The publication of Hughes’s Weary Blues was made possible through the assistance of Carl Van Vechten, an avant-garde white gay music critic, photographer, and best-selling novelist whose forays into Harlem helped “open” the black community to other whites and, perhaps more importantly, brought national attention to African Americans such as Hughes for the first time. No stranger to controversy himself, Van Vechten published the provocatively titled Nigger Heaven (1926), a sensation in both the commercial and cultural senses. The book, which offered an “insider’s” look at black Harlem, sold out immediately, while DuBois, Locke, and Cullen took the title alone as a starting point for their objections to the work that depicts tawdry images of black life. Yet other noted African American writers like James Weldon Johnson, author of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), praised the novel in the Urban League’s Opportunity magazine, remarking that Van Vechten had “achieved the most revealing, significant and powerful novel based exclusively on Negro life yet written….”33 If Van Vechten is essentially a forgotten novelist to present-day readers, he is better remembered for his close platonic friendship with Hughes. “Your letters are so very charming, dear Langston, that I look forward to finding one every morning under the door,” Van Vechten wrote to Hughes in the first month of their lifelong correspondence that began in May 1925. “The poems [Weary Blues] came this morning and I looked them over again. Your work has such a subtle sensitiveness that it improves with every reading…. [Alfred] Knopf is lunching with me today and I shall ask him to publish them.”34 Unlike black mentors such as Alain Locke, the white Van Vechten was well-placed in New York literary circles and could therefore see his protégé’s work through to publication with no less than the prestigious Knopf company. Still, for Hughes and other African American artists of the era, Van Vechten served not merely as a conduit to white social connections, as many white patrons of the period functioned. Rather, as Emily Bernard writes in Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten (2001), “What they [black writers] saw in Van Vechten was more than a useful contact; he was a fellow champion of free expression in black arts and culture.”35
Another ardent Van Vechten supporter was Zora Neale Hurston, who remarked in his defense over the Nigger Heaven controversy, “If Carl Van Vechten were a people instead of a person, I could then say, these are my people.”36 For Hurston, like the aforementioned black male writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the New Negro mandate of black respectability was a force to be resisted, if not subverted with transgressive renderings of African American experience. Writing in the autobiographical Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), for example, she recalls the motivation in undertaking her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934): “What I wanted to tell was a story about a man, and from what I had read and heard, Negroes were supposed to write about the Race Problem. I was and am thoroughly sick of the subject. My interest lies in what makes a man or woman do such-and-so, regardless of color. It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli.”37 Indeed, Hurston’s body of work marks a point of departure in African American women’s fiction up to that time. Previously, landmark novels like Jessie Fauset’s There Is Confusion (1924) and Nella Larson’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), which also offer the first candid appraisals of black women’s sexuality in African American women’s fiction, placed primary importance on book-length considerations of racial themes such as color and “passing” among the black middle class. Instead, Hurston’s work, notably Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), which Barbara Smith described as “one of a handful of books in existence that take Black women seriously,”38 ushers in a more radical shift in black women’s fiction in which, if racial themes are downplayed, they are done so only to the extent that the impact of sexual politics on poor, often rural, black women’s lives may be addressed more forthrightly. “In Biblical times a woman had few choices. She could be an idle queen or independent and an outcast. The only proper role was that of wife,” Smith added. “In Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston questions these assumptions still in force some two thousand years later.”39
While by the 1930s considerations of gender assumption had begun to be incorporated into black women’s writings with greater prominence, poet and playwright Angelina Weld Grimké had been writing “woman-identified” literature since the early twentieth century. Born in 1880 to aristocratic biracial parents whose intellectual ancestry included the famous white abolitionists and early women’s rights advocates Sarah M. Grimké and Angelina Grimké Weld (for whom the author was named), Angelina Weld Grimké produced works that infused the family tradition of racial uplift ideology with radical social protest propaganda. Her most prominent work, the antilynching play Rachel (1916), which was the first African American work to be performed by an all-black cast of actors for white audiences, was sponsored by the NACP specifically to counter the racist depiction of blacks in D..W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation (1915). Same-sex longings, however, were reserved by Grimké for the more private form of her love poetry, much of which remains unpublished even today. Poems such as “Rosabel” (“Rose whose heart unfolds, red petaled/Prick her slow