GAY RE-READINGS OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE POETS

In the light of the long-established fact of their homosexuality or bisexuality, it is high time for the cluster of ''Negro Renaissance'' poets, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Richard Bruce Nugent, to be reappraised by and for gay readers. This paper seeks to develop gay reading strategies in relation to the poems of these writers, in order to reveal for contemporary readers likely subtexts which, at the time of their writing, were publicly read as bearing on race alone. It is often possible to read a particular poem as referring (in images such as that of the social outcast) to either racial or sexual oppression, interchangeably; and possibly, therefore, to both at once, by way of an implicit comparison. Likewise, poems on miscegenation can just as well be read, via the theme of forbidden love, as referring to homosexuality. The fact that most published critical readings deal only with the racial issue does not invalidate the likelihood that the poem can be, and indeed requires to be, read as referring, also, to sexuality. Gay readings emerge, then, not merely from these writers' representations of attractive men and boys, but also in the midst of their most famously anti-racist themes.