Gay Bohemian Of The Harlem Renaissance

"I've always been called flamboyant," admits Bruce Nugent, the last living figure * involved with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s."There weren't many black bohemians, I gather , at that time."

Out of the Renaissance came such literary talents as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, to name a few. A significant number of them were gay or lesbian. Nugent was the most openly homosexual of any of them.

Nugent, himself a writer and artist, wore his bohemianism and homosexuality as a badge of honor. He became quite conspicuous because he" didn't wear socks." And because he had no permanent address, surviving on financial help from friends.

His homosexuality caused him little disapproval from the Harlem community. His own attitude was that he "thought everybody was in the 'life.'" Especially if he found them physically attractive. Nugent went about Harlem with the belief that "If you can't take me the way I am, it's your problem. It's certainly not mine." Being a bohemian, he asserts, will "probably keep me alive another 79 years."

A native of Washington, D.C., Richard Bruce Nugent came to New York around 1925. It was at that time that he met and became friends with Langston Hughes. Writes Nugent: "He was a made-to-order Hero for me. At 23 he ...had done...all the things young men dream of but never quite get done--worked on ships, gone to exotic places, known known people, written poetry that had appeared in print--everything."

It was not long before Nugent himself wrote a short story--prose-poem, as one modern-day critic labels it--that is considered the first one that depicts black homosexuality. In 1926, the year it appeared in Fire!!, a short-lived black literary journal, it shocked readers, particularly members of the black bourgeoisie.

Looking back on it nearly 60 years later, Nugent can't see what all the fuss was about. Certainly the story, by today's standards, is very mild in its bedroom scene. People shunned Nugent but for only a day or two.

The story, "Smoke, Lillies, and Jade," is written throughout  with ellipses. As a staffer at Fire!!, Nugent, with his story, used the elliptical approach because he "wanted people to think" as they read each word, each phrase, each sentence. At present, he is at work on a book he describes as being "pornographic in content."

Nugent knew he was gay from an early age. In fact, his father, who died when Nugent was in his early teens, suspected him. He recalls the day when "we were playing checkers and I kept winning games. My father said to me, 'It's time for me to die when you can beat me in checkers.' We would be playing checkers and he'd say 'Never do anything you'd be ashamed of and never be ashamed of anything you do.' " That was his father's way of telling him he knew instinctually that his son was gay.

And even though he and Langston Hughes were close friends, the rumor that Hughes was gay was not apparent to Nugent. "My personal feelings about Langston is that he was asexual. I had a big argument with [Hughes biographer] Faith Berry about that. I said to her: 'How do you know?'" Whether or not, Hughes and Zell Ingram, an artist and traveling companion, were sleeping together, as is hinted at in Berry's book, is something Nugent considers "unimportant to me. I know it was unimportant to Langston what people thought about them."

Now a resident of Hoboken, N.J., across the Hudson River from Manhattan, Nugent, a septuagenarian, still has an eye for the boys. But, he readily admits, with a chuckle,  "They don't have an eye for me. I have to wait for those peculiar people who like older men. They are few and far between."

That doesn't seem to bother him particularly. After all, when he was a young man "I missed many a streetcar I was waiting for but another one always came along. Sometimes crowded."

One of those "streetcars" was Philander Thomas, "Truly named," says Nugent. "Philander was very much a playboy. He brought people together. That's what he liked to do." In other words, a matchmaker? "Not a matchmaker in that sense, but bedmates. [People who came to Harlem did so] to vent their pleasures. Harlem was the place to be. Everybody thought they could and Philander saw to it that they did. He was quite a man, quite a funny man. I liked his random freedom. Very few people have it. I had it."

(The above passages are from an early draft of the manuscript I sent to Joseph Beam for his groundbreaking anthology, In the Life. This draft was written on June 17, 1985. I sent it to Joe so he could see my progress on the profile of Nugent.)

*Note: I was unaware at the time that another Harlem Renaissance writer, Dorothy West, was still alive.