My Interview With Richard Bruce Nugent

The following is from the transcript of my telephone interview in 1985 with the Harlem Renaissance writer and artist Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987).* He was also known as Bruce Nugent. Parts of the interview were used for an article I wrote about Nugent and the Harlem Renaissance for Joseph Beam's In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology.

Charles Michael Smith: It was hinted that [the poet Countee] Cullen and [Harold] Jackman [a schoolteacher] were lovers. It's hinted at in everything.

Bruce Nugent: You see, there was no such thing as a closet, particularly then [the 1920s]. It's just that nobody spoke about it. They didn't speak about quote heterosexual unquote relationships either. But people kind of knew. You don't get on a rooftop and shout "I slept with my wife last night" either.

CMS: You were considered the most flamboyant then.

BN: I've always been flamboyant. There weren't many black bohemians, I gather, at the time. I didn't wear socks I guess because I didn't have them sometimes. Sometimes because I didn't feel like it. Like today, I don't have on any socks. When I want to or when I think about it, I put on socks.

[He told me he was "very fond of the name Michael," my middle name.]

["I almost find it difficult to become friends with people who call me Richard."]

["I dabbled in everything," e.g. poetry, painting. "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?' 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."]

[Wrote the gay historian Eric Garber: "...Nugent dabbled successfully in painting, drawing, poetry, and dancing. He was self-consciously avant-garde and often had no permanent address. Preferring to drift from place to place. Nugent spent much of his time drawing erotic, often phallic, drawings." (The Advocate, May 13, 1982.)]

["I thought everybody was in the life" if he thought they were attractive. He was involved in a three-way fuck with Philander Thomas, who was "classically good-looking. By classically I mean that in Africa he would have been a  classically beautiful person. What they didn't know then was that Africans frequently had features like that, aquiline, Caucasian features. He was quite, quite beautiful. Philander didn't do anything. [He was] very much a playboy. He brought people together. That's what he liked to do. Not a matchmaker in that sense, but bedmates. [People who came to Harlem did so] to vent their pleasures and Harlem was the place to be and everybody thought they could, and Philander saw to it that they did. 

CMS: Did Philander have a sense of humor?

BN: Oh, yes [said with pleasure in his voice]. He was quite a man, quite a funny man. I loved Philander. I liked his random freedom. Real freedom. Very few people have it. I had it.

CMS: Do you know where Philander Thomas came from?

BN: I know very little about anybody's background. Apparently that's a failing of mine.

CMS: Did Philander 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 when people made their money any way they could. [Nugent said Philander Thomas was "truly named."]

CMS: Was he an actor?

BN: Oh, yes.

CMS: How did you meet him?

BN: I met him in Porgy [a play based on the novel by DuBose Heyward. The play became the basis for Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin and his brother Ira]. He was much more outgoing than I.

CMS: What did you do to amuse yourself?

BN: Go to shows, go to parties.

CMS: How did gay men meet then?

BN: I'm always kind of thrown by that question because it seems to me people just meet people. Like it is now. I understand that there were 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.

["If I had a place of my own, I would much rather be the host than the guest. That's still true." He goes to parties, but "They're not my favorite form of entertainment." "I've never been one to gravitate towards gay bars, gay restaurants, gay this, gay that. Any more than I've wanted to go to black this, black that. I go to people bars.]

CMS: Was Langston Hughes a gay man?

BN: I have strange feelings about Langston as well as I knew him. And it has been said that except for [writer] Arna Bontemps, I was Langston's best friend. Certainly, I knew him longest. My personal feelings about Langston is that he was asexual. I had a big argument with Faith [Berry, a Hughes biographer] after that. She implied that he was homosexual. I said to her, "How do you know that?" As long as I've known him, I didn't know that. He had a longstanding friendship with a boy named Zell Ingram. There were people who felt that Zell and he were lovers. I don't know whether they were or not [sleeping together]. A lot of those kinds of things weren't important to me. I know it was unimportant to Langston what people thought about them.

