In the 1920s and early 1930s, a Black artistic and cultural revolution dubbed the Harlem Renaissance blossomed in New York City. Through art, music, literature and poetry, the movement invigorated racial pride while striving to redefine—and elevate—what it meant to be Black in America.
Its milieu of pride and possibility also fostered a thriving queer subculture, replete with cross-dressing blues singers, extravagant drag balls and literary and artistic salons. In an oft-quoted 1993 essay “The Black Man’s Burden,” Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote of the Harlem Renaissance that it was “surely as gay as it was Black.”
During the first decades of the 20th century, more than a million Black Americans took part in the Great Migration, fleeing the Deep South in search of jobs and freedom from Jim Crow segregation and racial violence. The largest influx came to New York City’s Harlem district, which became an African American cultural mecca. There, writers, artists, musicians and stage performers collectively created an unprecedented celebration of Black heritage, turning folklore, spirituals and other aspects of the Black experience into art forms independent of white traditions and standards.
The new sounds of jazz and blues pulsing through Harlem drove an exuberant, anything-goes nightlife. Black and white, queer and straight alike shook off the dour restrictions of Prohibition at legendary music-and-dance spots like the Savoy Ballroom and the Cotton Club, and in Harlem's hundreds of speakeasies.
In a clear signal that Harlem’s creative class sought to torch old ideas, younger African American writers published in 1926 the single-issue literary magazine FIRE!! In it, their writing explored interracial relationships, homosexuality, color prejudice, promiscuity and other controversial topics.
“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” wrote poet Langston Hughes, one of FIRE!!’s founders, in his landmark essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”
That freedom of self-expression extended, in varying degrees, to gender and sexual identity. A small handful of Harlem’s most prominent creatives and intellectuals of the era were openly queer. Others pursued same-sex relationships in private, fearful of arrest or having their lives, careers and reputations ruined. In 1929, just days after the stock market crash, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, launched a public campaign against "sexual perversion” and other “moral degeneracy,” which he decried as a threat to traditional Black American families.
Nonetheless, Harlem’s queer community found safe spaces to express themselves—and to thrive—away from the scrutiny of police, the anti-vice commission and social conservatives. They partied and danced in cavernous dance halls, smoky, dark cabarets like the Hot Cha Club and speakeasies. At the queer haunt Clam House, female blues singers like the tuxedo-clad lesbian Gladys Bentley belted bawdy lyrics and flirted with women in the audience. Blues great Bessie Smith, who had love affairs with both men and women, occasionally crooned about the “mannish-acting women and a lisping, swishing, womanish-acting man.”
The Savoy Ballroom sometimes hosted drag balls and even stayed open til 5 a.m. to help queer revelers avoid late-night homophobic attacks on the street. Thousands regularly turned out for the spectacular annual masquerade and drag ball in Harlem's cavernous Hamilton Lodge, to watch hundreds of men in stunning, elaborate outfits parade beneath the colossal crystal chandelier.
Gatherings also happened in more private spaces, according to James F. Wilson, a City University of New York theater and English professor, and author of Bulldaggers, Pansies and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance. Gay men mingled, smoked “reefer” and drank bathtub gin at Gumby’s Book Studio, the preeminent literary and artistic salon of the era. Presided over by Alex Gumby, a charismatic, fashion-forward and openly gay Black history archivist, the studio attracted many famed Harlem Renaissance writers and intellectuals. A’Lelia Walker, daughter of Madame C.J. Walker, America’s first Black female millionaire, hosted scores of lesbians, gay men and celebrities at lavish soirees in her apartment on 136th Street. Less rarified venues included raucous rent parties and after-hours “buffet flats” in private apartments, where alcohol, gambling and all manner of sexual partners could often be found.
Here are six writers, performers and artists who played a part in the queer scenes of the Harlem Renaissance.
Wallace Thurman
After arriving in Harlem from Los Angeles in 1925, Wallace Thurman—editor, publisher, playwright, poet and novelist—edited a couple of journals before launching the boundary-pushing literary magazine FIRE!!. Contributors included poet Langston Hughes, anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston, out gay artist and playwright Bruce Nugent and others. The stories, poems, essays and drawings it featured tackled a wide range of taboo topics relating to race and sexuality.
Thurman’s groundbreaking first novel, The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), explored the nuances of skin-color bias within the Black community. Author of the play "Harlem," staged on Broadway the same year, he became the first Black manuscript reader at a mainstream publishing house.
Shortly after arriving in Harlem, Thurman was arrested for having sex with a man and publicly denied being gay. His marriage to a woman lasted six months; his wife sought a divorce on the grounds that he was a homosexual and refused to admit it.