heart’s stir/Tell her white, gold, red my love is—/And for her,—for her”) and “A Mona Lisa” (“I should like to creep/Through the long brown grasses/That are your lashes”), while not explicitly lesbian, nevertheless enable the author to address romantic sentiments to a female lover in a gender-neutral voice.40 Undeniably overt homosexual sentiments, by comparison, can be found in Grimké’s correspondence with friend Mamie Burrill. An 1896 letter from Burrill to Grimké asks, “Could I just come to meet thee once more, in the old sweet way, just coming at your calling, and like an angel bending o’er you breathe into your ear, ‘I love you.’”41 While one must once again exercise caution in attributing contemporary homosexual labels to people who lived long ago, a letter from Grimké to Burrill speaks clearly of lesbian love. Asking Burrill to be her “wife,” Grimké writes, “Oh Mamie if you only knew how my heart overflows with love for you and how it yearns and pants for one glimpse of your lovely face…. Now may the Almighty father bless thee little one and keep thee safe from all harm, your passionate lover.”42
If open references to lesbianism seldom appear in the poetry and short stories of black bisexual author Alice Dunbar-Nelson, she similarly chose to record them in more discreet outlets. Dunbar-Nelson, a popular elder poet of the Harlem Renaissance and an early activist in the black women’s club movement, published her first book, Violets and Other Tales (1895), when only twenty years old and a second book, The Goddess of St. Rocque and Other Stories, just four years later. Shortly afterward, she met her first husband, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the most famous black American poet of the day, retaining his name following their separation in 1902 and his death in 1906. Although Dunbar-Nelson remarried in 1916—“a good professional union,” in the words of Akasha (Gloria) Hull, editor of Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1984)43—the author remained sexually available to women, as did any number of married black women club members, as the diary reveals. According to an August 1, 1928, entry, Dunbar-Nelson noted,
Narka [Mrs. Narka Lee-Rayford of the National Federation of Colored Women] comes to the house for “comfort.” We want to make “whoopee.” So we telephone Mrs. Petis’ home to see if Leitha Fleming is there. She has just come home. We go…. They are eating cream—Leitha, Mrs. Glass and another little soul or two…. Life is glorious. Good home made white grape wine. We really make whoopee. Leitha and Narka strike up a heavy flirtation. My nose sadly out of joint. Something after two Narka starts to drive home alone, just as Bobbo [Dunbar-Nelson’s husband] comes up. Such a glorious moonlight night….44
At the same time, Dunbar-Nelson’s diary also indicates that her affections for men were genuine, albeit conventional, rather than another manifestation of forced heterosexual conformity common to the period. Writing in 1931, she commented, “[L]ove and beautiful love h
as been mine from many men, but the great passion of four or five transcended that of other women—and what more can any woman want?”45 Dunbar-Nelson otherwise remained private in regard to her sexuality, subject to the proprieties shared by such New Negro advocates of her generation as DuBois and Locke. In the case of black women writers, especially lesbians and bisexuals, however, an added dimension of gender-specific sexual restraint came into play, as Hull importantly observed: “They were always mindful of their need to be living refutations of the sexual slurs to which Black women were subjected and, at the same time, as much as white women, were also tyrannized by the still-prevalent Victorian cult of true womanhood.”46
Challenging early-twentieth century gender identity from an overtly lesbian perspective in fiction were the first identifiably lesbian novels published in the United States. Arguably the most influential of these works was British author Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), an explicit if bleakly interpreted plea for social tolerance of homosexuals. When the book was charged with obscenity by American courts in 1929, one judge proclaimed, “The book can have no moral value since it seems to justify the right of the pervert to prey upon normal members of the community,” declaring Hall’s novel “offensive to public morals and decency.”47 Nevertheless, the work became a literary touchstone for women writers of all sexual orientations for generations. Prior to The Well of Loneliness, Sarah Orne Jewett had been publishing woman-identified fiction since 1869, most notably The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). Although her novels are not lesbian-specific, historians have made a case for Jewett’s homosexuality based on her unpublished poetry and a thirty-year intimate involvement (or “Boston Marriage,” to borrow the phrase that describes long-terms relations between upper-class nineteenth- century women) with writer Annie Fields. The novels of Djuna Barnes furthered open representations of lesbianism, principally with the self-published Ladies Almanack (1928), a satire of sapphic Paris, and the landmark novel Nightwood (1936). In spite of the author’s courage in incorporating overtly homosexual themes, Barnes did not personally identify as a lesbian, pointing out instead that she “just loved Thelma,” referring to her eight-year relationship with artist Thelma Wood. Also residing in Paris among white American lesbian expatriates was Gertrude Stein, whose Tender Buttons (1912), “Miss Furr and Miss Skeen” (1922), and the posthumously published 1903 homoerotic novel Q.E.D. (1950) gave the modernist avant-garde a decidedly lesbian voice.
