Gay Harlem Of The 1920s: An Interview With Historian Eric Garber

Out of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, which lasted about ten years, came such creative notables as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer. For Hughes and others, the Harlem Renaissance was a time of race-consciousness and pride.

"Many of the key figures who  made the [Harlem] renaissance possible were lesbians and gay men," says Eric Garber, a gay San Francisco-based historian. Among these gay men were such luminaries as writer and critic Wallace Thurman, scholar Alain Leroy Locke, and poet Claude McKay. Garber describes Wallace Thurman as a man who was "a productive character" but one who "was very dark-skinned and had real contradictions around it because he received some prejudice around it. He would hate it and then two days later, he'd love it and hating it and hating light skins. Same way with his homosexuality." Another important gay figure at the time was Carl Van Vechten, the white novelist, journalist, and critic, who wrote the novel called Nigger Heaven (1926), "which became a bestseller for the white public and got a lot of white people interested in Harlem in a way that I'm sure he had not intended. I think it paved the way for a great deal more exploitation than certainly  he had intended. I don't think he intended his book to be taken the way it was taken. I think that was total naivete on his part. Foolishness almost. I don't think Nigger Heaven works at all. I found it rather offensive personally even though I like most of his other stuff." However, says Garber, ""some of his black peers at the time [such as the late James Weldon Johnson and Bruce Nugent, both writers] found nothing wrong with it." On the other hand, the black intellectual "[W.E.B.] Du Bois hated it."

Garber points out that "in the second page of the book, he [Van Vechten] explains that nigger heaven is the balcony of the theatre, the only place blacks were allowed to go to."

Van Vechten, says the blond, blue-eyed 28-year-old historian, "had a real fascination and love for Harlem and blacks in general" and expressed that love by focusing on "a lot of public attention of a great many black writers and artists," in his capacity as a journalist.

Among the places blacks and whites , artists, writers, socialites, and gays and lesbians could rub elbows was at A'Lelia Walker's Harlem apartment or her Hudson River estate. A'Lelia was the daughter of the black millionaire Madame C. J. Walker, whose wealth came from her hair straightening process. A'Lelia used the money her mother left her to "throw huge parties. I don't know if she was gay, but I do know she loved lesbians and gay men. She loved having them around her all the time. She loved the artists and writers."

Alexander Gumby's salon was another gathering place for creative lesbians and gay men. Gumby, who came to Harlem in1909 and was a butler turned postal clerk, was "very entranced," says Garber, "with the theatrical world and the artistic world and set up a salon basically to have parties. He also collected books." (That explains why his salon was called Gumby's Bookstore.)

As far as gay bars are concerned, "My understanding is there were no real gay bars. There were bars that sort of catered to gays but not in the sense that we know gay bars now.
"They [gay bars] started in really large numbers in the '40s definitely. I'm not sure about in Harlem, but nationwide it would seem like prior to the '40s, there were some places where you could go to pick people up."

"There were some gay places [that would have drag shows] that were very tourist-oriented where straight people would come to look at gays. There were also lesbian bars that had male impersonators. Prior to the '20s, at one point, female impersonators and male impersonators were considered quite respectable. No one had any idea that there was a sexual connotation to it. The ones that were just [for] socializing tended to be tourist places. They were listed in tourist guides. They were quasi-gay bars. But not like what we know today when there were only gay people there and [where you can] socialize and party and be yourself and let your hair down."

What was Harlem's reaction to homosexuality? Was there any homophobia? "It doesn't appear to be that way," replies Garber."Particularly among the artists and writers, there doesn't appear to have been censure at all. [Writer and artist] Bruce Nugent wrote "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade" [a 1926 short story about black male homosexuality] and he received a little cold shoulder for a couple of weeks. But he was openly homosexual throughout the period and went to the drag balls with [writer and NAACP executive] Walter White and his wife. For him there was no problem. There might have been for the very flamboyant female impersonators. Just thinking about the words that were used within the black community for homosexual like 'sissy' and 'people with freakish ways' and stuff so much different than words in the white community, which were things like 'deviate,' 'pervert,' and 'degenerate.' It would seem as though the attitude at least was less condemning. Certainly not open-armed embracing but not quite as condemnatory."

This is an edited excerpt from an article that was originally published in the now-defunct gay publication the New York City News (June 22, 1983).

An Interview With Bruce Nugent

The following is from a handwritten transcript of my interview with Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987) one of the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. The interview was the basis for the article I wrote about  Bruce Nugent for Joe Beam's anthology In the Life (Alyson, 1986).

