Home > Media > Books > Bruce Nugent, Richard Bruce Nugent, Thomas H. Wirth - Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent
Bruce Nugent, Richard Bruce Nugent, Thomas H. Wirth - Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent
Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Bruce Nugent, Richard Bruce Nugent, Thomas H. Wirt...
Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987) was at the center of the "Niggerati" faction of the Harlem Renaissance along with his roommate Wallace Thurman.* Against the pressure from W. E. B. DuBois and others to supply only edifying representations of the successful middle class, in the infamous single issue of Fire!! and in their other work, the "Niggerati" wrote about prostitution, number-running, religious charlatans, color prejudices among African Americans, fornication, homosexuality, etc. The elders (of DuBois's generation) who supported tellin' it (more) like it is included James Weldon Johnson, Charles S. Johnson, and Alain Locke. Locke, a Howard University philosophy professor and the first African American Phi Beta Kappa, was gay and sexually interested in a number of those whose careers he helped, including Nugent, sculptor Richmond Barthé, and poet Langston Hughes. The first and last of these three evaded his embraces, while it seems that Barthé did not.
(There were some heterosexual males within the "Niggerati" group, including painter Aaron Douglas, and physician/fiction writer Rudolph Fisher, along with Thurman's friend Arna Bontemps, and some predominantly gay ones among the more decorous DuBois-approved younger generation of the 1920s, notably Countee Cullen, who was for a brief time DuBois's son-in-law, but notoriously took Harold Jackman, renowned for his handsomeness along on the honeymoon to Europe. Wirth implies that Eric Walrond was also "in the life.")
Most of the Harlem Renaissance figures who were predominantly gay were selectively "out" (not that "out of the closet" was a category then in use) but not "public." That is, those "in the life" were also in the know, but the general public did not (this continues to be the pattern for many a Hollywood star even now). Homosexuality in the writing of Hughes (who was exceedingly reticent about anyone knowing his "business"), Claude McKay (who was mostly outside Harlem during the Renaissance, but viewed as a spiritual older brother by Nugent and others), and even Wallace Thurman (whose tearoom arrest was necessarily a part of the public record) represented their same-sex desires and conduct only in code. Nugent was the only one who was openly gay.
It was Nugent's "Smoke, Lilies and Jade" in FIRE!! that most scandalized the keepers of African American respectability with explicit celebration of same-sex desire—although it was in such mannered and fragmented prose that the general reading public would not penetrate the smoke to its lavender core. That rococo (art deco?) story has been anthologized numerous times, starting in 1983 with Black Men, White Men: A Gay Anthology edited by Michael J. Smith, where it followed the pathbreaking exploration of homosexuality in the Harlem Renaissance, "'Tain't Nobody's Business" by Eric Garber (the title is a formula for the unpublic, unashamed, uncloseted modus operandi then and (as "down-low") now).
Nugent was more a graphic artist than a poet or fiction writer. He was also a dancer and part of the cast of "Porgy" that opened on Broadway in 1927 and crossed the Atlantic (with Nugent the frequent "safe" escort for Rose McClendon, who played Bess). The book Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance includes many of Nugent's drawings (including 16 color plates). The book's editor, Thomas H. Wirth, who knew Nugent in his last year, discusses the influences of Aubrey Beardsley and Erté in Nugent's art-deco drawings, and the silhouette techniques that Aaron Douglas learned from portraitist Winold Reiss. The female nudes in the "Salome Series" (dating from 1930) recall those of Egon Schiele to me, and Reiss may have been a conduit of Sezession idioms, too. There are also portraits of some of Nugent's male inamorata and homoerotic drawings of monks and languid semi-nude males in a Gilgamesh series.
Following the laying-on of hands by Henry Louis Gates in a brief foreword, there is a substantial (61-page) introduction by Wirth with many photographs. Wirth (who has a Ph.D. in chemistry but knows a whole lot about Harlem Renaissance figures) stresses the influence of the perfumed and scandalous writing of Joris-Karl Huysman (especially Au Rebours) on, scanting that of the Anglophone mannerists including Oscar Wilde. He does not even mention Ronald Firbank, who had published a number of highly mannered novels (but not yet Prancing Nigger before Nugent moved to Harlem and met Hughes, Thurman, Zora Hurston, et al.
