Chapter 4: Langston Hughes

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Langston Hughes
1902-1967

Langston Hughes scholars have debated the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance writer’s sexual orientation for decades. The African-American community’s notorious refusal to admit that any black man is gay only exacerbates the matter. The “down-low” phenomenon, in which closeted homosexuality runs rampant in minority circles, also adds to the aura of a gay enclave in Urban America.

In Langston’s case, one side of the aisle has concluded that he was gay, citing passages from several poems that shed light on his perceived homosexuality. They point to published personal letters in which he describes intimate encounters with other men. A couple of low-budget biographies for both the silver and small screens also fuel their argument.

Their detractors, including those who personally knew the poet and playwright, insist that Langston exhibited no behavioral traits that suggested he was attracted to men. Even his official biographer isn’t convinced that he was gay. That the same biographer is now the co-director of Langston’s estate leaves one to think that his position may have influenced his conclusion.

The fencer-sitters also have chimed in with their opinions, claiming Langston was asexual, in which he had an indifference to both men and women. The theory is definitely plausible since the infamous 1950s Kinsey study on sexuality showed that 1.5 percent of the male population fits the description. So why don’t you decide?

Born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, James Mercer Langston Hughes came from a line of trailblazing civil-rights pioneers. His maternal grandmother, the former Mary Sampson Patterson of North Carolina, was one of the first women to ever enroll at and graduate from Oberlin College in Lorain County. In October of 1859, her first husband, the 24-year-old harness maker Lewis Sheridan Leary, was gunned down as he crossed the Shenandoah River during John Brown’s unsuccessful slave revolt in Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia. Together only a year, the couple produced a daughter, Louise, who was six months old when her dad was killed.

Mary married a second time 10 years later to Charles Henry Langston, who was born in Virginia to a white plantation owner and an emancipated slave of African- and Native-American ancestry. Like his wife, he went into the history books. In 1835, he, with his older brother, Gideon, was one of the first blacks to be accepted at Oberlin. And by 1858, he and his younger brother, John Mercer, co-founded the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society to fight for equal rights, suffrage and the same educational opportunities afforded to whites. Three years earlier, John became the first African-American in the country to be voted into office after he was elected clerk of the Lorain County township of Brownhelm. In 1888, after moving back to Virginia, he made more history with his election to the U.S. Congress as the first black representative from the state.

Meanwhile, Charles had bought a 125-acre farm and apple orchard north of Lawrence, Kansas, in 1868. He then returned to Northeast Ohio to wed Mary in Elyria on January 18, 1869. After the ceremony, the couple relocated to Kansas, where he continued his mission in America’s heartland to campaign for equal rights for all blacks. Mary, meanwhile, bore two more children: Nathaniel Turner in 1870 and Carolina “Carrie” Mercer in 1873. The couple also took in a foster son, Dessalines, who was named after a leader of the 1790s slave revolt in Haiti, which subsequently became the first independent nation ever ruled by blacks.

In 1872 in Kansas City, Charles became principal of the Quindaro Freedman’s School, the first state-chartered, four-year university for African-Americans west of the Mississippi River. The Kansas Republican Party also nominated him that year as one of its four delegates to cast the state’s votes and give Ohioan Ulysses S. Grant a second term as U.S. president. Weary of the rural life, he sold his farm 16 years later and moved to a home in Lawrence, where he partnered with businessman Richard Burns to operate a grocery store.

By the time he died of chronic stomach problems on November 21, 1892, the 75-year-old Charles helped establish the Interstate Library Association, led the Colored Benevolent Society and served as a grand master of the Colored Masons. He was also deeply involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. “For nearly three decades, (Charles) had been a leader of the campaigns in Kansas for black suffrage and for blacks’ rights to serve on juries and in the state militia,” historian Richard B. Sheridan wrote in his 1999 essay, "Charles Henry Langston and the African-American Struggle in Kansas." “Moreover, he was a leader in seeking improved social and economic conditions for black citizens.”

Daughter Carrie graduated from high school a year after Charles’ death and before she enrolled in a two-and-a-half-month program for a certificate in kindergarten and elementary education at Kansas State Normal School in Emporia. By 1898, she was teaching school in Guthrie in the Oklahoma Territory. There, she met Indiana native James Nathaniel Hughes, a 27-year-old law clerk whose mixed-raced heritage of Scottish, Jewish and African-American ancestries prevented him from taking the state bar examination.

