Feb 27, 2004  |  By: Liz Highleyman  | COMMENTS     

WHO WAS LANGSTON HUGHES?

Acknowledged as one of the all-time great American poets, Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a flourishing of African American arts and culture in the 1920s. While many gay, lesbian, and bisexual people were prominent in that movement, Hughes’ sexuality remains shrouded in mystery.

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on Feb. 1,1902 in Joplin, Mo. His parents divorced when he was young; his father left for Mexico, while his mother moved around seeking work.

Hughes spent much of his youth in Lawrence, Kan., with his grandmother, whose first husband had participated in abolitionist John Brown’s raid of the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. Hughes subsequently moved with his mother to Illinois and, later, Ohio.

Soon after he graduated from high school, Hughes’ first published poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” appeared in Crisis, the NAACP magazine edited by W.E.B. Dubois, a black scholar and author. With money from his father, Hughes entered Columbia University in 1921 to study engineering, but he left after a year and immersed himself in the burgeoning scene in Harlem. He supported himself with odd jobs and traveled widely abroad, working as a steward on a freighter.

During his years in Harlem, Hughes was friends with many gay and bisexual men, including his mentor, Howard University professor Alain Locke, and Locke’s other protégés: fellow poets Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, and Richard Bruce Nugent.

Locke was known both for helping link young black artists with wealthy white patrons, and for aggressively pursuing those he favored. For a time, Locke’s circle lived together in a rooming house dubbed “Niggerati Manor,” which developed a reputation for its wild parties.

Hughes also maintained a long-term friendship with a man some 20 years his senior, Carl Van Vechten, an openly gay white writer and devotee of Negro culture.

While working as a busboy at a Washington, D.C., hotel in 1925, Hughes slipped three of his poems to a customer — well-known white poet Vachel Lindsay, who went on to promote Hughes’ work and introduce him to publishers.

Later, Hughes would benefit from the patronage of Charlotte Mason, a wealthy, older white woman. But after the publication of his first novel in 1930, he rebelled against her control and thereafter supported himself as a writer.

Although open about his politics, Hughes was always circumspect about his private life. While he and Van Vechten corresponded for nearly 40 years, until the latter’s death, even in their personal letters (published in 2001) Hughes did not overtly discuss his sexual orientation or speak of romantic relationships.

Yet several of Hughes’ poems, such as “Young Sailor” and “Waterfront Streets,” can be read as homoerotic, and “Cafe: 3 a.m.” describes an early morning scene in a gay club: “Detectives from the vice squad/with weary sadistic eyes/spotting fairies.”

African-American studies professor Emily Bernard notes, “there has been a consistent attempt to ignore or at least downplay [Hughes’] homosexuality … his icon status among the African American community is contingent on his heterosexuality.”

But black gay men have been equally eager to embrace Hughes as one of their own. A 1998 film by Isaac Julien, “Looking for Langston,” explored what has often been left out of official histories. Sadly, Hughes’ estate did not allow his poetry to be used in the film.

Nevertheless, as the late black gay poet Essex Hemphill said, “the silence surrounding black gay and lesbian lives is being meticulously dismantled. Every closet is coming down … those closets are ancestral burial sites that we rightfully claim and exhume.”