Hidden History: Alain Locke is the Key (Part II)

Hidden History is my new Monday afternoon column for The New Gay. Each week, I’ll cover a different nook or cranny in the gay and lesbian past.

I was pleased to see that, as part of their Gay History Month issue, Metro Weekly included a discussion by Kevin Mumford about the difficulties of uncovering black gay history. Considering past discussions of race on this blog, Mumford’s article is highly worth reading. As one part of the article, he briefly mentions Alain Locke and other Harlem Renaissance figures. Here’s the fuller story that Mr. Mumford only had space to allude to.

For the proper lead-in to this week’s column, check out last week’s Alain Locke is the Key (Part I). There, I discuss how homosexuality was connected to the Harlem Renaissance, of which Locke was a prime mover-and-shaker.

When Alain Locke would stroll around the corner from his R Street home to 1461 S Street NW, the home of poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, to attend the Saturday Nighters salons in the 1920s, he was helping to insert himself into the heart of the burgeoning literary movement that would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Locke would, in fact, become arguably the leading intellectual force behind the Renaissance. But who was Alain Locke to be able to reach this position?

From an old-line Philadelphia family, Locke graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard. He went on to attend Oxford University as the first African American Rhodes scholar in history. But owing to racism, he was only eligible to be hired by historically black colleges upon his return to the United States. Settling in at Howard University’s philosophy department, Locke would continue to teach there almost until his death.

In his over forty years at Howard, Locke was a popular professor, but was also known as rigorous and intellectually exacting. Harlem Renaissance historian David Levering Lewis quotes from one of Locke’s freshman lectures, in which he argued that “the highest intellectual duty is to be cultured” and that culture “will have to plead guilty to a certain degree” of “exclusiveness, over-selectness, perhaps even the extreme of snobbery.”

Locke would apply these standards to his editing of the landmark 1925 anthology The New Negro. A broad-ranging collection of poetry, essays, fiction, and art, The New Negro gathered together most of the important figures in what would be the Harlem Renaissance. It also laid forth Locke’s ideas about how African-American culture was to proceed. Locke agreed in essence with African-American intellectual W.E.B. DuBois’s theory of “the Talented Tenth”: that the progress and achievements of the most educated and skillful blacks would help the entire race achieve equality. At the same time, Locke did not follow DuBois’s idea that all art must have a directly political or moral purpose. His view was that artistic expression—particularly art emphasizing blacks’ racial heritage—would cause a cultural awakening among African-Americans; this awakening would help improve blacks’ self-image and sense of community. By gathering together large numbers of blacks from different walks of life all in one place, cities like Harlem helped foster the environment where this cultural awakening could occur and change lives. The New Negro was the opening salvo in Locke’s theory of cultural change.

In addition to providing a forum for up-and-coming writers through his editing activities, Locke was also closely connected with one of the main white patrons of the Harlem Renaissance, Charlotte Osgood Mason. A now-controversial figure, the elderly Mason had the interest and the money to provide African-American writers and artists with time and space to work—as long as their work matched her carefully prescribed notions of what was “African” and “primitive” enough. As A.B. Christa Schwarz writes, Locke “fulfilled the role of talent scout” for Mason, seeking out artists worthy of her patronage. At various times, Mason provided money to writers who were recommended by Locke, such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

Despite—or perhaps because of—his power to help make artistic careers, Locke was not universally beloved. A sexist, Locke allegedly told female students not to attend class; he would give them an automatic “gentleman’s C” in exchange. Even though he had assisted Zora Neale Nurston’s career, she once referred to him as “a malicious little snit.” Charles S. Johnson, another major molder of the Harlem Renaissance, once declared that Locke had been “cast in the role merely of press agent” for the movement. And although Locke didn’t feel gay novelist Wallace Thurman achieved his potential, he personally liked Thurman; Thurman, meanwhile, was caricaturing Locke as the stiff and stuffy “Dr. Parkes” in his book Infants of the Spring.

Locke’s head could also be turned by a handsome man, which may sometimes have influenced his decisions in whose career to aid. He pursued Langston Hughes before apparently giving up in frustration in the face of Hughes’s ambiguous sexuality. Locke also had a complicated relationship with Richard Bruce Nugent, the one openly gay member of the Renaissance. When Nugent was living in Washington D.C., he became friendly with Locke, who asked him to contribute a drawing to The New Negro. Upon seeing the drawing, Locke encouraged Nugent to write a story to accompany it; eventually, the story, “Sahdji,” appeared in the anthology while the drawing did not. Nugent’s first published story, “Sahdji” was changed into a ballet, and Locke published it again in his 1927 Plays of Negro Life.

