Once upon a time, in an America far, far away lived two pariah peoples in a land that the Anglo-Saxon ruling class considered as theirs...

October is LGBT History Month, and so we should remember the Pansy Craze of the early 1930s, one of the few bright spots of pre-Stonewall...

HUMAN NATURE OR AFRICAN DEPRAVITY? It’s all depressingly familiar: an artificially cobbled state created under colonialism explodes in...

"Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination."   Well, there it is. Case closed and not much more to say...

Ask an American what areas and sectors of America are controlled by Jews, and you’ll get a variety of responses from “nothing” to...

America hates old people. Aging out of relevance, health, and a community of peers as they die off is no fun even if one has wealth or...

Before there was the record producer John Hammond (not to be confused with the white blues musician John P. Hammond), before there was...

Poetry and lynching -- not an obvious coupling. Poetry, of course, has never been only the hearts-and-flowers rhymes we now associate...

This is a gruesome way to kick off 2023, but because of our commitment to centenaries, we must acknowledge that 1923 began on New Year’s...

It is an odd, little discussed fact that ALL of the best-known poets of the Harlem Renaissance were queer: Claude McKay, Countee Cullen,...

Langston Hughes has long been fiercely claimed as gay by the Black LGBT movement, although there is no hard evidence that he was...

Chances are you’ve never even heard of Clara Smith. It’s confusing that there were so many Smiths amongst the crop of divas that...

Farrokh Balsara was born in Zanzibar’s Government Hospital on September 5, 1946 to Parsee parents, followers of Zoroastrianism. Farrokh’s...

When people ask where the name of my production company comes form, I flippantly reply, “Shoga is Swahili for faggot.” It’s a throwaway...

Think about it. Up until the defeat of pleasing tonality by exponents of modern music some time in the 20th century, classical music sat...

In the early years of the 20th century, the rhymed lyric expressing the feelings of the writer was the dominant poetic form in America....

Ask even a well-educated reader of Harlem Renaissance literature who was the most prolific novelist of the time, and you’ll probably get...

In terms of African American history, 1922 wasn’t particularly notable. Nor was there much to celebrate. A vigorous effort to outlaw the...

For those Americans who have sufficient cultural literacy to know about Josephine Baker, the clip we carry in our head is of a gangly...

The Charleston reigned supreme as the dance of the Roaring Twenties. There were other shorter-lived crazes, most notably the Black...