Excerpt 2: While the most celebrated poets of the Harlem Renaissance were men—Hughes, McKay, Cullen—Black women’s poetry was far from incidental to the movement. Poems by Alice Dunbar Nelson, Helene Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Anne Spencer appeared frequently in periodicals, although only Georgia Douglas Johnson published full volumes of poetry (including The Heart of a Woman, and Other Poems [1918] and Bronze [1922]). Women poets negotiated a number of difficulties concerning gender and tradition as they sought to extricate themselves from stereotypes of hypersexuality and primitive abandon. Attempting to claim femininity on terms denied them by the dominant society, they worked variously within and against inherited constraints concerning the treatment of love and nature as well as racial experience in poetry.
A significant proportion of poets, as well as other participants in the Harlem Renaissance, were gay or bisexual, including McKay, Cullen, Locke, Dunbar Nelson, Richard Bruce Nugent, and perhaps Hughes. References to lesbian sexuality were also well-known in blues songs by Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. The Renaissance participated in what one scholar termed “the invention of homosexuality” in American culture during the early 20th century, when sexual identities came to be defined and policed in new ways. Drag balls were reported in Black newspapers, sometimes disparagingly. In part because of lax policing, Harlem was known as a destination for whites seeking illicit sexual thrills, but it also allowed for discreet liaisons through which long-term same-sex relationships developed both within and between the races. According to some critics, the renaissance was as gay as it was Negro. However, with the exception of Nugent, gay sexuality among the well-known writers and artists was discreet and mostly closeted.
