When Harlem Was ‘as Gay as It Was Black’

By Derrick Bryson Taylor and Scott Reinhard, New York Times

On Valentine’s Day in 1930, the Hamilton Lodge at the Rockland Palace in Harlem hosted a masquerade ball that was billed as a “rendezvous for the frail and freakish gang,” according to a pithy dispatch from The New York Age, the prominent Black newspaper of the era.

At the event, the Age report read, “it was difficult to distinguish sexes.” Women were “rigged up” in masculine attire, while “scores of males of pronounced effeminate traits gracefully disported themselves in beautiful evening gowns.”

Although many people associate the history of queer culture (a descriptor whose original negative usage has been transformed over time) in New York with Greenwich Village, events like the ball were not uncommon in Renaissance-era Harlem, where the L.G.B.T. population socialized in a variety of spaces, some of which were interracial. Their lives were frequently viewed as scandalous for the mores of the time.

Over roughly two decades, Harlem became home to Black artists, musicians, authors and socialites of all sexual stripes. In a 1993 essay, the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. stated it bluntly: Harlem was “surely as gay as it was Black.”

In the years since, the Renaissance has increasingly been seen as having created “modes of kinship that far exceeded nuclear families,” in the words of Clare Corbould, an African-American history scholar and associate professor at Deakin University in Australia. “Scholarship on the Renaissance has dovetailed with queer theory and studies to deepen and broaden our understanding of the Renaissance,” she said.

Learn about the L.G.B.T. performers such as Gladys Bentley, Albert Hunter, and Langston Hughes, who used their artistry to express their sexuality.

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