The couple married in Guthrie on April 30, 1899. The match was like oil and water. The fun-loving Carrie adored the theater, literature and shopping sprees; the aloof James was tight-fisted with his money and harbored fierce resentment toward the African-American race, presumably because of the barriers he faced because of it. Despite their personality differences, the newlyweds moved across the border to Joplin in the southwest corner of Missouri, where James landed a $25-a-month job as a stenographer for a lead- and zinc-mining company. Carrie also learned she was pregnant. Their first son, however, died after his birth in February of 1900. A year later, the pair headed east to Buffalo, New York, where she became pregnant again, this time with Langston.

Despite the pregnancy, the Hugheses’ marriage stood on rocky ground that led to a separation. James fled to Cuba, then to Mexico City, where he worked as the personal secretary to the head of the Pullman Palace Car Company, a leading manufacturer of sleeper cars, streetcars and trolley buses. Meanwhile, Carrie returned to Joplin to give birth almost two years to the day after the death of her first son.

Langston seldom saw his mother as a toddler after Carrie accepted a job as a stenographer for an African-American lawyer in the Kansas capital of Topeka. Instead of taking her son with her, she left him with her mother in Lawrence, where, as an elementary-school student, he discovered an inherited passion for the theater and books. He began to write poetry. He also delivered both The Saturday Evening Post and the town’s weekly newspaper to subscribers.

It’s not clear when Carrie’s divorce from James became final. But by 1915, when Langston was 13 years old, she married Topeka cook Homer Clark, who had custody of his two-year-old son, Gwyn Shannon, from a prior marriage. After Grandmother Mary died in the wee hours of April 8 at 79 years old, the Clarks settled that summer in Lincoln, Illinois, about 30 miles northeast of the capital of Springfield.

Langston enrolled in the eighth grade at Central School, where he impressed teachers with his intellect, friendliness and even temper. He also was elected class poet because of his skin color, he reasoned. “There were only two of us Negroes in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry,” he said years later. “Well, everyone knows -- except us -- that all Negroes have rhythm. So they elected me as class poet.”

Langston delivered his graduation poem during a ceremony on May 31, 1916, on the same day his unemployed stepfather left Lincoln for Cleveland. At the end of the summer, he, his mother and stepbrother joined Homer, who eventually found work as a machinist in the steel mill. The family lived in a dank basement apartment at 11217 Ashbury Ave. between Superior and Euclid avenues and near Wade and Rockefeller parks in University Circle. Langston also signed up for his freshmen year at Central High School and found an after-school job peddling ice cream in Bessie Kitzmiller’s confectionary at 3943 Central Ave.

A bright student, Langston was one of a handful of African-Americans in a class of predominantly white kids whose parents had immigrated from Europe. He excelled at graphic arts, ran on the school’s track team and, during the summer after the ninth grade, earned more spending money by running a dumbwaiter at Halle’s department store downtown. The job, he later wrote, awed him when he saw wealthy shoppers buy pricey perfumes and cigarette lighters that cost six times the rent his parents were paying every month.

But Langston’s home life abruptly collapsed, when his stepfather walked away from his marriage and hopped on a westbound train to Chicago. Carrie, hoping for a reconciliation and with Gwyn in tow, soon followed and left Langston to fend for himself in a room in a boarding-house attic at 2266 E. 86th St. north of Quincy Avenue. (The Fairfax Renaissance Development Corporation of Cleveland bought the dilapidated home for $100 in November of 2009, with tentative plans to renovate it into a museum of Hughes memorabilia.)

Because the only meal he knew how to make for himself consisted of boiled rice and hot dogs, Langston spent much of his time at the home of his closest buddy, Sartur Andrzejewski, a blond-haired, Polish-Catholic classmate whose mother and two sisters fattened up the boys on sausage and cabbage. He also sought respite at the “Playground Settlement,” the first community center that Russell and Rowena Woodham Jelliffe founded in 1915 to showcase the best African-American writers, actors and dancers of the day. The husband-and-wife team would play a pivotal role later in his life.

During the summer of 1918, Langston decided to join his mother in Chicago. Homer again had split town, leaving Carrie and the two boys in yet another drab one-room apartment in the Windy City. The trio, however, made the best of the situation, with Langston earning his keep by delivering hats for a milliner who hired Carrie as a maid. But Chicago, teeming with whites who despised minorities, proved too dangerous, and he boarded a Cleveland-bound train by himself to start his junior year at Central High.

