to “younger Negro artists.” Fire!! also published the most frankly homoerotic short story of the Harlem Renaissance, Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” published under the nom de plume Richard Bruce as Part One of a novel that was apparently never completed. With the publication of “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” homoerotic literature emerged, if not at the center, at least within the canon of Harlem Renaissance literary production, alongside works by Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Helene Johnson, Aaron Douglas, Arna Bontemps, and others. Fire!!, along with works by some of its contributors, was criticized by some of the older generation of New Negro critics, but not always for the reasons one might expect. Benjamin Brawley, writing for The Southern Workman, seemed more concerned with its faddish prose style, and criticized Nugent for promoting an “unwillingness to work” with his lounging, decadent character Alex in “Smoke, Lilies and Jade.” Alain Locke, himself a self-identified gay man, was less critical, but still wished that its “flesh values” had not been expressed “in hectic imitation of the ‘naughty nineties’ and effete echoes of contemporary decadence.”
If either of these critics objected to the homoerotic content of the Richard Bruce (Nugent) story, they chose for whatever reason to cloak their criticism in a discourse about decadence. In other words, “decadence” was code for homosexuality, especially the type of homoerotic literary performance inherited from fin-de-siècle European writers. It is perhaps too much to assert that a story with explicit homosexual themes might still have satisfied Du Bois’ criteria for New Negro art if it drew more from native soil than from white European sources. But what alienated Nugent, Thurman, and McKay from the old guard of the New Negro movement was their willingness to cater to the public’s taste for exoticism and decadence.
This essay locates the source of this “decadent strain” in the cultural exchange between white, urban, middle-class gays and the “New Negro” writers of the Harlem Renaissance. George Chauncey has argued convincingly that by the 1920’s middle-class gay men in New York City were rejecting the “semiotics of inversion” in favor of a new identity based on sexual object choice. What Chauncey calls “queer culture” adopted an æsthetic of refinement that was interpreted by some as effete decadence. This new semiotics of refinement and excess became the code by which middle-class gay men both revealed and concealed their sexual identities. The vigorous cultural commerce that went on between Greenwich Village and Harlem through the early decades of the 20th century has likewise been thoroughly studied. What has received less notice, however, is that while middle-class white gay men were turning Harlem into a locus amœnus—a site of boundless sexual possibility—the gay writers of the Harlem Renaissance and their critics both were adapting the semiotics of refinement and material excess—the language of decadence—to their own homoerotic discourse.
IN OCTOBER 1926, The Crisis published an address delivered by W. E. B. Du Bois at the Chicago conference of the naacp titled “Criteria of Negro Art.” In it, he concludes: “Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”
The discourse over the function of art in the Harlem Renaissance is frequently cast as a debate between “art as propaganda” and “art for art’s sake.” It was Du Bois who laid out the agenda for the “art as propaganda” side. Du Bois’ manifesto can be seen in action in a call for manuscripts for the 1926 Krigwa literary contest appearing in The Crisis. Du Bois urged: “We want especially to stress the fact that while we believe in Negro art we do not believe in any art simply for art’s sake. We want the earth beautiful but we are primarily interested in the earth.” Du Bois should not be characterized as some kind of neo-puritan, however. His call for manuscripts exhorted his readers to “Plumb the depths. If you want to paint Crime and Destitution and Evil, paint it. Do not try to be simply respectable, smug, conventional.” Beauty, for Du Bois, was subservient to “Truth”; and art would be in the service of propaganda.
Alain Locke, in contrast, argued that “art in the best sense is rooted in self-expression.” Locke responded directly to Du Bois’ agenda by asserting that, in their spiritual growth, black artists “must choose art and put aside propaganda.” He rejected propaganda on æsthetic grounds, but also because it “perpetuates the position of group inferiority even in crying out against it.” As adamant as Locke was on the subject of propaganda, though, he agreed with Du Bois about the “decadent strain” that he saw emerging in younger New Negro writers. In an oft-quoted passage from his essay “Art or Propaganda?” Locke wrote:
Our espousal of art thus becomes no mere idle acceptance of “art for art’s sake,” or cultivation of the last decadences of the over-civilized, but rather a deep realization of the fundamental purpose of art and of its function as a tap root of vigorous, flourishing living. Not all of our younger writers are deep enough in the sub-soil of their native materials, too many are pot-plants seeking a forced growth according to the exotic tastes of a pampered and decadent public.
