Black Nostalgia: Poetry, Ethnicity, and Homoeroticism in Looking for Langston and Brother to Brother

Abstract

One of the most prominent and exciting issues in black gay nostalgia is the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement of the late 1910s, the 1920s, and the early 1930s identified with major black poets, writers, and artists, e.g. Langston Hughes, Richard Bruce Nugent, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas, and the art quarterly Fire!! in Harlem in New York. The homosexuality of several of the Harlem Renaissance members is now generally known and is even occasionally mentioned in scholarly studies, but rarely has it been examined in depth. “In fact,” as Henry Louis Gates Jr. notes, “it is astonishing that so many prominent participants in the [Harlem] Renaissance were reportedly gay, lesbian, or bisexual. The movement that enabled outsider Negro artists to emerge as a group for the first time,” he adds, “was also the movement that enabled gay and lesbian artists to express their sexuality with a greater degree of freedom than at any other period in American History” (xi).