Langston immediately plunged into school life. His class elected him to a seat on the Student Council. He served as president of the patriotic American Civic Association and secretary of the French Club. His extra-curricular activities also included membership in the Home Garden Club.

On top of all his after-school interests, Langston embraced the world of journalism by signing up as a writer for the school’s newspaper, "The Monthly." He submitted poems and short stories, including one that depicted a backwoods girl inviting a paperboy and his family to her wealthy aunt’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. He also was appointed the editor of “The Belfry Owl,” a satirical section of the newspaper in which contributors submitted written observations of the goings-on at Central. And because of his work on the publication, Langston honed his poetic writing style. His English teacher, Ethel Weimer, helped by introducing him to pieces by such poets as Walt Whitman, Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg, whom he described as his “guiding star.”

One of the highlights of Langston’s junior year came in the spring of 1919, when Carrie and Gwyn came back to town and rented a shoebox of an apartment at 5709 Longfellow Ave. south of Carnegie Avenue. His mother found work as a waitress. And unexpectedly, his father, James, wired a telegram to invite his son to spend the summer with him in Mexico. Langston jumped on the offer.

The south-of-the-border sojourn proved eye-opening. Langston learned that his dad had acquired three pieces of property: his home in Toluca, a spacious ranch 40 miles away in Temascaltepec and a rental house another 44 miles away in Mexico City. He also discovered that his father was a vociferous racist, who told his son to “look at the niggers” as they passed a field of laborers picking cotton.

Langston’s prolific poetry-writing helped soothe the tension with James. His writing style evolved with a maturity that was invigorated by his observations of the escalating racial and political battles in the U.S. He also depicted Cleveland in his pieces. “I wrote about love, about the steel mills where my father worked, the slums where we lived, and the brown girls from the South, prancing up and down Central Avenue on a spring day,” he explained years later.

In September, Langston booked a seat on a Pullman for the train ride home to Cleveland to begin his senior year at Central. He amazed his fellow track-and-field teammates by clearing the high jump at five feet and six inches, a spectacular feat considering the bar was set two inches higher than his five-foot-four-inch frame. He continued his responsibilities for both the Student Council and French Club. He also tried his hand at acting in school plays.

Langston’s final year of high school flew by quickly. On June 16, 1920, his 127-member senior class graduated in Central’s auditorium, where he pondered his academic future. Should he stay in Cleveland and enroll at Western Reserve University with Andrzejewski and a few other classmates? Or should he follow his instincts and apply to the more exclusive Ivy League college, Columbia University, in New York City to be near other writers? If he headed to the East Coast, he’d certainly need financial help from his dad in Mexico. So a month later, he traveled back to Toluca to argue his case. The reunion unexpectedly lasted a year.

During his stay, Langston made a living as a tutor to the children of the city’s mayor. He often spent his free time at the bullfights in Mexico City. And, on at least one occasion, he patronized a bordello, although there’s no evidence to suggest that he had sex with any of the female prostitutes.

In June of 1921, African-American scholar, author and editor W.E.B. Dubois published Langston’s 14-line poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in the NAACP-sponsored magazine, "Crisis." The piece became his signature lyric, primarily because of its focal line, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” The nationwide exposure of its publication must have impressed James because he offered to spring for his son’s Columbia tuition, but only if Langston majored in engineering and not creative writing. The gesture, however, was ill-fated. Although he maintained a B-plus grade point average, Langston dropped out of school a year later, citing on-campus racial prejudice for his decision.

Instead, he started to absorb the mushrooming arts-and-music scene of the black community in the Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem. And, under the wings of the much older gay “father of the Harlem Renaissance,” Alain LeRoy Locke, he moved from his seven-dollar-a-week, fourth-floor room at the YMCA’s Harlem branch to a boarding house at 267 W. 136th St. that he and fellow writers Countee Cullen, Wallace “Wally” Thurman and Richard “Bruce” Nugent affectionately dubbed “Niggeratti Manor.” Nugent went so far as to make the rooms more festive by painting homoerotic murals on the walls. And the housemates developed a reputation for their all-night parties.

The question, then, remains: Was Langston gay? With the exceptions of an exhaustive two-volume biography and a couple of docudramas, historians seldom have written about his sexuality, even with hypotheses and conjecture. The guessing games start with his collection of gay comrades, including Cullen himself.