While Locke ostensibly rejected the art-as-propaganda model, he stopped short of advocating the bohemian credo of l’art pour l’art, which he characterizes as strictly the product of a foreign influence, something Old World and European. Furthermore, his critique of younger writers and their failure to access “native materials” hints at an agenda that, while not necessarily propagandistic, still hints at a social mission beyond mere self-expression. Locke seems caught between his own sexuality and friendships with many of the younger male writers, and his position as a founding father of the New Negro movement.
Wallace Thurman parodied Locke in his satirical roman à clef Infants of the Spring (1932). Thurman’s novel is perhaps the period’s most pungent commentary on the tensions between personal expression and social purpose that arose between the founders of the New Negro movement and younger artists in the 1920’s and early 30’s. Thurman was a close friend of Richard Bruce Nugent, and their shared address at 267 West 136th Street—nicknamed “Niggeratti Manor”—became the setting for Infants of the Spring. Thurman portrays his own homosexual relationship with the white Harold Stefansson in the suggestively homoerotic relationship between the novel’s main character, Raymond, and his Nordic friend Stephen Jorgenson. Nugent, who was openly gay, appears as the bisexual Paul Arbian, whose name is a homophone of his initials, R.B.N. Locke is depicted in the character of Dr. Parkes lecturing a salon of New Negro artists at “Niggerati Manor” about a certain influence he sees running through their art. Dr. Parkes tells the assembly:
I am somewhat fearful of the decadent strain which seems to have filtered into most of your work. Oh, yes, I know you are children of the age and all that, but you must not, like your paleface contemporaries, wallow in the mire of post-Victorian license. You have too much at stake. You have ideals. You should become … well, let me suggest your going back to your racial roots, and cultivating a healthy paganism based on African traditions.
Thurman was acutely aware of Locke’s position regarding the preferred mode for creating New Negro art based in African traditions, and he knew that what he was writing was strictly outside of that tradition.
The “decadent strain” to which Dr. Parkes refers is personified by the character of Paul Arbian, Thurman’s portrait of his friend and sometime housemate Richard Bruce Nugent. Paul admits to “indulging” in homosexuality, although he is evasive about his sexual preference. He declares, “Oscar Wilde is the greatest man that ever lived,” and counts among his favorite writers Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and especially J. K. Huysmans, whose character des Esseintes in À rebours (“Against the Grain”) he proclaims “the greatest character in literature.” Even Paul’s suicide is heavy with decadent symbolism. After locking himself in the bathroom of a Greenwich Village tenement, he “donned a crimson mandarin robe, wrapped his head in a batik scarf of his own designing, hung a group of his spirit portraits on the dingy calcimined wall … then slashed his wrists with a highly ornamented Chinese dirk.” In the novel’s final irony, Paul has strewn the floor of the bathroom with the manuscript of a novel he’s written, but the bloody bathwater has inundated all but the title sheet and dedication page: “To Huysmans’ Des Esseintes and Oscar Wilde’s Oscar Wilde.”
If critics like Du Bois, Locke, and Brawley were coding their criticism of homosexuality in a language of decadence, they were taking their cue from the writers they criticized. The New Negro writers, in turn, were learning their language of decadence from the same sources as their white gay counterparts in Greenwich Village and elsewhere in the city. The decadent material-culture symbols associated with Paul Arbian, characterized by their exoticism and superfluity, are part of a code of signifiers that constituted a semiotics of homosexuality in the early 20th century. In an essay in The New York Times, Herbert Muschamp describes, using Herbert Gans’ terminology, an urban gay “taste culture” that formed in the decades before the appearance of gay-themed books in the mainstream press: “Ronald Firbank novels, Aubrey Beardsley engravings, Victorian bric-a-brac, Art Nouveau and Art Deco ornaments, Fortuny fabrics, faded Hollywood stars: these artifacts were signs in a code, adopted before openness about homosexuality was possible. The love that dared not speak its name had learned to scream through décor.”
