Was the Harlem Renaissance Gay?

A look back at the gay, the bi-curious and the LGBT-friendly denizens of the literary movement.

1 of 13

The Wedding of Countee Cullen and Nina Yolande Du Bois

University of Massachusetts

In 1928, Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen married Nina Yolande Du Bois -- daughter of W.E.B. -- in a lavish wedding. The marriage didn't last: Cullen sailed to Paris with his best man, Harold Jackman, three months after the event. The play Knock Me a Kiss dramatizes this story.

Captions by Linda Villarosa
2 of 13

Countee Cullen

Library of Congress

Cullen is widely -- though not universally -- believed to have been gay. He was awarded more major literary prizes than any other black writer of the 1920s and was the second black person to win a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
3 of 13

W.E.B. Du Bois

Library of Congress

W.E.B. Du Bois fired his friend and protégé Augustus Dill, the business manager of the NAACP publication the Crisis, after Dill was arrested for a homosexual encounter in 1928. But Du Bois later regretted it. "I had no concept of homosexuality," Du Bois wrote in his autobiography. He also blamed the breakup of his daughter Nina Yolande's marriage on her difficult personality -- rather than his son-in-law's sexuality.
4 of 13

A'Lelia Walker

A'Lelia Bundles/Madam Walker Family Archives

Known as the Joy Goddess of the Harlem Renaissance, Walker, daughter of Madam C.J., threw lavish and legendary parties, which included gay men and lesbians of all colors. A patron of the New Negro Movement, she established a literary salon, the Dark Tower, in 1928.
5 of 13

Gladys Bentley

Florida International University African Diaspora Identities

Bentley, a cross-dressing blues singer, headlined the Clam House. Notorious and notoriously popular, the club on 133rd Street was part of Harlem's thriving nightlife in the '20s and '30s.
6 of 13

Claude McKay

Library of Congress

The Jamaican-born writer has been described as "gay," "bisexual" and "sexually ambiguous." The author of 1929's Home to Harlem, considered to be the first commercially successful novel by a black author, didn't write about gay themes and chose not to discuss his own sexuality.
7 of 13

Wallace Thurman

Library of Congress

Thurman launched the literary journal Fire!! in 1926 and wrote the novels The Blacker the Berry and Infants of the Spring. Earlier, he was arrested for having sex with a man but was later married to a woman for six months.
8 of 13

Alain Locke

Library of Congress

Locke, history's first black Rhodes scholar, is often called the Father of the Harlem Renaissance. In the 2001 essay " 'Outing' Alain L. Locke," biographer Leonard Harris accused some scholars of obscuring Locke's gay life, leading to the false idea that "Locke's sexuality was irrelevant to his intellectual and personal history."
9 of 13

Richard Bruce Nugent

Thomas Wirth

Nugent, known as the "perfumed orchid of the New Negro Movement," didn't hide his sexuality. He contributed the blatantly homoerotic short story "Smoke, Lilies and Jade" to the journal Fire!! He also insisted that at the time, "Nobody was in the closet. There wasn't any closet."
10 of 13

Angelina Weld Grimké

Library of Congress

The poet and playwright wrote Rachel, a play that dramatized the effects of lynching on a black family. Her overtly same-sex longings can be found in correspondence with her friend Mamie Burrill. Grimké signed a letter to her friend, "Your passionate lover."
11 of 13

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Library of Congress

The author of the first published collection of short stories by an African-American woman, The Goddess of St. Rocque and Other Stories (1899), Dunbar-Nelson was married to the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Her diary revealed that she had sexual relationships with fellow members of the black women's club network.
12 of 13

Langston Hughes

Library of Congress

The sexuality of the best-known poet of the Renaissance remains unclear. Some said he was "asexual," while others described him as "sexually ambiguous" and "mysterious."
13 of 13

'Brother to Brother' Poster

Brother to Brother

The 2004 film Brother to Brother linked present-day Harlem to its Renaissance past through the eyes of a young black man struggling with his sexuality. The movie, which won a Special Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, stars Anthony Mackie. The actor Daniel Sunjata plays Langston Hughes.