CMS: Was Zell gay?

BN: I don't know.

CMS: What about traveling?

BN: I love Italy. I go whenever I can, which is very seldom. I used to go every summer. There are caste differences in Italy. People are divided from each other in Italy.

[He still has an eye for the boys? "Of course I do. My only objection is they don't have the eye for me (laughs). I have to wait for those peculiar people who like older men. They are very few and far between."]

[His father "knew I was going to be gay." "One day 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.' And he'd say, 'Never do anything you'd be ashamed of and never be ashamed of anything you do'."]

[He got married in 1953; 17 years (length of marriage); his wife died of cancer; "My love [for her] wasn't a physical love."]

[He was part of the staff of the short-lived magazine Fire!! as well as Harlem.]

CMS: You wrote "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade" for Fire!! It is considered the first short story to deal with black homosexuality.

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 an exclusively gay man. At the time you wrote the story, a lot of people were scandalized by it.

BN: He called the 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: Why so many ellipses in "Smoke, Lilies, 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 sometime with the proper dots.

CMS: You did it deliberately to shock the middle-class people.

BN: Wally [Thurman] and I thought that the magazine would get bigger 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 was bannable were a story about streetwalkers or prostitutes and about gay people, homosexuality.

CMS: Thurman was a gay man himself and he 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, George Schuyler, who was more brilliant than he.

The Blacker the Berry [Thurman's novel] 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.

CMS: He was writing about himself.

BN: He was ambivalent about his 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 he 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: His novel, Infants of the Spring, was autobiographical?

BN: That was almost all autobiographical. I think he was more successful in that [novel].

CMS: You say your marriage was not a physical love.

BN: We were very much in love with each other. I spent two years trying to prevent her from marrying me because she was definitely a heterosexual woman and a very beautiful one. Men were after her all the time. I told her [I was gay] but I suppose she had that dream that makes them think they can change me. Gayness is just a phase, an adolescent phase, you outgrow it. [No children were produced from the marriage.] Anybody, people who saw us together at that time never would doubt why we married. We were so much in love. Taxicab drivers would stop [and say] "Were you flagging a cab?" We'd say, "No!!" So, he said, "Where are you going, I'll take you. I've never seen people so much in love."

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. 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. Mother befriended him. 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 [the mixed-race British composer Samuel] Coleridge-Taylor came to America. No one could play his music. 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 it [his music] for Mother and 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.

I came from a middle-class Washington family. My mother studied to be a schoolteacher. She never taught. My father was a Pullman porter. It was very respected; one of the few ways to make money. At that time [his parents] were pillars of society in Washington, which meant fair [in complexion], quote good hair, all the other bullshit. As a matter of fact, it was because of all that crap that I left Washington.

CMS: Why did you move to Hoboken [in New Jersey]?

BN: I couldn't afford to live in New York. [He has lived in Hoboken for seven or eight years.] I have a habit of living wherever I happen to be.

CMS: What do you do now in your spare time?

BN: I still write and draw. I get Social Security and brunches on the goodwill of my friends.

Nugent spoke at a gathering of the members of Black and White Men Together/New York. He told them, "If you don't have the courage of your convictions, nobody is going to be able to give it to you. If you don't have enough love to share, you're not going to get it. You can't love anybody else if you don't yourself because what are you loving from? I've always felt like this. This is probably what makes me a bohemian. It's probably going to keep me alive another seventy-some years. If you can't take me the way I am, it's your problem. It's certainly not mine."

*Three artworks by Nugent, including a self-portrait, are on display at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in a show called "The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism." It closes on July 28, 2024.

Harlem Renaissance Art Comes To The Met

If there were such a thing as a time machine, I would gladly get in it and travel to the 1920s, to my favorite historical period, the Harlem Renaissance.

It would be a thrill to brush shoulders with the likes of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and sundry other writers, musicians, painters, and sculptors. Since that's not possible, the next best thing would be to visit the upcoming exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, slated to run next year from February 25 to July 28. It will be called "The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism."

