Gay Literature

By: Charles I. Nero

Source:

 The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature

Gay Literature

Gay writing was an important element of the Harlem Renaissance. Gay and bisexual men—such as Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay—were vital presences in this literary movement. Locke, a professor of philosophy, mentored some of these men and published their work in his landmark anthology The New Negro (1925), including Nugent's short story ““Sadji”,” the earliest known gay text by an African American. A year later Thurman's Fire!! (1926)—a magazine whose explicit purpose was to shock the black reading public—appeared. According to folklore, Thurman and Nugent tossed a coin to choose as a subject either homosexuality or prostitution. Thurman got prostitution and produced the story ““Cordelia, the Crude”,” while Nugent contributed the semiautobiographical ““Smoke, Lillies, and Jade”,” the most explicit homoerotic text of the Renaissance. In 1932 Thurman published Infants of the Spring, which included several gay characters. Decades later the black gay British film director Isaac Julien used several texts by these writers in his controversial film Looking for Langston (1989), an exploration of homosexuality in the Harlem Renaissance.

Most Harlem Renaissance writers were not as explicit about homosexuality as Nugent or Thurman were. Instead, homosexuality is often referred to in code. Those readers familiar with homosexual coding might detect it in poems such as ““Young Sailor”” or ““I Loved My Friend”” by Langston Hughes and others might conjecture homosexuality in the recurring pagan imagery in Cullen's poems. However, it is often difficult to detect homosexual coding because the settings in which gay life occurred in the 1920s no longer exist. For instance, the now extinct bachelor subcultures that provide the setting for McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) were sites for gay life in the 1920s and 1930s. Analyses of this novel and others by McKay have yet to consider the full significance of the homoerotic settings in which they take place.

Gay writing was even more concealed after the Harlem Renaissance ended. The economy collapsed bringing on the Great Depression, the Second World War raged, and, after the war ended, the persecution of homosexuals increased. During the Cold War, in particular, the FBI targeted homosexuals as enemies of the state and many were imprisoned, fired from jobs, or forced to hide their identities. Nevertheless, during this period Langston Hughes denounced the persecution of gays and lesbians in his poem ““Cafe 3 A.M.”,” which first appeared in the 1951 collection Montage of a Dream Deferred. Hughes's 1963 Something in Common and Other Stories also contained ““Blessed Assurance”,” his first short story with gay characters. During this post-war period Owen Dodson, a professor at Howard University, published plays, poetry, and the semiautobiographical novel Boy at the Window (1951).

James Baldwin's emergence in the 1950s as a leading writer was a watershed event for black gay writing. Shortly after emigrating to Paris, he wrote a defense of homosexuality, ““The Preservation of Innocence”” and published it in Zero (1949), a little-known Moroccan journal. He explored adolescent homosexual yearnings in the short story ““Outing”” and in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). In his next novel Baldwin took a strange course for an African American writer, and particularly for one well-known as a critic of American racism. In Giovanni's Room (1956) all the major characters were white, the setting was in Europe, and the plot concerned a bisexual love triangle. Giovanni's Room created controversy, but it earned Baldwin a major place in the gay literary tradition. He would explore gay and bisexual themes in future novels Another Country (1962), Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), and Just above My Head (1979).

Since Baldwin, black gay writing has increased significantly. The reasons for this increase are that the gay and lesbian rights movement has had some important successes: the creation of gay publishing houses, the growth of gay-owned independent bookstores, and—in the 1980s—the discovery of a reading public, not exclusively African American, interested in black gay writing. These reasons bear on two seminal works published in the 1980s. Although ideologically dissimilar, Michael J. Smith's Black Men/White Men: A Gay Anthology (1983) and Joseph Beam's In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (1986) were published by small gay presses. The fact that both were anthologies is significant. Contributors such as Essex Hemphill, Larry Duplechan, and Melvin Dixon, who would later publish with mainstream houses, gained attention in these pioneering anthologies.

The black gay anthology is also informative about how black gay writing gets published. Much of the published black gay writing comes out of grassroots community organizing. Importantly, that has enabled the establishment of a variety of black gay-owned publishing concerns. The New York City-based Other Countries writing collective released two critically praised anthologies, Other Countries Journal: Black Gay Voices (1988) and the award-winning Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS (1993). The poet and playwright Assotto Saint founded his own Galiens Press and published his poetry Stations (1989), the elegiac Wishing for Wings (1995), and also the work of others in The Road Before Us: One Hundred Gay Black Poets (1991) and Here to Dare: Ten Gay Black Poets (1992). The arrival of the personal computer and widespread use of desktop publishing also increased the proliferation of black gay writing such as ““fanzines”” and periodicals. A notable instance of a desktop publishing venture that attracted national attention is E. Lynne Harris's first novel, Invisible Life (1991), which a major press reprinted in 1994.

Despite incalculable losses due to the AIDS pandemic, black gay writing is in a healthy state. The writing exists in a variety of genres, notably poetry, short fiction, autobiography, essay, and the novel, and publishers seem eager to release works by black gay writers. Small (white) gay-owned presses such as Alyson Publications in Boston, for instance, released Essex Hemphill's anthology Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (1991) and novels by Steven Corbin (Fragments That Remain, 1993; A Hundred Days from Now, 1994), Larry Duplechan (Captain Swing, 1993), James Earl Hardy (B Boy Blues, 1994), and Canaan Parker (The Color of Trees, 1992). Still, within the last decade both mainstream and university presses published an astonishing array of black gay literature: Don Belton (Almost Midnight, 1986), Cyrus Cassells (Soul Make a Path Through Shouting, 1995), Steven Corbin (No Easy Place to Be, 1989), Samuel R. Delaney (The Motion of Light in Water, 1988; The Mad Man, 1994; Atlantis, 1995), Melvin Dixon (Trouble the Water, 1989; Vanishing Rooms, 1991), Larry Duplechan (Blackbird, 1986; Tangled Up in Blue, 1989), E. Lynn Harris (Just as I Am, 1994), Gordon Heath (Deep Are the Roots: Memoirs of a Black Expatriate, 1992), Essex Hemphill (Ceremonies, 1992), Bill T. Jones (Last Night on Earth, 1995), Randall Kenan (A Visitation of Spirits, 1989; Let the Dead Bury the Dead, 1992), and George C. Wolfe (The Colored Museum, 1987).

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