🏳️🌈🏺Renaissance Harlem Legacy
🏳️🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️🌈
Queer Hands Lifted the Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was often fetishized and may have seemed “queer (odd)” to white literary critics—and behind the scenes, they were right.
But some were fans, like gay white critic Carl Van Vechten, who helped nationalize Harlem’s brilliance in his problematic but popular 1926 novel about the neighborhood—now infamous for its title and voyeuristic tone. He at least used his privilege to help amplify—but never contain—queer Black voices.
Van Vechten promoted Alain Locke, the closeted philosopher whose anthology The New Negro became the movement’s foundation. Locke carefully curated a vision, mentoring queer artists who lived at the intersections of race, gender, and desire, making their work approachable.
Together, they championed Countee Cullen, a poet who laced classical verse with same-sex longing and coded heartbreak. Though briefly married, Cullen gave voice to the emotional interior of black queer life in a form palatable to elite white audiences—subversively slipping past their defenses.
Where Cullen sparked, Richard Bruce Nugent set the page on fire—literally—in the “vulgar” zine Fire!! There, unlike Locke’s collection, Nugent published openly queer stories like Smoke, Lilies and Jade while living boldly in glitter and eyeliner.
Fire!! drew scorn from white readers and Black leaders alike. Claude McKay, author of the homoerotic Home to Harlem, was also sidelined for his queer and socialist themes—while Black culture, especially jazz, was widely appropriated, even as its artists were erased.
But above them all stood Langston Hughes, Harlem’s poet laureate. Guarded in life but achingly intimate in verse, he mapped the soul of Black America—and quietly, his own queer desire.
From a private love poem to Lucien Happersberger:
“Love me with your whole body, / Not with your mouth only.”
And in Young Sailor, one of his most tender:
“He came out of the sea, a boy, / and I saw in his eyes the sun… / The young sailor was the beginning of new days to me.”
Beneath the clouds of centuries of pain, there were always rainbows in the Harlem lights—even if many tried to hide them.