According to an article in the Arts section of the New York Times ("Met Announces Harlem Renaissance Show," August 23, 2023), the show will be "New York's first major survey in nearly 40 years dedicated to one of the most influential artistic movements to have originated in the United States."

The Met will display artworks by African-American artists that will be on loan from historically black colleges and universities such as Clark Atlanta University and Howard University.

Included in the exhibition will be photographs by another Harlem Renaissance notable, James Van Der Zee.

I'm excited about this event. God willing, I don't plan to miss it.

How I Became An "In The Life" Contributor

How I came to write about the Harlem Renaissance writer and artist Richard Bruce Nugent for Joseph Beam's 1986 anthology, In the Life, is an interesting story.

Joe, who worked at a gay bookstore in Philadelphia called Giovanni's Room, wrote me a fan letter and sent it in care of the New York Native, a weekly gay paper that I wrote for in a freelance capacity in the early eighties.

The bookstore carried the Native which Joe told me he only read if it had an article in it by me. He was admittedly hungry for articles about other black gay men of which there was not that much, particularly in the gay press.

A short time later, Joe asked me to write an article about Bruce Nugent and gave me his phone number in Hoboken, New Jersey. Looking back, Joe probably got the number from Tom Wirth, Nugent's friend and literary executor, who reissued the controversial journal, Fire!!, that Nugent, Langston Hughes, and others put out in the 1920s.

Up to that point, I knew nothing about Nugent. But I took on the assignment and wrote an article in which I tried to put Nugent's life and career within a larger context of what was happening in Harlem and elsewhere, artistically and otherwise.

Years after In the Life came out, I discovered that I'd  been in error when I said that Bruce Nugent was the last living member of the Harlem Renaissance. He wasn't. Dorothy West, also a writer, was still alive when I interviewed him.

Zora Neale Hurston And Ida B. Wells, A Wishful Literary Conversation

February is Black History Month. So if I could go back in time, I would want to be transported to the Harlem Renaissance and sit in a room with novelist/anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and journalist/anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, two of my favorite African-American historical figures.

Both Hurston and Wells were contemporaries and probably knew about each other. For me it would be a joy to just listen to them exchange ideas and experiences, especially about the American South. Not only would their conversation be eye-opening, it would be intellectually stimulating.

A Harlem Renaissance Novel Becomes A Musical

One of the many books from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s that I need to read is George Schuyler's Black No More. It is described as a satirical novel in which, writes historian David Levering Lewis in When Harlem Was in Vogue (Vintage Books, 1982), "Dr. Junius Crookman, an Afro-American scientist, invents a process--'by electrical nutrition and glandular control'--which turns dark skin white and crinkly hair straight."

The book was recently adapted into an off-Broadway musical, complete with choreography by the renowned Bill T. Jones.

Schuyler, a black conservative, and his white wife, were the parents of a biracial child, Philippa, who became a piano prodigy. Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker magazine wrote two lengthy profiles of Philippa in the 1940s when she was still a child. In 1967, covering the Vietnam War as a photojournalist, she was killed in a helicopter crash.

For a time there was talk of turning her life story into a feature-length movie, with singer Alicia Keys, herself a piano prodigy, portraying Philippa.

Remembering Archivist Thomas Wirth (1938-2014)

I recently read on science fiction writer Samuel Delany's Facebook page that Thomas Wirth, who was an independent scholar, book collector, and publisher, had died. His death occurred in October 2014, at the age of 76.

The first and only time I ever saw Wirth in person was in 1990 when he did a talk at the now-defunct Home to Harlem gift shop on 125th Street in Harlem. It was run by Kevin  McGruder, who later became an author as well as a historian and professor.

Wirth's talk focused on Fire!!, a short-lived magazine that Richard Bruce Nugent collaborated on with fellow writers Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman in 1926, and which Wirth reprinted. (Wirth became friends with Nugent and later was appointed the executor of Nugent's literary estate.)