Charles Michael Smith: Do you know where Philander Thomas [a gay matchmaker and playboy] came from?
Bruce Nugent: He was in Porgy and Bess [a play by Heyward DuBose]. I know very little about almost anybody's background. Apparently that's a failing of mine.
CMS: Did he live in Harlem?
BN: Oh yes.
CMS: He didn't work for a living. He more or less put people together.
BN: He put together homosexual people. He liked to do it and I suppose it was a time [1920s]when people made their money anyway they could.
CMS: He was an actor.
BN: Oh yes.
CMS: How did you meet him?
BN: I met him in Porgy. He was much more outgoing than I.
CMS: What did you do then to amuse yourself?
BN: Go to shows, go to parties.
CMS: How did gay men meet back then?
BN: I'm always kind of thrown by that question because it seemed to me people just meet people. Like it is now.
I understand that there were a number of gay bars, gay places. I never patronized [them] because I was not fond of the company of gay people. I still don't enjoy their company very much. They don't have anything to talk about.
CMS: Your short story, "Smoke, Lillies, and Jade" is considered the first black gay short story.
BN: People began to say "How could you write anything so gay in  1926?" I didn't know it was gay when I wrote it.
CMS: The protagonist seemed to be bisexual. He was not exclusively a gay man. At the time you wrote the story, a lot of people were scandalized by it.
BN: He called the man beautiful and you didn't call a man beautiful and I did it. I even named one Beauty.
CMS: You were rejected for a couple of days.
BN: I don't think they rejected me, I just think they were a little shocked and scandalized.
CMS: You did it deliberately to shock the middle class people.
BN: Wally [Thurman] and I  thought that the magazine [Fire!!] would get higher sales if it was banned in Boston. So we flipped a coin to see who wrote bannable material. And the only two things we could think of that were bannable were a story about streetwalkers or prostitution and about gay people, homosexuality.
CMS: Why did you use so many ellipses in "Smoke, Lillies, and Jade"?
BN: It was my device for having people [get the impression] that I was talking with them. When you talk, you have these periods, shorter and longer periods. It wasn't originally written with three dots between everything. Now three dots, now five dots, now two dots but the printer said, "We can't be bothered with doing that. We don't have that many dots." I would still like to do it some time with the proper dots.
CMS: Thurman himself was a gay man who had a problem around that.
BN: Oh God. Everybody did.
CMS: He more so.
BN: Wally was a deeper thinker than I was. I didn't think very much. I wasn't a very cerebral person.
CMS: Was he fun to be around?
BN: We lived together. You don't think I'd live with somebody who wasn't fun to live with. Yes, Wally introduced me to so many, many, many facets, things. He was very widely read and that's all I can say about him. He was absolutely a fascinating person. And perhaps with the exception of maybe one person,[writer] George Schuyler, who was more brilliant than he.
CMS: What did you think of his novel, The Blacker the Berry?
BN: The Blacker the Berry is pretty bad. He wasn't a very good novelist. You have to be your characters when you write a novel. He tried to be a woman. [The protagonist of the novel is a black woman.]
CMS: He was writing about himself.
BN: He was ambivalent about his [dark] color. He grew up in Salt Lake City, that Mormon place.
I was from Washington, D.C.  and in Washington we didn't associate with people who were as dark as Wally. And Wally was pretty black. My description of him [in David Levering Lewis's book When Harlem Was in Vogue]: black with a sneering nose. He was very self-conscious about being black.
CMS: Was Thurman effeminate?
BN: He was not. As a matter of fact, when we were living together, people thought quote that he was the husband and I was the wife. I'm sure they thought that. I was the one who had the gay reputation. People put their own interpretation to anything.
CMS: Infants of the Spring was autobiographical.
BN: That was almost all autobiographical. I think he was more successful in that [novel].
CMS: When did you know you were gay? At age 12, 13?
BN: I discovered that I liked men long before that. Seven, eight, nine. Before I had any sexual experience at all of any kind.
CMS: Black Washington society at the time was very exclusive.
BN:There used to be a man, a Filipino. There's a strong prejudice as you probably know among American Negroes toward anything that's not American Negroes, be it African, Filipino, Puerto Rican, whatever. This boy's mother was not accepted into Washington Negro society.
At that time [his parents] were pillars of society in Washington which meant fair [skinned], quote good hair, all the other bullshit. As a matter of fact, it was because of all that crap that I left Washington.
I was very fortunate in my parents. The only word for them was that they were bohemians. My mother played piano, my father sang. Mother played by ear. She was invaluable when [composer Samuel] Coleridge-Taylor came to America. Coleridge-Taylor's music was too complicated and too much very sundry other things. I remember Taylor would come past the house and talk with Mother and he would hum [a tune] to Mother. Mother would play it. Later on she learned to read music but at the time she didn't. So when [John Philip]Sousa's band couldn't play the music, my mother accompanied them.
My mother studied to be a schoolteacher. She never taught. My father was a Pullman porter. It was [a] very respected [occupation]. One of the few ways [for a black person] to make money.
CMS: You dabbled in many things.
BN: I've never been as diverse in my abilities as people are now. I didn't know music. I was just familiar with it but I didn't know it. Popular music of the day, jazz, so-called classical music. Somebody asked me, "Do you like classical music?" I said, "What is classical music?" The first thing I said was "No. Sounds stuffy." And yet everything that was played at concerts I already knew because Mother and Father used to play it and sing it at home.