You hardly hear anything about the role of classical music in the Harlem Renaissance, do you? All anyone talks about are the pop, blues and jazz genres. Yet the Negro du jour whose portrait graced the cover of the magazine edited by Alain Locke that was later to be expanded into The New Negro was Roland Hayes , a tenor who performed art songs in French, German, and Italian. He had finally overcome his home country's prejudice after great success in Europe, including a command performance at Buckingham Palace, to receive grudging recognition for his enormous talent. African American musicians were welcomed and acclaimed in popular genres, but those who were attracted to the white preserve of classical music had to fight for their audiences. A generation earlier, Will Marion Cook , was unable to scale the wall of prejudice and turned to syncopated music half in desperation -- much to the benefit of ragtime and Broadway. Still, classical music and the advanced training that it required always attracted some African Americans. Hall Johnson, the composer of "Fi-Yer" featured in "Smoke, Lilies and Jade," was amongst the few composers -- among them J. Rosamund Johnson and William Grant Still -- who made their living through popular music but whose ambitions reached into concert halls. Born in 1888, Hall Johnson performed in orchestras led by James Reese Europe , Will Marion Cook, and in Eubie Blake's Shuffle Along . By the time of the Harlem Renaissance, however, Johnson had become interested in arranging choral music. (He formed the acclaimed Hall Johnson Choir in 1925.) Concert performances for spirituals were a staple of "serious" African American music and Johnson had a knack for their arrangements. But he wanted to compose his own music as well. When he read The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes' acclaimed first volume of poetry, he found the text he wanted to set to music: " Fire ." SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Langston Hughes published "Fire" in his first collection of poetry The Weary Blues . Here is the poem in its entirety. Fire, Fire, Lord! Fire gonna burn ma soul! I ain't been good, I ain't been clean — I been stinkin', low-down, mean. Fire, Fire, Lord! Fire gonna burn ma soul! Tell me, brother, Do you believe If you wanta go to heaben Got to moan an' grieve? Fire, Fire, Lord! Fire gonna burn ma soul! I been stealin', Been tellin' lies, Had more women Than Pharaoh had wives. Fire, Fire, Lord! Fire gonna burn ma soul! I means Fire, Lord! Fire gonna burn ma soul! The speaker echoes the traditional Christian understanding that sinners will go to hell and burn forever. With radical honesty the man acknowledges his evil nature and that fire is his inevitable fate. But he asks a question, "Tell me brother, do you believe, if you wanna go to heaven (you) got to moan and grieve?" The implication is that perhaps the life of constricted virtue leading upwards is not worth the price of foregoing pleasure and sin. In any event, the man has made his choice and accepts his place in the Christian afterlife. When Hall Johnson sets this text to music, he erases all doubt or ambivalence. He repeats the initial stanza again and again and replaces the glimmer of pleasure in the original poem ("Had more women/Than Pharaoh had wives.") with further confirmation of eternal damnation: "Tell me, brother, can't you see/Dem fiery flames wrapped all 'round me." The final extended high note on which the song ends can easily be sung as a wail of despair. Nugent introduces "Fi-Yer" realistically towards the end of "Smoke, Lilies and Jade" when his autobiographical protagonist, Alex, attends a classical performance in a church with Beauty. "Fy-ah Lawd had been a success . . . Langston bowed . . . Langston had written the words . . . Hall bowed . . . Hall had written the music." But the obsessively repeated lyric, "fire's gonna bu'n ma soul," becomes a leitmotif that sounds throughout the scenes leading to the openly gay embrace. The fire of damnation has become the fire of passion. Rusty Watson 's powerful delivery nicely plays on this admixture of exaltation and despair. Hall's so-called modern spiritual can easily be flattened to a fatalistic acceptance of damnation. Nugent places it in positive context, transforming (perhaps) the Christian trope of fiery damnation into the ecstacy of physical passion. Rusty frees "Fi-Yer" from its art song origins and injects his mastery of gospel into his interpretation. His final soaring "s-o-o-o-u-u-l," the note that pushes Alex into a spontaneous manifestation of his love for Beauty, is overwhelming -- yet ultimately ambiguous. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

I spent the year 1988 doing dissertation research in Tanzania. I was looking to activate four years of classroom Swahili with an immersion experience in a nation and culture where Swahili was the language of daily communication. I had also been an out gay man for almost a decade when I went to live there, and the pervasive homophobia of African culture sent me temporarily back into the closet. Swahili coastal culture, as I discovered, was different from the culture of the interior. The Swahili people -- indeed the language itself -- had evolved over centuries of intermingling between Africans and Arab colonizers who had established outposts and cities on the East Coast of the continent. Consequently the Swahili people, particularly in precolonial times, possessed a cosmopolitan culture that encompassed a greater knowledge of the world and its variety than the mainland tribes upon whom they often preyed as slave-traders.  