In the early 20th century, racial inequality, or “The Race Problem” as it was often called, was the dominant concern for Black Americans in the United States, and perhaps a dominant concern for the entire country. At this time, Black Americans were migrating from the south to other parts of the country, and setting down roots in northern cities like New York. The Harlem neighborhood of New York City became a major center for Black life and in America, and the world at large. The cultural renaissance that was birthed from this time and place is seen as a high point for Black awakening and identity.
What is often ignored about this time period is the real and necessary contributions of women and queer individuals to this cultural awakening. This is perhaps because many of these women and queer people focused their work not solely on “The Race Problem”, but also matters of sexuality and queer desires. The reality of the Harlem renaissance is that it was not just an awakening for Black identity, but it is also an essential point of history for the modern understanding of female sexuality and queer identity.
We began this class by examining the popular literature on race that came out of this time period, most notably “The Crisis” magazine, the official magazine of the NAACP edited by W.E.B. DuBois, and “Opportunity”, the journal by The National Urban League, edited by Charles S. Johnson. We also examined “Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro”, an issue of the Survey Graphic magazine dedicated to Harlem life in the 1920s, edited by Alain Locke.In “Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro” Locke explores the efforts made by Black Americans living in Harlem to separate themselves from the enslaved past and harmful stereotypes that totally misrepresent Blackness. But the New Negro was more than just a darker version of their white counterpart. The New Negroes in Harlem also consisted of a vibrant community of queer individuals like Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Alain Locke himself, who in many cases led the charge for a modern idea of Blackness, while also being aware of their own marginalized identity separate from, but compounded with their Blackness. Women writers and thinkers of the Harlem renaissance like Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston and Jessie Fauset also set out to create a more accurate and freer idea of what it meant to be a Black woman.
In her 2001 essay “Histories and Heresies: Engendering the Harlem Renaissance”, Cheryl A. Wall delves into how and why the contributions of women writers and thinkers of the period were forgotten. She focuses much of the essay on Jessie Fauset, a female writer of the Harlem Renaissance who was an editor of The Crisis magazine and author of four fiction novels, but who’s work is often forgotten.
“When the Harlem Renaissance was rediscovered by historians in the 1970s, Locke’s vision shaped the formal record of the past. Jessie Fauset merited little more than the equivalent of a footnote.” (Wall, 63).
It wasn’t under feminist scholars like Sidney Janet Kaplan came along that the works of women like Fauset were appreciated and treated with the same level of importance as works by male writers.
“Engendering the Harlem Renaissance means undoing perimeters that exclude women and their writing” (Wall 68) writes Wall. “It means mapping the journeys of black women writers, as they intersect with the journeys of other black women cultural workers- visual artists, for example, as well as blues singers and performers whose art has been valued for its non- conformity. It means recognizing how black women writers in all genres make unconventional use of conventional literary forms.” (Wall, 68)
“Fire!!” magazine, the one-issue literary magazine headed by Wallace Thurman was a rare example of queer and women writers taking center stage during the Harlem Renaissance. It is an important document as evidence of queer and women contributions to the period. Thurman and the magazine’s other contributors represented the “younger” generation of Negro writers, standing in opposition to the more respectable and heteronormative The Crisis and Opportunity magazines. In “Desires Made Manifest: The Queer Modernism of Wallace Thurman’s Fire!!”, writer Matthew N. Hannah discusses the significance of Fire!!.
“Thurman envisioned Fire!! to be a repudiation of, to his mind, the stodgy political sociology of the Negro press, especially the immensely popular Crisis founded by Du Bois in 1909 and Opportunity founded by Charles S. Johnson in 1923.” (Hannah, 164).
The magazine sought to depict the true reality of Harlem life, where queer activity was ever-present, even if not openly spoken of.
“As a literary magazine, Fire!! represented real Harlem life, and the sexualities operating within it, rather than the idealistic artwork that so often appeared in other magazines dedicated to racial uplift.” (Hannnah, 171)
Richard Bruce Nugent, writer of “Smoke, Lillies and Jade” a short story appearing in Fire!! Magazine is one of the key figures to explore when thinking about queerness in the Harlem Renaissance. “Smoke Lillies and Jade” is thought to be the first piece of Black queer literature. Dorothea Lobbermann details of the importance of Nugent as a queer figure of the Harlem Renaissance in “Richard Bruce Nugent and the Queer memory of Harlem”. Lobberman posits that Nugent and figures like him may have been lost to time largely because the modern understanding of queerness greatly differs from the understanding of it in the 1920s.
“Homosexuality has always been a dirty word,” he said in the 1980s. “But . . . homosexuality, the practice of it, was not a dirty thing.”37 This differ- entiation between language and practice informs the homosexual discourse in the 1920s, a discourse that pathologizes same-sex practices and desires. Before Stonewall, homosexuality was a practice: “We didn’t call it . . . we did it,” as Nugent said in one interview.” (Lobberman, 230)
This may explain why Nugent and other queer figures of the Harlem renaissance are not often added to the canon of Queer literature and history that we have today. Though we now understand the instance of same-sex romance and sexual encounters as gayness or queerness, in the early 1920s, people who would now be known as gay were simply people who engaged in same sex acts. Despite the complications of seeing Nugent as a gay figure (he identified as non-gay and bisexual at times in his life, but later identified as gay), it is impossible to deny the importance of his work to queer history, given it’s positioning within the Harlem renaissance.
“But what sustains Nugent as an important entry point to a reading of Queer Harlem is his insistence on the diverse, intersectional character of “identities,” performances, and (sexual) acts, as well as pleasure, as guiding principles for understanding raced and gendered, eroticized and sexualized human encounters.” (Lobbermann, 235)
The importance of women and queer people to the Harlem renaissance may have been set aside or forgotten due to the emphasis on inequality between men, which is a result of the patriarchy. The leaders who spoke out against racial inequality remained overwhelmingly men throughout the 20th century, and there have been, and continue to be, periods of time were heteronormativity is placed on a pedestal for Black Americans to aspire to. Now, nearly 100 years after the peak of the Harlem Renaissance, we finally have the tools necessary to easily access all of the documents and work left behind by the women and queer people of the Harlem renaissance, and the perspective to put this work into appropriate context.
The work left behind by the women and queer people from the Harlem Renaissance show us how there are marginalized groups within marginalized groups. They are proof of the concept of intersectionality, the idea of inhabiting multiple identifies at once. The work of these individuals shows that it also possible to be many things in one body, and to be passionate about and fight for all parts of yourself to be seen.
Works Cited