A year younger than Langston, Countee Leroy Porter was abandoned at birth by his parents and raised by his paternal grandmother until her death in 1918. At 15, he was adopted by Episcopal minister Frederick Ashbury Cullen in Harlem. He won many poetry-writing contests as a teenager and edited his high school’s magazine. Although he later married twice, he told his first wife that he was sexually attracted to men. His laundry list of potential suitors included Langston, who showed no reciprocal interest.

Langston also maintained a friendship with openly gay writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten, who championed the Harlem Renaissance stable of artists and writers. His 1926 novel, "Nigger Heaven," about a librarian and a writer who try to keep their romance alive in the face of rampant racism, created a stir after its publication. The book’s title alone referred to a Jim Crow-era phrase about theater balconies, where African-Americans were corralled during stage performances while white audiences sat in the more comfortable seats below.

To further analyze Langston’s sexual orientation, consider his six-month voyage to West Africa as a crew member aboard the "S.S. Malone" in June of 1923. The freighter made several stops, including the Nigerian capital of Lagos and the largest Canary Island of Tenerife. In both ports of call, he experienced his first two man-to-man sexual encounters with a couple of frisky crewmates. Both of them wanted him to play the “male” role in bed, he told his secretary decades later.

On his way back from Africa in early 1924, Langston left the ship to work in the kitchen of a Parisian nightclub for a few months. By November, he was living with his mother in Washington, D.C., where she was staying with relatives from the John Mercer Langston side of her family. He also found a job as the personal assistant to historian Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History. But the demands of the position left him little time to write. So he resigned to bus tables in the restaurant of the Wardman Park Hotel in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Good move, too. One evening, as he cleared dirty dishes and silverware in the dining room, Langston spotted Vachel Lindsay, who was one of the era’s most heralded American poets. He seized the moment and presented the Illinois-born, Hiram College-educated writer with copies of three of his poems. From that night on, an obviously impressed Lindsay declared he had discovered new African American talent.

At the same time, Langston scored a first-place prize for his poem, “The Weary Blues,” in a writing contest sponsored by "Opportunity" magazine. Thanks to Van Vechten’s connections, he inked a book deal with the Knopf Publishing Company. His debut collection of poetry, "The Weary Blues," featuring the five-year-old “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,“ hit bookstore shelves in January of 1926.

Langston still wanted to complete his college education, despite his disconcerting freshmen year at Columbia. He enrolled for the winter semester at Lincoln University in the Pennsylvania town of Oxford near Philadelphia. Founded in 1854, the college staked its claim as the oldest historically black school in the country. And Langston immersed himself in campus life with other classmates, including future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He also pledged membership in the Omega Psi Phi social fraternity, whose motto, “Friendship is essential to the soul,” spoke for itself.

Langston’s first semester at Lincoln ended in June, just in time for "The Nation" magazine to publish his essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The memorable “manifesto,” as some historians have described it, addressed both the struggles and achievements of African-Americans writers, painters and musicians. “The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual, dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” he wrote. “If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter, either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how. And we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.”

In early 1927, Langston’s sophomore anthology of poems, "Fine Clothes to the Jew," stormed the literary world to the dismay of many African-American book critics. Its title itself raised a few eyebrows because it referred to poverty-stricken Harlemites, who traded their wardrobes for cash in Jewish-owned pawn shops. Many black reviewers railed against the book because it concentrated on the poorest segment of black society. Yet, the work further established Langston as an artistic force in the Harlem Renaissance.

The distinction made an impact on Charlotte Osgood Mason. The wealthy widow of a distinguished surgeon, parapsychologist and hypnotherapist, her inheritance financially backed several Harlem artists, including painter Aaron Douglas and novelist Zora Neale Hurston. The feisty, overbearing “Godmother,” as she insisted her young beneficiaries call her, added Langston to the mix that spring and oversaw his work on his first novel, "Not Without Laughter," about an African-American boy and his impoverished family in the Midwest.

Langston graduated from Lincoln with a bachelor’s degree in 1929 and returned to Harlem to write his book, insisting that he would always make New York City his home. “I’ll never leave Harlem for anywhere else,” he told his Niggeratti Manor housemates.

Yet, right before "Laughter’s" release in 1931, he and Mason quarreled over creative differences in his writing. As a result, Langston retreated to Cleveland for a homecoming with his mother, who had returned from Washington to rent a home at 4800 Carnegie Ave. He didn’t tell his benefactor about his whereabouts.

