Langston Hughes

A black and white photo of Langston Hughes, a black man with short hair and a thin mustache. He smiles widely and wears a black suit with a striped shirt, dark sweater, and paisley tie.

“I am so tired of waiting,

Aren’t you,

For the world to become good

And beautiful and kind?”

– Langston Hughes

A leading force in the Harlem Renaissance, a poet, a scholar, an activist, and a black man, Langston Hughes spoke unashamedly of his experiences with racism in a still heavily segregated America. What he discussed less, leaving ample space for speculation, was sexuality, specifically his own. While there is a general agreement of some level of connection to queerness, the debate rages on as to the nature of that connection and the level of understanding any contemporary source can have without explicit self-identification.

Langston Hughes was born in Missouri in 1902, and his parents split shortly after his birth. After both of his parents had gone their separate ways, Hughes was left with his grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston, who proceeded to raise him as her son. He went to a desegregated school and was the only black student in his class. It could easily be said that the separation he felt when faced with this catalyzed his poetry. Hughes was known as the class poet and wrote prolifically. From his first poems, he used his experiences with racism as inspiration.

Hughes was also impacted by African cultures. He travelled back and forth from America to different parts of Africa for his job working on a boat during his lifetime. On his first trip, he recalls throwing all his books into the ocean outside of a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. His experience with the cultures there, combined with the culture he experienced in America, led to the poetry’s powerful nature. When art and culture were in flux, Langston turned from the classical Shakespearean format to the flow of folk stories and blues songs. He worked hard throughout his life to write about meaningful topics and make them accessible to as many people as possible. He made sure to use an easily understood vocabulary and often recited his poems, giving people who couldn’t read access to his work as well.

While his work was affected by his race, Hughes was careful to keep mentions of his sexuality to a minimum. In his most obviously queer works, he does not align himself with queerness but rather shows his support for the queer community. In ‘Cafe, 3 AM’, for example, Hughes says:

“Degenerates,/some folks say./But God, Nature,/or somebody/made them that way.”

Despite his relative silence on the subject, speculation on his sexuality has always existed. Some theorists claimed that Hughes wasn’t gay but was rather uninterested in sex with anyone, regardless of gender. Others claim that he was a gay man, and any suggestion to the contrary is an attempt to hide an important part of his identity.

But in an uncommon turn of events, both theories may be correct.

It is entirely possible that Langston Hughes was asexual and gay. The first biographer who suggested his asexuality, Arnold Rampersad, did so because there was no concrete evidence supporting Langston Hughe’s supposed homosexuality. That being said, this idea of “concrete evidence” on its’ own is problematic in the study of queer history. Not only is evidence often hidden to protect queer people, but much of queerness does not leave behind the kind of trace that can be easily measured and deemed to be clear proof. Queerness is not an action, but a way of being, and one can be queer without ever acting on it. The ideology which requires action for queerness to be validated has been largely left behind by queer scholars. In Langston Hughe’s case, he engages with queerness and the queer community in many ways that are definitively queer, even if he himself seemingly never openly identified himself as such.

He went to queer parties, built connections with the queer community, wrote about queerness, and had deep passionate (if not proveably sexual) relationships with other men. Not only this, but his possible lack of sexual attraction to anyone, would make him just as queer. His romantic attraction to men can exist in tandem with a lack of sexual attraction to men or his lack of sexual attraction can exist on its’ own and still lead to the nebulous conclusion of queerness.

Some accounts do suggest that Hughes never experienced sexual attraction to other men. This evidence comes partly because he did have many opportunities to act on such attraction but is not known to have done so. Two other queer poets, Alain Locke and Countee Cullen sent letters to each other about Langston’s potential seducibility, but in the end, it seems that they were unable to spark a sexual relationship with him. This could be due to his lack of attraction to people, or just them in particular. Evidence against his possible asexuality also exists, as he did at one point have gonorrhea, but this is still not definitive. It does not mean he experienced sexual attraction or pursued it outside of select times. It is not excluding of the identity, but it does add a shadow of doubt to an already blurry image.

There is, however, more than enough evidence that Langston experienced deep romantic attraction to other men. He wrote unpublished love poems with their subjects being men, and he often found himself in the company of gay men, having many friends who were out, and being a part of the queer community at the time. He reportedly even went to drag clubs with friends. None of this evidence does anything to disprove or solidly prove any one identity, but the questions that his life brings up in general are quite queer ones for a man that some still think to be completely and uncomplicatedly heterosexual.

Despite the community of relative support he was surrounded with, Langston Hughes never came out himself. This may have been out of concern for his safety, but other possible reasons can be found in his writing. In the short story, Hughes wrote about a boy’s father struggling with his son’s queerness. The son’s life has many parallels with Langston’s: both lead the same clubs, excel academically, and have difficult relationships with their fathers.

Langston Hughes died in 1967 and had his ashes encased in a memorial in the foyer of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. He is revered as a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance, as he deserves to be.

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material

Als, H. (2015, March 2). The Elusive Langston Hughes. The Sojourner. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/sojourner

Belonsky, A. (2014, February 1). Today in Gay History: The Great ‘Was Langston Gay?’ Debate. Out Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.out.com/entertainment/today-gay-history/2014/02/01/today-gay-history-great-%E2%80%98was-langston-gay%E2%80%99-debate

BENNETT, J. (2000). MULTIPLE PASSINGS AND THE DOUBLE DEATH OF LANGSTON HUGHES. Biography, 23(4), 670-693. https://doi.org/10.2307/23540229

Jones, S. (2009, August 5). Langston Hughes & Closeted Poetry. Retrieved https://saeedjones.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/reading-in-the-closet/

Langston Hughes. (2012). University of Illinois. Retrieved from http://www.uis.edu/lgbtqa/langstonhughes/

Langston Hughes’ Down-Low Dreams. (2021, August 29). The Gay & Lesbian Review. https://glreview.org/article/langston-hughes-down-low-dreams/

Salinger, Tobias. (2015, February 7). Understanding Langston: A New Collection Reveals The Poet’s Struggles. Observer. https://observer.com/2015/02/collection-of-langston-hughes-letters-reveals-his-many-struggles/

Vogel, S. (2006). Closing Time: Langston Hughes and the Queer Poetics of Harlem Nightlife. Criticism, 48(3), 397-425. https://doi.org/10.2307/23128793

Vogel, S. (2009). The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance. University of Chicago Press.