A hallmark of the decadent sensibility is the use of objets d’art as synecdoche, what Janell Watson has described as “fragments of art which stand for Art in general.” This is the ultimate iteration of “art for art’s sake.” In Chauncey’s analysis, a studied interest in fashion, art, and décor was part of what differentiated the emerging, middle-class “queer” from the gender inverted “fairy,” which was still the dominant form of homosexual subjectivity among working-class men. Both Huysmans’ À rebours and Van Vechten’s Peter Whiffle (1922), whose title character resembles des Esseintes, are filled with “exquisitely described fabrics, flowers, furnishings, books, jewels, and perfumes.” Van Vechten, in choosing a name for his title character, must have been alluding to the foppish Captain Whiffle in Tobias Smollett’s 1749 novel The Adventures of Roderick Random, described by G. S. Rousseau as possibly “the first authentic description of the enduring male homosexual stereotype in modern culture.” The character of the over-dressed, preening fop had previously been associated with effeminacy. Smollett’s Whiffle found himself accused of “carrying on a correspondence with his surgeon not fit to be named.” Both novels contained detailed descriptions of the characters’ dress, which are similar in their choices of color, fabric, and jewelry. By consciously participating in a tradition of coded vocabulary in familiar contexts, both writers transformed objects with no overt homoerotic content into an unmistakably gay ensemble.
Thomas H. Wirth, in his critical introduction to Nugent’s selected works, Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance, writes that Nugent’s career began “squarely in what might be characterized as the tradition of perfumed decadence.” Nugent, especially in “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” uses the coded vocabulary of Huysmans, Van Vechten, and the European æsthetes. Alex, the story’s main character, smokes out of an ivory cigarette holder “inlaid with red jade and green.” He reads Wilde, Freud, and Bocaccio, and attends Gurdjieff meetings. In his languorous reveries, he blows smoke and dreams:
he would like to live in a large white palace … to wear a long black cape … very full and lined with vermillion … to have many cushions and to lie there among them … talking to his friends … lie there in a yellow silk shirt and black velvet trousers … like music-review artists talking and pouring strange liquors from curiously beautiful bottles … bottles with long slender necks …
The ellipses are original and part of the modernist style that Benjamin Brawley criticized in his omnibus critique of the “Negro Literary Renaissance” published in a 1927 issue of The Southern Workman. What Brawley never explicitly mentions is the story’s homosexual content. He sees the problems of the New Negro Harlem Renaissance as resulting from a new sense of “freedom” following World War I, which gave rise to “latent impulses” and “suppressed desires” and “romanticism.” But his coded vocabulary is decidedly homophobic. His solution is a return to the study of Tennyson, whose years of study of Greek and Latin authors offer a shining example to New Negro writers. The astute gay reader may detect an unintended but amusing irony in Brawley’s advice to young writers. Perhaps if Nugent had spent his evenings reading Virgil instead of Oscar Wilde, he would have cast his homoerotic story in the tropes of the Classical eclogue instead of fin-de-siècle decadence—Alexis and Corydon instead of Alex and Beauty (characters in “Smoke…”)?
While Nugent’s imagery and symbolism in “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” position him squarely in the tradition of fin-de-siècle decadence, his modernist prose style distinguishes him from Van Vechten and his European predecessors. Van Vechten’s vague homoerotic symbolism in Peter Whiffle is pure effete æstheticism:
His room on East Broadway had been painted ivory-white. On the walls hung three or four pictures, one of Marsden Hartley’s mountain series, a Chinese juggler in water colour by Charles Demuth. … There were lovely desks and tables, Adam and Louis XIV and François I, a chaise longue, banked with striated taffeta cushions, purple bowls filled with spiked, blue flowers, Bergamo and Oushak rugs, and books bound in gay Florentine wall-papers.