Langston only intended to stay with his mom for three weeks, after which he would pay for a trip to Florida with the next check that Mason sent him. Ten days later, however, the matriarch of the arts wrote that she was financially cutting him off for good.

Three weeks turned into three months before good news materialized. The Harmon Foundation awarded "Laughter" its annual gold medal for Langston’s contributions to fine arts in the African American community. The prize came with a $400 check that would help him finance a trip to the South. At the suggestion of the Jelliffes, who had since founded the predominantly black Gilpin Players theatrical troupe, he chose Zell Ingram, a 21-year-old gay man as a traveling companion. The pair took turns behind the wheel of Carrie’s Ford to Miami, then hopped on a train to Key West. From there, they boarded a boat to Havana, where Langston was treated like a celebrity as he alighted onto Cuban soil. His published works had electrified readers as far as the Caribbean.

Biographers have well documented the second half of Langston’s life in his ascent as an influential poet, playwright, novelist and newspaper columnist of the Harlem Renaissance. For these pages, though, the focus now will shift to his Northeast Ohio connections since the region remained a magnet for him, primarily because of the Jelliffes’ theater, Karamu House, at 3807 Central Ave.

In the fall of 1935, Langston’s mother moved from her Carnegie Avenue digs to a three-room apartment at 212 S. Pleasant St. in Oberlin. The town occupied a special place in her heart because both of her parents graduated from Oberlin College. Because of his proximity to Cleveland, Langston made frequent trips to the city for poetry readings. And he regularly visited the Jelliffes, who asked him if he would like to become Karamu’s playwright-in-residence. They needn’t say more. The offer was a no-brainer.

Langston’s debut offering, "Little Ham," took a farcical look at the numbers racket in Depression-era Harlem. For the most part, the play wowed theater critics after its Karamu debut on March 24, 1936. They trumpeted it as “hilarious” and “side-splitting,” with predictions of a possible run on Broadway and an adaptation on the silver screen. Langston’s next Gilpin Players production, "Troubled Island," was staged in May. The two plays marked the beginning in a long line of scripts that he would write for the troupe.

Although Langston returned to live in Harlem -- he would buy a townhouse at 20 E. 127th St. in 1948 -- his subsequent Cleveland visits in the ‘40s and ‘50s included several poetry readings at the main branch of the city’s public library. He also served as master of ceremonies at the Cleveland Black Folk Festival in 1952. One of his last public appearances took place at the Jelliffes’ golden-anniversary party for Karamu House in 1965.

On May 6, 1967, in New York City, Langston felt a sharp pain in his stomach. He was rushed to New York Polytechnic Clinic, where, six days later, he underwent prostate surgery to remove a potentially cancerous mass at the bottom of his abdomen. The operation went well. However, Langston’s condition started to take a downward turn three days later, when physicians diagnosed him with bronchopneumonia. His temperature also skyrocketed to 103 degrees, causing him to slip in and out of consciousness.

Two more days passed with no signs of improvement. Wheeled into the hospital’s intensive-care unit, Langston lapsed into a coma. At 10:40 p.m. on Monday, May 22, he died of septic shock, a virulent medical condition that kills half of its victims.

About 200 invited mourners, including chanteuse Lena Horne and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche, gathered at Benta’s Funeral Home in Harlem on May 25 to pay their respects. Playwright Arna Bontemps, with whom Langston had sometimes collaborated, read some of his buddy’s poems. Later, at a Manhattan crematory, a handful of friends broke into a recitation of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

After Langston’s death, accolades continued to mount in his honor. Among them, the City College of New York awarded its first Langston Hughes Medal in 1973 to recognize an influential and entertaining African-American writer. New York City officials bestowed landmark status on his Harlem home and renamed East 127th Street as Langston Hughes Place. And in 2002, the U.S. Postal Service celebrated the 100th anniversary of his birth by portraying his image on a postage stamp in its Black Heritage series.

Literary scholars and historians alike have also studied Langston’s poems to glean even a hint of his sexual orientation. Some analysts have determined he was asexual. Other researchers have concluded that he kept his homosexuality in the closet for fear its discovery would make him a pariah in the African-American community. And there’s yet another army of intellects, who are certain that he led a gay lifestyle. “He was always eluding marriage. He said marriage and career didn’t work,” said Jean Blackwell Huston, former head of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in an "Esquire" magazine article in February of 1992. “It wasn’t until years later that I became convinced he was homosexual.”