In fact, about 30% of Swahili vocabulary is derived from Arabic, including the word shoga, which was used as a term of endearment between women. But shoga also had a secondary meaning, acknowledged even by the Victorian Standard Swahili-English Dictionary published by the Inter-Territorial Language Committee for the East African Dependencies in 1939. Shoga's secondary meanings are "(2) a catamite; (3) an impotent male person who associates with women, often as a servant." When I tell people shoga is Swahili for faggot, that is a flip approximation that occludes the richness and nuance of Swahili culture. I saw shogas -- men who dressed and walked as women -- in Lamu and Mombasa, but I never spoke to them. This was an indigenous style of homosexuality that partook of no Western influence and was somewhat intimidating to me for that very reason. (And, of course, I was back in the closet. I wasn't attracted to effeminate men, anyway.) The Swahili language has moved on in a big way since 1988, and perhaps shoga does mean faggot now. The online translation site bab.la only defines shoga as "gay" or "lesbian." (Actually, lesbianism has its own terms, sagana, which means "to grind against one another.") And I ran across the poster pictured at the top for a home-grown video by what appears to be an East African counterpart to Nollywood. So what does shoga mean? Let's say it means "queer," as in non-normative. I think even Swahili speakers would agree with that. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Ah, the shame of it all! How could one despised minority climb out of their oppression on the backs of another despised minority? Cultural critics have theorized that the best way Jewish entertainers could establish their American credentials was by blacking up, at least during the time period when that was acceptable. By donning blackface, Jews could hide their own ethnicity and join the minstrel lineage that stretched back to the 1830s when "Daddy" Rice made a career out of blacking up and acting the buffoon to a little ditty called " Jump Jim Crow ." American audiences, both Black and white, couldn't get enough of it, and minstrel shows were by far the dominant form of live entertainment during the 19th century. The conventions they established outlived the form itself and snaked their way into new and diversifying types of entertainment: vaudeville, musical comedies, radio, and movies.   The expansion of these entertainments provided space for talented children of immigrant parents, many of them Jewish, to establish themselves in a country where other avenues of achievement were either blocked by class privilege or anti-Semitism. If you didn't have the education or opportunity to go to law school, the world of entertainment provided a rough meritocracy of talent. And so, in the early part of the twentieth century, several Jewish performers who went on to have big careers put on burnt cork. Some only had early episodes, such as Sophie Tucker; some kept it as a permanent part of their shtick , notably Eddie Cantor and . . . Well, we'll just wait on that. The thing is, in the first decades of the 20th century, many people performed in blackface, including Blacks themselves. It was accepted as a showbiz convention, not deeply analyzed, and certainly appealing to the white majority, which was where the real money was. If Dad had donned blackface and had spoken an artificially mangled dialect when he was a minstrel performer, why not do it as well if that's what the market demanded? The most famous Black performer of his day, Bert Williams, chose to perform in blackface long after many of his peers had forsaken or repudiated the practice. In 1921, the Black-produced musical Shuffle Along created a theatrical sensation with its introduction of syncopation and Black performing styles on Broadway. Langston Hughes hailed it as a precursor to the Harlem Renaissance, but the show was stuffed with blackface performers, including the comic leads. In a spectacular bit of historical irony, the show's hit song, "I'm Just Wild About Harry," was reprised in the 1939 Hollywood music, Babes in Arms , in which Judy Garland sings and dances with a blacked-up Mickey Rooney and chorus . Mickey and Judy were far from the only Gentile performers to bring a little blackface fun well into the midcentury. Bing Crosby, Shirley Temple, and even Joan Crawford are on that list.  So why then does there seem to be special opprobrium reserved for blacked-up Jews? In part, I believe, it's because Jews, overrepresented in entertainment, easily borrowed, adapted, stole (you choose) Black innovations in music, singing, and comedy to fashion their own sometimes spectacular careers -- a kind of cultural blackface that was otherwise invisible. But what nailed Jewish blackface permanently to the historical wall of shame was the technical innovation, the high production values (for its time), and the blithely unconscious moxie of . . . The Jazz Singer . SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

