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.

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.

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.

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).

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.