The friendship was not entirely without strings, however. In Thomas Wirth’s biography of Nugent, he repeats a section of an interview Nugent gave in which he described a time where Locke:

offered me his body. A professor of philosophy and a person old enough to be your father doesn’t lie on a bed in their shorts and say, ‘Do anything you want.’ What can you do except be embarrassed? And be a little disappointed in the person who did it. I was a lot disappointed. I was traumatized by it.

He did not cut off contact with Locke after this incident, however. Locke introduced Nugent to the sculptor Richmond Barthé; Wirth doubts that Nugent and Barthé became lovers, but they were intimate and lifelong friends, and they were close enough that Barthé cast them as the Biblical beloveds David and Jonathan in one letter to Nugent. Nugent also depended on Locke for emotional support, writing to him:

I feel the need of someone to lean on so bad. What I think would be a cure seems to be such an impossibility. Am I so impossible that I can not get a friend of the sort I want. Everyone else seems to have one close friend who thinks of all the small niceties and petty things except me. With me they all either use me without reciprocation or depend on me until I feel it incumbent upon me to create something in me for them to lean on…Don’t they ever realize that a prop (of nothing more than honest affection) might help me too? Please write me soon.

Nugent would later worry, though, that rejecting Locke’s advances had cost him. He wrote years later that Locke had specifically advised Charlotte Osgood Mason against providing patronage to him.

The difficult aspects of his personality aside, Alain Locke could provide tremendous support to writers he befriended. Perhaps the most prominent example of his benevolence is in the case of the great gay poet Countee Cullen. In a brilliant book, Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, independent scholar A.B. Christa Schwarz outlines Locke’s close support of Cullen. Locke was a crucial mentor for Cullen, both artistically and in understanding and accepting his sexuality. Cullen was acutely aware of the dangers of pursuing gay sex and “had a propensity to assess same-sex love negatively.” But in 1923, Locke gave Cullen a copy of British gay rights activist Edward Carpenter’s compilation Iolaus: An Anthology of Friendship, helping Cullen see the great tradition of homosexuality in history and literature.

From the number of editions in which it was published and the number of printings it received after its initial appearance in 1902, Iolaus was obviously a critical text for unknown scores of gay men. Colloquially dubbed “The Bugger’s Bible,” Iolaus was a collection of essays and primary source texts of writing about same-sex friendship and love. Cullen wrote to Locke that reading Iolaus had “'opened up for me soul windows which had been closed.'” The anthology emphasized writings that viewed same-sex sexuality as healthy, robust, and normal. Cullen asked Locke to destroy a letter where Cullen said that Iolaus had thrown “a noble and evident light on what I had begun to believe, because of what the world believes, ignoble and unnatural.” But he wrote the letter. Cullen’s worldview had changed because of Locke, and scholars believe that this is what allowed Cullen to begin to address his sexuality in his poetry.

Shortly after Alain Locke’s death in 1955, an article in The Washington Post talked about the eulogy delivered for Locke at Howard University. Many plaudits were given, including those for Locke’s “’tranquil and genial spirit,’” his intelligence, and his contributions to Howard’s curriculum revision. But the most apt was government professor Robert E. Martin’s statement that Locke was “motivated by two fundamental influences—great devotion to the intellectual life and deep concern for students.” These two factors were undoubtedly crucial for Alain Locke. They were also profoundly linked to his homosexuality in ways that are only now beginning to come to light.

Author's note: I'll write more about gay angles to the Harlem Renaissance in future columns. For anyone who wants to read more immediately, several books are very worthwhile. For a general history of the Harlem Renaissance, the standard book is David Levering Lewis's When Harlem Was in Vogue. For homosexuality and the Harlem Renaissance, the best books I've found thus far are A.B. Christa Schwarz's Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance and Thomas Wirth's Richard Bruce Nugent bio-anthology, Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance. Eric Garber's essay that I alluded to in Part I can be found in the aptly named anthology Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past.

Next week: Hidden History takes a break for Columbus Day; in two weeks, I'll look at how not to become lost to history.

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philipclark@hotmail.com.