Eight important glbtq contributors to the Harlem Renaissance:
Row 1: (left to right) Countee Cullen and Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Row 2: Angelina Weld Grimké and Langston Hughes
Row 3: Alain Locke and Claude McKay
Row 4: Wallace Thurman and Carl Van Vechten
Images of Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Carl Van Vechten are details from photographs created by Carl Van Vechten and appear courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Hughes, Langston (1902-1967)
“Langston Hughes, whose literary legacy is enormous and varied, was closeted, but homosexuality was an important influence on his literary imagination, and many of his poems may be read as gay texts… One of the greatest ironies in the life of the people’s poet was his own understandable silence regarding the oppression of gays. As a gay man, Hughes lived that secret life silently in the confines of a very narrow, but well-constructed closet–one that still shelters him today.” ¹– Alden Reimonenq
Alden Reimonenq is Interim Dean of the College of Humanities at California State University, Northridge. He taught at St. Mary’s College of California for seventeen years. He is working on a biographical and critical study of Countee Cullen. His poetry and reviews have appeared in James White Review and in the anthology Milking Black Bull: 12 Black Gay Poets. His book of poetry Hoodoo Headrag was published in 2001.
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