In Harlem of the 1920s, however, the modernist avant-garde was showcased by no one more boldly than by the heiress A’Lelia Walker, daughter of Madam C. J. Walker, a self-made millionaire whose fortune derived from the invention of hair-straightening products. Although A’Lelia Walker was neither an artist nor intellectual (she “spent the Renaissance playing bridge,” David Levering Lewis observed dryly),48 she was known principally for her lavish gay parties at her Hudson River estate and in her Manhattan apartment, dubbed “The Dark Tower.” Her guest list regularly included royalty and visiting dignitaries, not to mention a veritable roll call of Harlem Renaissance celebrities like DuBois, Cullen, Hurston, Van Vechten, and Hughes, the last of whom remarked that Walker’s social connections “would turn any Nordic social climber green with envy.”49 Often described for her tall, striking appearance, not to mention her riding crop and jeweled turbans, Walker was provocative by nature, as when she threw a segregated dinner party where whites were served chitterlings and bootleg liquor, while blacks were seated separately in more lavish quarters and offered caviar and champagne. For Richard Bruce Nugent, however, these functions were nothing more than “a place for A’Lelia to show off her blackness to whites.”50 And while she went through four short-lived marriages, she is remembered for having been surrounded by attractive women, all of whom “were crazy about her.”51 Furthermore, it has been argued that Walker’s openness about her.”Furthermore, it has been argued that Walker’s openness to homosexuals engendered greater tolerance of lesbian and gay men by setting a progressive example for other socially prominent African Americans to follow. Still, her “funny parties,” as black lesbian Mabel Hampton called the more intimate gatherings at The Dark Tower, illustrate the extent to which the millionairess was willing to participate in Harlem’s sexual bohemia. “They were kinds of orgies. Some people had clothes on, some didn’t,” Hampton recalled years later, speaking of one evening in particular when men and women, gay and straight, black and white partied at Walker’s home. “People would hug and kiss on pillows and do anything they wanted to do. You could watch if you wanted to. Some came to watch, some came to play. You had to be cute and well-dressed to get in.”52
Performing in all-black shows at Harlem’s Garden of Joy and the Lafayette Theater as a dancer in the 1920s, Mabel Hampton was acquainted with most of the black lesbian and bisexual entertainers of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Gladys Bentley, perhaps the best-known “bulldagger” on stage during the era. Bentley, a butch woman who had left Philadelphia in 1923 to live openly in Harlem, won headlining fame as a male impersonator at The Clam House, a speakeasy popular among black lesbians and gay men. Dressed in an elegant men’s suit, top hat, and cane, the three-hundred-pound-plus star sang off-color renditions of blues standards. If Bentley’s shows shocked Harlemites, the entertainer’s off-stage behavior—such as marrying her white woman lover in a well-publicized civil union—was a public illustration that she was willing to employ lesbianism as the very foundation of her celebrity persona. Late in life, however, Bentley took great care to distance herself from her homosexual past. “For many years I lived in a personal hell,” she began apologetically in a 1952 article of redemption entitled “I Am a Woman Again,” published in Ebony magazine. “Like a great number of lost souls, I inhabited that half-shadow no-man’s land which exists between the boundaries of the two sexes…. I earned large sums of money and thrilled to recognition, still, in my secret heart, I was weeping and wounded because I was traveling the wrong road to real love and true happiness…until the miracle happened and I became a woman again.”53 Bentley’s self-described “miracle” in reality consisted of hormone therapy, faith in God, and, maybe most importantly to Ebony’s audience, marriage to a man, which she describes as the “awakening within me of the womanliness I tried to suppress.” Photographs accompanying the article depict the author at home turning back her husband’s bed and taste-testing meals she has prepared for him, while printed captions assure readers that “Miss Bentley enjoys the domestic role she has shunned for years.”54 Although her marriage was short-lived, and she confessed to remaining “haunted by the sex underworld in which I once lived,” Bentley nonetheless asked that her message be embraced as a source of hope for lesbians and gay men. “I want the world to know that those of us who have taken the unusual paths to love are not hopeless; that we can find someone in the opposite sex who can teach us love as love ought to exist.”55
In many respects, Bentley’s purported transition from lesbian nonconformist to husband-happy homemaker tellingly demonstrates the extent to which even gay-identified homosexuals in the declining years of the Harlem Renaissance felt increased pressure toward “normalcy” at any cost. Writing in his study of gay New York, George Chauncey observed, “After a decade in which gay men and a smaller number of lesbians had become highly visible in clubs, streets, newspapers, novels, and films, a powerful backlash to the Prohibition-era ‘pansy craze’ developed. The anti-gay reaction gained force in the early to mid-thirties as it became part of a more general reaction to the cultural experimentation of the Prohibition years and to the gender rearrangements of the Depression. As the onset of the Depression dashed the confidence of the 1920s, gay men and lesbians began to seem less amusing than dangerous.” 56 The federal government’s prohibition against alcohol, beginning in 1917, not only had failed to end the manufacture of liquor but had driven the drinking-life underground, creating a demiworld where lines of socially acceptable behavior regarding sex, gender, and race were unregulated and there
fore blurred. In the wake of Prohibition’s repeal in 1933, however, government agencies enforced a new series of morality-based legal codes that sought to control the consumption of alcohol, as well as the settings in which it was served. The state of New York, for example, set up the State Liquor Authority, which threatened to revoke liquor licenses from anyone serving “undesirables,” including homosexuals, prostitutes, and gamblers. Consequently, police closed hundreds of gay bars and gay-patronized establishments, while homosexual men were rounded up in tourist-friendly city centers like Times Square and dispersed to the far reaches of Greenwich Village and Harlem. By the 1930s, Prohibition advocates such as The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) were no longer needed to perform the function of safeguarding morals. Instead, the government had set itself up as both cultural arbiter and watchdog, defining acceptable parameters for sexual expression, with extreme prejudice guaranteed to those who deviated.
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