I mentioned this bit of Harlem Renaissance history in my article about Nugent for In the Life, the 1986 anthology edited by Joseph Beam.

Wirth, it should be noted, is responsible for editing a collection of Nugent's writings called Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance (Duke University Press, 2002) and for the publication of Gentleman Jigger, Nugent's novel, written during the days of the Harlem Renaissance (Da Capo Press, 2008).

From Wirth's online obituary, I learned that he "selected historian Kevin McGruder to assume ownership and administration of The Fire!! Press."

In the seven years since Wirth's death, I haven't seen or heard anything about publications from this press. Let's hope there will be very soon.

Hunting A Serial Killer In 1920s Harlem

I love the Harlem Renaissance and I also love mystery novels. When those two loves are combined, I am overjoyed.

So you can imagine how I felt when I read in Publishers Weekly (April 19, 2021) that a mystery novel set in Harlem in 1926 was scheduled for publication in June.

In a sidebar interview, Nekesa Afia, author of Dead Dead Girls: A Harlem Renaissance Mystery (Berkley Prime Crime), stated that she "love[s] the Harlem Renaissance" because "it was this period of growth, and art, and music, and fashion."

Afia continued: "That post-WWI generation had such brilliance and creativity, and they were so alive and fun even though they had just gone through a war, and the world was a mess."

Dead Dead Girls is Afia's debut novel, the first in a series. Its protagonist, Louise Lloyd, a showgirl and waitress--who is black and lesbian--helps the police track down a serial killer of black girls.

The accompanying review notes that Afia "couples tender relationships with strong senses of era and place." (Will Harlem Renaissance figures like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay make a cameo appearance?)

If Dead Dead Girls is as interesting as it sounds, I can't wait to read it. And I will definitely be looking forward to other books in this new series.

The Irresistible Zora Neale Hurston

 I love the following quote from Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), a Harlem Renaissance writer who was also an anthropologist and a folklore scholar. The quote was published in the July 2009 issue of The Sun, a North Carolina-based culture magazine, in its "Sunbeams" section, a roundup of quotations by prominent people.

"Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?"

Isabel Wilkerson, the author of  two nonfiction books, The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste, was asked by The New York Times Book Review (August 2, 2020) which three writers, living or dead, she would invite to a literary dinner party. She named Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston.

I've read the biographies of all three writers and read some of their work. I wouldn't mind being present at a dinner party that included them. No doubt such a gathering of powerful intellects would be a mind and life altering experience. Hurston would especially be a joy with her down home humor, playful inventiveness (she coined the term "niggerati," to describe the Harlem literary set of the 1920s), and knowledge of African-American folklore.

How indeed could anyone with any sense deny themselves Zora Neale Hurston's splendid company?

Harlem Renaissance Redux

What I would like to see is a true second Harlem Renaissance, not the one they say exists today which is really more about real estate and gentrification than anything cultural.

This new movement would rival, maybe surpass, what went on in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, out of which came such artistic luminaries as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, et al. It would involve every branch of the arts to the nth degree, making use of existing as well as newly created cultural venues.

In my fantasy world, my apartment, which has a large living room, would be at the center of this activity a la A'Lelia Walker's Dark Tower salon on West 136th Street. (Walker, the daughter of the black cosmetics entrepreneur Madame C.J. Walker, was a supporter of the arts during the Harlem Renaissance.)

As a result, Harlem Week, instead of being a month-long series of events in August as it is now, would be year round.

Harlem, Then And Now

Speakeasies, drag balls, the Cotton Club, literary salons, Alexander Gumby's bookstore, hot jazz. All of these activities and venues and much, much more were a significant part of Harlem's social scene in the 1920s. This historical period is now known as the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance, or the Harlem Awakening, as one scholar in Negro Digest magazine preferred to call it, was an intellectual and cultural movement--involving literature, art, music, and the theatre--out of which emerged such notables as writers Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay; musicians Duke Ellington and Ethel Waters; and artist Aaron Douglas, to name a few.