Moreover, Nugent’s frank depiction of a homosexual encounter fully exposes a homoerotic sensibility only hinted at by Van Vechten. Alex leaves a party at four in the morning and hears footsteps approaching. He “liked the sound of the approaching man’s footsteps” and wished they could speak, “but strangers don’t speak at four o’clock in the morning.” The stranger asks, in Spanish, for a light—a classic pick-up line that would have been recognized immediately by his gay readers. The stranger follows Alex to his apartment:
Alex turned in his doorway … up the stairs and the stranger waited for him to light the room … no need for words … they had always known each other ……… as they undressed by the blue dawn … Alex knew he had never seen a more perfect being … his body was all symmetry and music … and Alex called him Beauty … long they lay … blowing smoke and exchanging thoughts … and Alex swallowed with difficulty … he felt a glow of tremor … and they talked and … slept …
The language is not explicit by modern standards, but a few details serve to create a full and realistic scene of a crepuscular erotic encounter. The carefully placed ellipses suggest what the words leave to the imagination, especially the long ellipsis before the characters undress and the break between “talked” and “slept.”
The decadent influence in the writings of Richard Bruce Nugent and Wallace Thurman took place in a broader context of cultural exchange between the gay worlds of Harlem and Greenwich Village in the decade following the end of World War I. By the early 20th century, New York was already what George Chauncey described as the site of “an organized, multilayered, and self-conscious gay subculture, with its own meeting places, language, folklore, and moral codes.” The twin loci of this emergent subculture were Greenwich Village and Harlem. Chauncey continues: “If the Village was considered the city’s most infamous gay neighborhood by outsiders, many gay men themselves regarded Harlem as the most exciting center of gay life.” It was evident to contemporary black chroniclers of Harlem social life that the gay influence there was a white, European import with roots in fin-de-siècle decadence. The connection between European decadent writers and local behavior is implicit in the punning allusion to Oscar Wilde in an item in the Baltimore Afro-America about a Seventh Avenue café in 1930: “Sunday after noon was its opening and we saw erotic, neuretics [sic], perverts, inverts and other types of abnormalities, cavorting with wild and Wilde abandon.”
Several historians of the Harlem Renaissance have discussed the extensive cultural exchange that took place between Harlem and lower Manhattan in the early decades of the 20th century. Nathan Huggins (1971) discusses the popular fantasy of uninhibited sexuality historically associated with Harlem in the minds of white visitors:
Afro-Americans and Harlem could serve a new kind of white psychological need. … Men who sensed that they were slaves to moral codes, that they were cramped, and confined by guilt-producing norms which threatened to make them emotional cripples, found Harlem a tonic and a release. Harlem Negroes’ lives appeared immediate and honest. Everything they did—their music, their art, their dance—uncoiled deep inner tensions. Harlem seemed a cultural enclave that had magically survived the psychic fetters of Puritanism.
George Hutchinson locates this psychological phenomenon in a broader social context. Interest in black sexuality and the sexualized social spaces of Harlem was part of a larger social project to emancipate the body from Puritanism and Victorianism in which black artists of the Harlem Renaissance participated with whites as twin inheritors of the legacy of Walt Whitman. Through this lens, it is easier to see the cultural exchange that took place between gays and African Americans in the shared social spaces of Harlem as a transaction in which both parties participated.
Many whites traveled to Harlem to hear jazz and blues music performed. Some gay men used jazz and blues at private house parties to recreate the atmosphere of Harlem speakeasies—but this was a distinct cultural practice, according to Kevin Mumford. The common use of jazz, argues Mumford, evinces a “circulation and exchange of cultural forms” between blacks and gays. Blues lyrics are another point of intersection. In “Foolish Man Blues,” the singer wakes up to find her man “in a sissy’s arms” and ends with the complaint that “a sissy shook that thing and took my man from me.” “Sissy Man Blues,” recorded by several blues artists including Kokomo Arnold, Pinewood Tom, George Noble, and Connie McLean’s Rhythm Boys, famously contains the lyric “Lord if you can’t send me no woman, please send me some sissy man.” According to Eric Garber, gays and lesbians were a noted presence at the rent parties and buffet flats where they would have heard these songs performed.