Ethel Waters
After touring the Black Vaudeville circuit, Ethel Waters moved to Harlem in 1919 and became an entertainment icon. As a blues singer, she recorded hits like “Stormy Weather” and her version of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”
She was the first Black woman to integrate theater on Broadway when she starred in Irving Berlin's 1933 musical "As Thousands Cheer." She became the first African American to star on her own television show—the 1939 variety special “The Ethel Waters Show”—and the second to be nominated for an Academy Award.
Her three marriages ended in divorce, and in the 1920s, Waters, who frequented Harlem’s lesbian circles, had a romantic relationship with dancer Ethel Williams. Known as “The Two Ethels,” they lived together in Harlem. Later in life, she announced that she had rededicated her life to Jesus Christ and toured with evangelist Billy Graham on his crusades.
Countee Cullen
Already an award-winning poet in high school, Countee Cullen expanded his literary reputation during his college years when his work appeared in Harper’s, Crisis, Poetry and other renowned periodicals. When he entered Harvard University to pursue a master’s degree in English, he published Color, the collection of poems that established Cullen as a leading young artist of the Harlem Renaissance.
His sonnet “From the Dark Tower,” published in FIRE!!, decried racial injustice, stating it would not last forever and would ultimately make black people stronger and more resilient. “We shall not always plant while others reap…"
Cullen’s very public 1928 wedding to the daughter of racial justice leader W.E.B. Du Bois—Harlem’s premiere social event of the era—ended shortly after the honeymoon when Cullen confessed his love for men to his new wife. With Cullen conflicted about his sexuality, his mentor, philosopher and writer Alain Locke, steered Cullen to gay-affirming material of the day.
Cullen had relationships with Black and white men, a fact reflected in some of his work. He dedicated his poem “Tableau” to a white ex-lover:
“Locked arm in arm they cross the way, The black boy and the white,
The golden splendor of the day, The sable pride of night.
From lowered blinds the dark folk stare, And here the fair folk talk,
Indignant that these two should dare in unison to walk.”
Alain Locke
Alain Locke, a prolific writer, philosopher and educator, was considered the “dean” of the Harlem Renaissance. The first African American selected as a Rhodes Scholar in 1907, he obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University in 1918. His 1926 anthology of African American writers, The New Negro (which included his own work), became a cultural and artistic cornerstone of the Harlem Renaissance.
In Locke’s New Negro philosophy, race transcended heredity, the limitations of the past and the politics of civil rights. Instead, he saw race (and the arts) as an arena for individual and collective empowerment.
Locke, who taught for decades at Howard University, was secretive about being gay. But in his circle, he encouraged and supported other gay African American writers in the Harlem Renaissance and exposed them to pioneering and gay-affirming literature about sex and sexuality. Some, like Langston Hughes, were the object of his unrequited affections.
Gladys Bentley
Clad in her signature white tuxedo and top hat, Gladys Bentley belted out songs with bold, risqué lyrics to audiences in Harry Hansberry’s Clam House. Her performances at the queer haunt on West 133rd Street also drew straight crowds and celebrities to see her play piano and sing popular songs rewritten with double entendres.
Reacting to her show, writer Langston Hughes called Bentley “an amazing exhibition of musical energy—a large, dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard—a perfect piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm.”
The most “out” of the women who popularized blues music in the 1920s, Bentley married a white woman in a civil ceremony in 1930. Later in life, she married a man and published “I Am a Woman Again” in Ebony magazine in 1952, stating that hormone shots cured her lesbianism. Critics note that the story was published during the McCarthyism era, when gay and lesbian people were being targeted for investigation under a climate that linked homosexuality with communism.
Richard Bruce Nugent
Bruce Nugent was one of the few African American writers who declared himself out publicly. Along with some other leading new Black literary figures of the time, he criticized Black writers who appeased white society to achieve racial equality.
His stream-of-consciousness short story “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” published in FIRE!!, described a homoerotic and interracial encounter. Also a visual artist, Nugent published illustrations in FIRE!! and exhibited paintings along with other Black artists of the time.
Later in life, he married Grace Marr and they lived together for 17 years until her death in 1969. His work resurfaced in gay anthologies in the 1980s. The 2004 film Brother to Brother conveyed Nugent’s recollections about the Black gay artists of the Harlem Rennaissance.
“People did what they wanted to do with whom they wanted to do it,” Nugent said shortly before his death in 1987 about writing openly about homosexuality during the Harlem Renaissance. “You didn’t get on the rooftops and shout… You didn’t. You just did what you wanted to do.”