What's happening in Harlem today has been called by real estate developers, "the second Harlem Renaissance." Actually this "second renaissance," if it can be called that, is really about real estate, gentrification, and displacement of longtime residents.

The attempt to rename Harlem by calling it SoHa (an acronym for South Harlem) to make it more trendy and attractive to gentrifiers is designed to erase the glorious history of an area called the Capital of Black America, an area that has contributed a lot culturally to America as well as the world. Thankfully there are those in Harlem who are rebelling against the renaming of this world-famous community.

Cleve Jones's Former Roommate

When I read gay activist Cleve Jones's riveting memoir,When We Rise: My Life in the Movement, I was surprised to learn that he and historian Eric Garber were roommates in San Francisco at one time.

In 1982, at New York's Hunter College, I attended Garber's slide lecture on the gay and lesbian aspect of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. I later interviewed him for the New York Native, the now-defunct gay weekly newspaper.

Garber's research inspired me to do further reading on the gays and lesbians of the Harlem Renaissance like the artist/poet/novelist Richard Bruce Nugent, who I wrote about for Joseph Beam's 1986 anthology, In the Life.

Note: See my 1983 New York City News interview with Eric Garber that I posted on this blog on April 20, 2013.

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).

Exotic Negroes At The Cotton Club

In 1923, Owney Madden, a powerful and feared New York gangster with ties to "Dutch" Schultz, opened the Cotton Club on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. It served two functions: first, Madden needed a place to sell the beer he illegally made for his Prohibition-era customers. And second, he wanted to take advantage of the newfound white interest in black artistic achievement.

In the days before the Great Depression, writes black playwright Loften Mitchell, "Harlem was seen by outsiders as a showplace, a center of nightlife, a place for discovering 'exotic Negroes' and new art." It was the time of the Harlem Renaissance, when black writers and artists such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston were, in the words of Hughes, "express[ing] our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame." It was also the time when whites from downtown and abroad came to Harlem to hobnob with struggling young black writers and artists in the salon of A'Lelia Walker, the daughter of Madame C.J. Walker, the black woman who became a millionaire by creating a hair-straightening process for blacks.

Carl Van Vechten, a white journalist and critic, is considered the primary catalyst for this influx of whites to Harlem. "As an influential critic, he helped launch the careers of numerous talented blacks," writes historian  Eric Garber of San Francisco, who's working on a study of the gay scene in Harlem in the 1920s. "But he is most notorious for his 1926 novel, naively titled 'Nigger Heaven', [which] told the story of the tragic love between a young black writer and his Harlem girlfriend and was intended to impart a sympathetic understanding of  Harlem and its people. Some of Van Vechten's black friends appreciated it, but the majority of Harlem was outraged."

"The white reading public," continues Garber, "had the opposite reaction, and the novel quickly became a best seller. After reading the novel, many whites hurried to Harlem to see the real thing."

And many of them hurried to the Cotton Club, which catered exclusively to a white clientele. "The low class of whites didn't come to the Cotton Club," recalls 81-year-old Joe Attles, a black former nightclub singer and dancer, "because they couldn't pay the money. All the young Vanderbilts and the This-and-Thats, they came to Harlem. They were young  and they had money. The rest of them who came to Harlem were gangsters. They came to visit the other gangs."

No blacks were allowed as customers--"unless you were a celebrity, like [dancer Bill]Bojangles [Robinson]," writes Langston Hughes in his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea. "So Harlem Negroes did not like the Cotton Club and never appreciated its Jim Crow policy in the very heart of their dark community"--a community that by 1930 was 200,000 strong.

The only other blacks allowed in the club were those hired as entertainers, waiters, or kitchen help. But despite its discriminatory admission policy, the Cotton Club launched many show business careers. Included among its alumni are Lena Horne (who in 1933, at the age of 16, joined the chorus line), Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, and the dancing Nicholas Brothers.

This is an excerpt from an article that was published in the San Francisco Chronicle (via syndication by the Los Angeles Times) on December 23, 1984.