Throughout the course of his career, Langston made noticeable changes in the subject matter of his poems and short stories. While most of his early works depicted the plight of Black America, his later pieces exhibited a homoerotic nuance. For example, in the poem, “Trumpet Player” --- which appeared in his 1947 collection, Fields of Wonder -- a reader can visualize the protagonist in the act of oral sex with another man: “The music from the trumpet at his lips is honey mixed with liquid fire/The rhythm from the trumpet at his lips is ecstasy distilled from old desire.”

The unpublished “To Beauty” similarly radiated a homosexual overtone. The first line of the piece, “To worship at the altar of beauty,” was a well-known gay code phrase during the Jazz Age to describe intimate, same-sex encounters. And “Café: 3 A.M.,” which made its debut in his 1951 anthology, Montage of a Dream Deferred, clearly described a police raid on a gay nightclub.

Detectives from the vice squad
With weary, sadistic eyes spotting fairies.
Degenerates, some say.
But God, nature or somebody made them that way.
Police lady or lesbian over there?
Where?


Langston also seemed to go out of his way to draw parallels between himself and the main character in his 1961 story, "Blessed Assurance." The piece, about a father who flips out over his son’s effeminate nature, portrayed Delmar as “a brilliant, young queer, on the honor roll in high school, and likely to be graduated in the spring at the head of his class.” In the story, he also was a member of the French, Glee and Drama clubs, and dreamed of going to Paris after graduation.

The likenesses were more than coincidental. For starters, Langston, like Delmar, excelled at academics. He was an officer in Central High’s French Club and acted in theatrical productions during his senior year. He also spent a few months in France after his West African stint on the Malone.

Furthermore, both boys were products of broken, dysfunctional families. They even were named after ancestors on the maternal sides of their families. And as if Langston again was writing in code, the name of Delmar’s church-choir director, Manley Jaxon, gave readers pause to wonder. The choral maestro’s first name obviously referred to virility; his surname was that of five-foot-two-inch Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon, a popular African-American drag queen of the ‘20s and ‘30s.

At least two filmmakers have weighed in on the debate. In 1988, British director Isaac Julien made the 42-minute, black-and-white flick, "Looking for Langston," to memorialize the writer’s contributions to the Harlem Renaissance from a black, gay vantage point. Julien also intended to “construct a narrative that would allow viewers to meditate and to think, rather than be told,” he said in interviews. The tribute eventually won a Teddy Award for Best Short Film at the 1989 Berlin International Film Festival.

Upon its 1990 release in the U.S., the executors of Langston’s estate tried to censor the film, claiming they never gave Julien permission to incorporate readings of the writer’s poetry into the script. They also demanded that movie houses had to cut off the sound during screenings when Langston’s work was heard. “Clearly, (Langston) never wanted to be known publicly as gay,” wrote Stanford University professor Arnold Rampersad in his biography, "The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume II: 1941-1967: I Dream a World." “In the absence of clear evidence that he was, how could (former estate administrator George) Bass do otherwise than oppose Julien’s willful, even flagrant, abuse of (Langston’s) name and of the wishes of his estate?” (You, the reader, should know that Rampersad is now one of the estate’s co-administrators.)

The film, "Brother to Brother," by documentary filmmaker Rodney Evans received less controversy after its debut at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where a jury awarded a “special prize“ to the piece. Set in modern-day New York, the movie portrays a gay art student who meets Langston’s former housemate, Richard “Bruce” Nugent, in a homeless shelter. As the movie flashes back to 1920s Harlem, the author and painter can be seen cavorting with such writers as Langston, Wally Thurman and Zora Neal Hurston in scenes that suggest that nearly every Niggeratti Manor tenant was homosexual. After Sundance, the movie made the rounds of gay film fests as well as occasional airings on public television.

Before his death of AIDS-related complications at 38 years old in November of 1995, gay black poet and activist Essex Hemphill continued to challenge African-Americans’ ignorance of homosexuality within its community. To explore the sexuality of black icons like Langston is to unearth the truth behind their legacies. “The silence surrounding black, gay and lesbian lives is being meticulously dismantled,” he said. “Every closet is coming down. Those closets are ancestral burial sites that we rightfully claim and exhume.”

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Langston Hughes’ remains were interred beneath a medallion embedded in the foyer of the Arthur Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, 515 Malcolm X Blvd. in New York City. He was 65 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser