Florida Atlantic University will host “The Harlem Renaissance: As Gay as it was Black”

Florida Atlantic University will showcase a new exhibition called “The Harlem Renaissance: As Gay as it was Black”.

This exhibition will address the gay world within the Harlem Renaissance. For years, folks didn't want to mix the two, but now the truth will be told. I'm actually excited about this.

The Harlem Renaissance, which occurred in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s, shaped black culture for generations and influenced American society. The movement was “surely as gay as it was black, not that it was exclusively either of these,” according to historian Henry Louis Gates, whose research the exhibition’s title is extracted from.

“I think most people like to draw neat little identity lines around people,” said Jack Rutland, executive director of the Stonewall Library Museum Archive in Fort Lauderdale, which organized the exhibition. “With this exhibition, we hope to blur those lines to show that when people come together in a place at a time, amazing things can happen when identity ceases to matter quite so much.”

Few of the artists and writers profiled in the exhibition can be considered “out” or “gay” in any modern sense of the terms. The Harlem Renaissance was moved along by men and women who led double lives. Many imbued their work with coded references to their sexuality.

Profiled are such famous people as writer Richard Bruce Nugent, whose “Smoke, Lillies and Jade” is praised as the first published black gay short story. Langston Hughes, who is considered one of the foremost writers of the Harlem Renaissance and author of “The Weary Blues,” also is featured. Zora Neale Hurston, a writer and folklorist whose best known work “Their Eyes Were Watching God” was set in Central and South Florida in 1937, is another leading figure profiled. Poet and novelist James Weldon Johnson, a Jacksonville native who with his brother John Rosamond composed “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the song now known as the Negro National Anthem, is another artist the exhibition pays tribute to.

The exhibition also features a section acknowledging that not all contributors of the Harlem Renaissance were homosexual. Historian W.E.B. Du Bois; actor Paul Robeson; artist Aaron Douglas; dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson; songwriter Eubie Blake; bandleaders Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway; and musicians Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller are among those noted.

The Harlem Renaissance ended with the outbreak of World War II. In the ensuing post-war decades, the sexuality of many of its leading figures has been overlooked.

“It was a subject that none of us at Stonewall had seen addressed very fully in any of the existing literature on the Harlem Renaissance,” said Rutland. “We also discovered it was a wonderfully unusual gay/lesbian history story. Usually the history of a minority in America ended up being a tale of repression and rebellion. This was a tale of creativity, cooperation and coming together.”

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