Georgia & A'Lelia: A Reminiscence

The following is from my interview in 1985 with Richard Bruce Nugent, one of the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. In this portion of the interview, Nugent discusses two major female figures of  the Harlem Renaissance: Georgia Douglas Johnson in Washington, D.C. and A'Lelia Walker in New York's Harlem.

Charles Michael Smith: How would you describe Georgia Douglas Johnson and her salon?
Bruce Nugent: I think that [Georgia Douglas Johnson] was the most unique one because it was almost like a throwback to ancient days when salon's were the property of women. Women always had salons. Everybody had passed through Georgia Douglas Johnson's hands at one time or another. It was at Georgia Douglas Johnson that I met Langston Hughes in Washington. Nobody went there to meet writers. You went there to meet people.
CMS: And A'Lelia Walker's salon?
BN:  The difference between A'Lelia and Georgia was as different as chalk and cheese. Georgia entertained in her home writers, artists. She was just a remarkable woman, terrifically remarkable. She was a poet herself. Her book is called Autumn Leaves. She encouraged more black people in her home.
A'Lelia Walker opened her Dark Tower, named after a column Countee Cullen wrote in [the magazine] Opportunity. She opened her Dark Tower so that the Negro artists had a place to congregate and eat, cheaply or inexpensively. It didn't turn out quite that way, first of all.
CMS: No cheap food then at A'Lelia's?
BN: At A'Lelia's? There was nothing [for] ten cents at A'Lelia's. We couldn't eat, drink at A'Lelia's. Who drank coffee anyhow? You drank coffee so you could sit around and talk and meet other people.
[Georgia] did not serve food. If she had, it would not have been for sale. There was, I suppose, some tea and coffee, like in your own home. She had a pleasant home. She was interested in art and artists. She was a poet herself. A'Lelia Walker was a striver and a striver in Washington [society] got short shrift. A'Lelia Walker had a lot to overcome. You see she had her [dark] color, her hair, and her antecedents to overcome socially. Her mother [the cosmetics tycoon Madame C. J. Walker] after all [had been] a washerwoman, my God.
[Georgia Douglas Johnson] was a nice brown, nice pale brown. She was from Atlanta, Georgia. She had the same kind of social setup [there] that Washington and Philadelphia and all the places had at the time. Family, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Her husband was acceptable because he was the first black recorder of deeds in Washington.
There was nothing scandalous about her. The ones whose names are talked about are those who were outrageous, like  [writer]Wally [Thurman] and me. The nonconformists. Georgia was very much a conformist. She was just a poet, a very good poet. She had an open house where people would come to talk. This was before the so-called Negro Renaissance.

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.

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.

Gay Bohemian Of The Harlem Renaissance

Richard Bruce Nugent, who was born in Washington, D.C., died in 1987. During the Harlem Renaissance, he frequented Georgia Douglas Johnson's soirees where he met Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, W.E.B. DuBois, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, among others. Nugent was the only writer of the Harlem Renaissance period to deal with homosexuality explicitly in his work, as in his short story, "Smoke, Lillies, and Jade," published in Fire!! Born of middle class parents in 1906, Nugent's adopted lifestyle made him conspicuous because he lacked a permanent address. He wore his bohemianism and homosexuality like a badge of honor.

This brief obituary of Richard Bruce Nugent was originally published in Black/Out magazine (Fall 1988) and was adapted from my article about him that was published in In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (Alyson, 1986).

Rendezvous At Lucky's

Male couples were such a common sight at Lucky's Rendezvous, a popular nightclub in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s, that people didn't bother to look twice at them. This liberal attitude put Lucky's Rendezvous ahead of its time and attracted nightlifers to its friendly, relaxing environment.

The narrow, smoky nightclub on St. Nicholas Avenue, at 148th Street, counted among its clientele those of the lavender persuasion, as well as artists and intellectuals, black and white. Celebrities such as Henry Fonda, Gene Kelly, Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, and the black gay composer Billy Strayhorn were either frequent or occasional drop-ins. According to Strayhorn's biographer, David Hajdu, Lucky's had "a piano that Strayhorn would likely end up playing by dawn." As a result, Strayhorn, one of the nightclub's frequent patrons, developed a following there.

