Some of the ways that we understand American gay history is through the the Stonewall Uprising as
a before and after, right? But I think before Stonewall there was this incredible moment of
gay liberation, queer liberation, Black liberation in the 20s in Harlem.
Most people remember learning about the Harlem Renaissance in school: Langston Hughes, blues,
jazz-- an explosion of artistic talent. But what we don't learn about is that Harlem was also a
thriving gay community.
So the way that Harlem became a haven for LGBT life is the way that it
became a haven for Black people from all over the world, really. It became this crossroads, right?
And a big part of this is the Great Migration which obviously meant that a lot of Black
people came came North especially to cities that are now considered Black cities like Chicago
and in Harlem in New York City. It was known at the time as the Black mecca, right? And so it was
in some ways the largest black city in the world. And it did of course include a lot of
energy and excitement, cabaret, blues, jazz, so it really was in some ways a crossroads of
all of these different artistic and musical and cultural energies. A lot of white patrons would
go to Harlem to quote-unquote "slum" because the mores were much more relaxed, and especially
during the prohibition era, a lot of these were in some ways uh you know speakeasies.
Vices flourished in Harlem because African Americans did not have the political power to be able to
demand that government keep these things out of their neighborhood, and the corruption of the
police and the judges all of that enabled gay activity as well as all kinds of other activity
to thrive in Harlem.
A lot of the reasons that a lot of black folks came to Harlem was because
they weren't allowed to be in other parts of the city, and so again it's a paradoxical form
of freedom that's that's based out of you know legal economic and political disenfranchisement
to this day when people study the Harlem Renaissance they often don't consider the LGBTQ
aspects of it and part of that is because many of the gay writers did not actually identify as gay.
And Langston Hughes is a wonderful figure in the in this era because he's considered somewhat queer
but he was never fully out politically whereas Richard Bruce Nugent is the poster boy
for someone who was unashamedly out
and there certainly are many jazz figures who were gay
Gladys Bentley was notorious for wearing men's clothing in public. I think she
would be what we would call a butch lesbian. And she wore a white tuxedo and she played with gender
There was also of course the drag ball scene in Harlem which not everyone talks about that's
that goes all the way back to the 20s in Harlem, and so it was quite a free time and ironically
that freedom of sexual expression as well as gender fluidity really petered out.
The great depression is is said to have caused the the downfall of the of the Harlem Renaissance
as well as the increasing conservatism in American culture after the second world war
That conservatism is one of the reasons the Harlem Renaissance isn't remembered as a time of gay liberation.
So there was a retrospective closeting so to speak of these figures. The consequences of
not teaching the period of the Harlem renaissance as being inherently queer is that queerness
remains white in the cultural imaginary because we don't have this story of Black queerness.
I think a lot of people talk about the stonewall rebellion in 1969 and a lot of us are trying to
re-understand it as being centered on trans women and trans women of color, and in a sense it's a
similar story where a lot of the black and brown um queer people were the ones who were at the
forefront of this movement. And so it's important to uncover this history to again recover these
ancestors who really led the charge and try to un-forget all the liberation that they created.