While black gay writers of the Harlem Renaissance were absorbing the decadent style of their white contemporaries, white gays were looking to Harlem for both erotic release and affinity in a common heritage of oppression. In Blair Niles’ 1931 novel Strange Brother, Mark Thornton is a white gay man living in a settlement house in Harlem and working as an art teacher. In one scene in the novel, his friend June Thornton is visiting his room and finds, next to a volume of Walt Whitman, a copy of The New Negro. Mark reads to her from Countee Cullen’s poem “Heritage”: “Thus I lie, and find no peace/ Night or day, no slight release/ From the intermitten [sic]beat/ Made by cruel padded feet/ Walking through my body’s street.” The narrator continues: “Mark could not go on, for the tears which filled his eyes and his voice. And June realized again how he always identified himself with the outcasts of the earth. The negro had suffered and that bound Mark to him.” The racialization of Mark’s sexuality is comparable to the sexualization of race that was part of the cultural exchange between the worlds of Lower Manhattan and Harlem. Interestingly, Kevin Mumford reports that Strange Brother, in addition to being one of the most widely read gay-themed books of its day, was placed in the “colored section” in many rental libraries along with other homosexual novels. In Mumford’s analysis, this placement “suggests the extent to which the borders between black and homosexual geographical spaces were blurred by clandestine crossings … searching for a way to classify Strange Brother, the proprietors ‘racialized’ the homosexual text.”
One of the great party scenes in 20th-century American literature is the grocery party at Niggeratti Manor in Thurman’s Infants of the Spring. At the height of the bacchanalia, Thurman writes: “Whites and blacks clung passionately together as if trying to effect a permanent merger. Liquor, jazz music, and close physical contact had achieved what decades of propaganda had advocated with little success.” It is here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, that the conflicting agendas of self-expression and race advocacy merge and are obliterated. It is clear from Thurman’s tragicomic depiction of Paul Arbian’s suicide that he could be as critical of the decadence among his contemporaries as he was of the propagandists and nativists of the old guard. If Dr. Parkes has failed to convince his protégés to turn to native sources (whatever that could mean), Paul Arbian has also failed to create a magnum opus from the leavings of Oscar Wilde and Huysmans that would survive his own suicide. While historians debate the success of the Harlem Renaissance in creating an enduring African-American art capable of “rehabilitating the race in world esteem,” the imperatives of an emerging gay subculture, in which Harlem played a central role, succeeded in forming an alliance based on mutual need.
The importance of a gay revisioning of the Harlem renaissance is clear. Even while Richard Bruce Nugent was providing a gay-positive voice for researchers of the movement in the 1970’s and 80’s, his contemporaries were still decrying the era’s decadent influences. The poet, critic, and folklorist Sterling Brown declared in a 1974 interview:
I have no relationship to any Harlem renaissance. When they [the writers and artists of that era]were down there flirting with Carl van Vechten, I was down south talking to Big Boy [a principal informant in Brown’s lifelong study of folklore]. One of the most conceited things I can say is I am proud that I have never shaken that rascal’s hand. … He corrupted the Harlem Renaissance … he was a voyeur. He was looking at these Negroes and they were acting the fools for him.
Removed as we are from the last vestiges of decadent sensibility, perhaps we can now begin to read the gay writers of the Harlem Renaissance as neither exponents of a foreign influence, nor New Negro propagandists, but as artists struggling with the double consciousness of blackness and gayness for a form of artistic self-expression that combined both identities without being “about” either.
Michael S. Miller is a writer and scholar based in New York City.