Lucky's, which had no cover or minimum charges, and was described by Ebony magazine as "Harlem's strangest nightclub," because of the wide assortment of people it drew, was opened in December 1942, one year after the United States entered World War II, by jazz composer/pianist/bandleader Charles Luckyeth "Lucky" Roberts and his two silent partners. After an altercation with his partners, he became sole owner of the club in 1946. [Note: My aunt, Victoria Watkins (1917-1997) worked at Lucky's as a waitress.]

The garish red and white facade of Lucky's wasn't considered eye-catching or trendy (the club, writes Hajdu, "was located partway below street level"). Its interior decoration consisted of plain furnishings, a discolored ceiling, and uncomfortable chairs. Despite all of that, its bar was always crowded, especially Thursday through Sunday, when Harlem's cafe society set congregated. The reason Lucky's Rendezvous was popular, despite the above-mentioned shortcomings, explained a Columbia University psychologist to Ebony in 1951, was the fact that it "made [customers] feel at home. There was no hostility shown towards any of them."

A version of this article was published in NYQ magazine, April 19, 1992.

Fairy Tales in Harlem

What's happening in Harlem has been labeled by real estate developers as "the second Harlem Renaissance." But it is a misnomer; the first Harlem Renaissance , in the 1920s and 1930s, was an artistic movement out of which came such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen. That has nothing to do with the present situation, which is about land and buildings, not art.
If there is a second renaissance in the making, Casa Frela, a new art gallery located at 47 West 119th Street in the Mount Morris Park Historic District, is helping to spearhead it. Casa Frela, which means "your house should be a walk in the park" (containing one word from Spanish and one from the language of the Yaqui Indians of Mexico) is in a brownstone designed by the Gilded Age architect Stanford White. Lawrence Rodriguez, an openly gay man of Mexican descent (both parents were Yaquis) owns the four-story building as well as the gallery in a neighborhood where many gay and lesbian artists reside.
When he moved to Harlem more than three years ago, the Fashion Institute of Technology graduate's intention was to buy a building, not start a gallery. But when he showed the work of an artist who lived down the street, that exhibit put the gallery on the map.
Last year, he showed the work of three lesbian artists--Allicette Torres, D.C. Gable, and Kelly Beeman--in an annual show called "Rainbows Over Harlem." The works included a range of female images, some that were erotic, some non-erotic.
This year he is showing the work of six gay male artists--Brian H. Crede, Anthony Gonzales, Joel Handorff, Seth Ruggles Hiller, Tai Lin, and Branden Charles Wallace--in a show called "Fairy Tales: Personal Legend, Urban Myth, Gay Exhibition." The show, which runs until July 13, "tells individual narrative stories through drawings, paintings, and sculpture," says Rodriguez , in a press release.
Rodriguez who receives a 30 percent commission for each artwork sold says that his gallery can sell anything that's priced under three thousand dollars. But because of his location and the state of the economy, Rodriguez does not deal with anything priced above that. He explained that galleries on 57th Street and in Chelsea were more established and that Harlem is an up and coming art venue. Plus, the other galleries were more centrally located in Manhattan, making them easier to get to from the jobs of art lovers.
Rodriguez, despite being openly gay, does not plan to exclusively handle gay-oriented artworks; he envisions Casa Frela as a place where a lot of Latino artists can showcase their work.
Another vision of his is to open a smaller gallery in Houston, Texas to be called Casita. He recently went there to look over a property to see if he could afford it.
Whenever Rodriguez opens a show, which requires months of preparation, it turns into a major learning experience for him. Or as he terms it, "Cliff's Notes version of an artist's work."
For Rodriguez, the foremost goal of Casa Frela is to act as "a vibrant magnet for the art enthusiast."