Also oddly missing from Wirth's introduciton and from the extensive bibliography is Garber's essay which did so much to reintroduce the gay strand of the Harlem Renaissance in general and Nugent's central place in particular. Wirth is also very vague about the extent of extant Nugent manuscripts. He mentions "Nugent's late novels" without specifying what survives of them, or what his criteria for selecting the excerpt "Lunatique" were. Even more frustrating, in that Wallace Thurman's "Niggerati" roman à clef Infants of the Spring ends with the manuscript of the Nugent character (Arbian—Nugent's initial RBN) becoming illegible in the flood of a bathtub's overflow, Wirth does not say anything about how much more of Geisha Man than what he included there is or of Jigger Man, Nugent's own roman à clef of the "Niggerati Manor" and of similarly autobiographical accounts of sexual relations with some Mafiosi.
In addition to these excerpts from unpublished novels, and Nugent's graphics, there are a few poems focused on being gay, four "Bible Stories," some memoirs of colorful figures (including the uncolored Carl Van Vechten), and some allusive prose bits. Following Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, Nugent was fascinated with the Herod/Salome/John the Baptist milieu. Two of the bible stories involve the Magi. Herod's catamite Carus is smitten by the Ethiopian one, Caspar, warns the "wise men" of Herod's homicidal intent and runs away with Caspar. The fourth of the "Bible Stories" provides homoerotic motivations for Judas to fulfill his role. The prose in these stories is very arch, though not as fragmented as "Smoke" or "Pope Pius the Only" (published in 1937 in a magazine edited by the youngest Harlem Renaissance figure, Dorothy West, who also became its last survivor).
Few of Nugent's writings or graphics were published during his lifetime. As shown in the movie Brother to Brother, he survived mostly on his (sometimes biting) wit and charm. In an interview with Wirth about his gay life, Nugent related that he was rejected by a number of "brothers" who were sexually involved with males whom Nugent came on to in D. C. (where he grew up). He gravitated to Italians (and, I think, olive-skinned Jews) who "were open to opportunities such as I presented.... They turned me on. When I turn on, I guess I light up, because they knew it immediately, and the liked it... Nobody appreciates being liked and wanted and being desired as much as Italians do. or nobody shows it as much."
The seduction of a Mafia don, Orini, in Gentleman Jigger is one of the high points of the book along with the long poem "You Think to Shame Me" (in which the homosexual promiscuity of the narrator is that with which attempts to shame fail), and the memoir, particularly those of collectors Alexander Gumby and Carl Van Vechten, but also the synoptic one of Harlem in the 1920s when
"Negroes found their own interest in themselves reviving, encouraged by the white trailblazers.... Being black (or even slightly colored) began to be fashionable and a means of livelihood.... There was no pie in the city in which there was not a Negro thumb. The Negro in New York had come into his somewhat precarious and nebulous own.... House-rent parties, playing the numbers, and religion became the only pleasures of the many who could not afford to go to the Italian-owned speakeasies and gang-owned Nightclubs [in Harlem]."
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This review is dedicated to Ed Grover, a fellow devotee of the arch writings of Firbank and Saki. Even before we co-hosted the June 2001 gay/lesbian write-off, we had been discussing the gay figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including the downtown promoter/voyeur of the Harlem vogue, Carl Van Vechten, who wrote the infamous(ly titled) Nigger Heaven (the title referred the segregated balconies of movie theaters) and photographed anyone African American who was anyone, including Nugent. Van Vechten's portraits usually included a prop, and the one for the portrait of Nugent (reproduced on p. 227) was a bust of Antinous, the catamite beloved of the emperor Hadrian). Langston Hughes was Van Vechten's protégé and defended Van Vechten's novel (when it was attacked by DuBois et al.). Nugent recalled refusing to give Van Vechten the deference ("I didn't toady successfully") Van Vechten was accustomed to receiving from the New Negroes he promoted ("I don't think it had a thing, really, to do with any sexual urge toward me.")
(It is too bad that the epinions photo is not of the paperback edition cover with the illustration of the character Beauty, a nude male figure crawling to Beauty's lips, and flowers than Nugent drew for "Smoke, Lilies and Jade.")
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*"Roommate" is not a euphemism. Both Thurman and Nugent wrote about Thurman's white male inamorata in their romans à clef of the "Niggerati Manor," and of Nugent's numerous male affairs. Thurman liked Scandinavian men, Nugent Mediterranean ones, and neither was sexually attracted to the other.
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