“ Shuffle Along was a honey of a show,” Langston Hughes wrote in his autobiography, The Big Sea . “To see Shuffle Along was the main reason I wanted to go to Columbia." On May 21, 1921 a bedraggled musical produced, composed and performed entirely by Blacks pulled into an equally bedraggled Broadway-adjacent theater on 63rd Street. Much to everyone's surprise -- except, perhaps, the show's creators -- Shuffle Along proved to be a monster hit, playing over 500 performances, making $9,000,000, and bringing droves of white spectators to sit in a non-segregated audience. Shuffle Along made a significant impact on the theater world, bringing Black styles of syncopation and dance to the Great White Way and opening Broadway up to a string of Black musicals until the Depression choked them off. Previous to Shuffle Along, there had been a twelve-year drought. The show made big stars, since forgotten, out of its female leads, and some notable African American performers whose reputations were still in the future had temporary gigs during its two-year run (Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Adelaide Hall). For the musically inclined, both Hall Johnson and William Grant Still were in an orchestra led by the composer Eubie Blake. Blake's score was of a consistently higher quality than any other musical of the 20s with the exception of Showboat. For both African American theater and Broadway, Shuffle Along was a landmark event. It was such a success that the vaudeville team who wrote the thin, jokey book, Miller and Lyles, bombed in ill-advised revivals of 1932 and 1958. When Broadway's most famous African-American director, George C. Wolfe, wanted to stage an update, he found that, outside of the wondrous score, he could use very little of the original material. Why? Because African American musical theater was still shackled to its minstrel show origins -- blackface, an artificial broken English that was supposed to signal darkie talk, demeaning stereotypes right, left and center. The music and dancing were amazing; the book was mostly an embarrassment. But most people didn't see it that way in 1921, and it would be decades before the Black musical would distance itself adequately from its shameful past. Of course, African Americans were forced into this, but there was no unanimity of sentiment regarding these time-hallowed show business traditions. (Pigmeat Markham reluctantly gave up blackface in 1943.) Nonetheless, lines from the original script, such as, "Listing to me, folkses. Listing to me. We will pay no more attention to my reponent," simply couldn't withstand any sort of historical awakening. At its centenary, Shuffle Along deserves memorialization and is best forgotten. As a poignant illustration of the cruel conditions America imposed on Black artists, this is what Eubie Blake later wrote. "The proudest day of my life was the opening night of Shuffle Along. At the intermission all these white people were saying, 'I would like to touch the man who wrote this music.' At last, I'm a human being."   N.B. Eubie Blake was the son of former enslaved parents who'd moved north to Baltimore. As the only child (out of 21!) who survived to adulthood, he knew no grandparents or any other family members because both his mother and father had been sold in infancy. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

This intriguing headshot portrays a very complex young man destined to become, in spite of his physical absence, a star of the Harlem Renaissance. Claude McKay was a Jamaican who lived most of his life in America, a peasant and a poet, a literary innovator and an acolyte of traditional poetic forms, a radical, a late convert to Catholicism, a Black writer who quarreled and alienated practically all of the other Black players of the Harlem Renaissance. He was also bisexual, although his homosexual adventures were known only to a narrow circle of acquaintances. And yet McKay's commitment to an honest presentation of his complex self and the world around him led him to portray his love of men plainly. You didn't need to "interpret" McKay to understand the valediction to a Black friend crushed by his difficult life in Harlem that closed the 1922 poem, " Rest In Peace . 'Twas sudden—but your menial task is done, The dawn now breaks on you, the dark is over, The sea is crossed, the longed-for port is won; Farewell, oh, fare you well! my friend and lover. His early poems, written in Jamaican dialect and based on his experiences in the constabulary, are equally straightforward about the passion he felt for a fellow policeman. " Bennie's Departure " speaks pretty plainly about "the love that dare not speak its name." Because he was bisexual, McKay recorded and wrote about queer spaces and relationships in 1920s Harlem in a nonjudgmental manner. One of the sympathetic characters in his 1928 bestseller Home to Harlem was Billy the Wolf, "wolf" being Harlem slang for a masculine gay (which, of course, described McKay as well). Our short, " Congo Cabaret ," made the queerness of this speakeasy explicit, but, once again, McKay's writing wasn't in the least bit coy. "I’se a wolf, all right, but I ain't a lone one," Billy grinned. "I guess I’se the happiest, well-feddest wolf in Harlem, Oh, boy!" I could go on, but others have pointed out the strongly homoerotic relationships between McKay's fictional stand-in, the Haitian exile Ray, and the various "manly men" to whom he's attracted. ( Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. ) As McKay grew older, less able to contend with the poverty that dogged him all of his life, and grew more disenchanted and conservative in political outlook, he was more circumspect about his bisexuality, although he wrote a novel, Romance in Marseille , in the early thirties that depicted a loving relationship between two men with a remarkably post-Stonewall sensibility. His queer characters are not exotic or part of a gay subculture. They’re just ordinary working folks. McKay was a passionate, complex, prickly writer and personality. The controversies that his writing stirred up upon publication turned on his radical politics and his unvarnished portrayal of a Black lower class that had no interest in aping the Victorian morality of the Negro middle class. They screwed and drank and fought and enjoyed the company of pansies and ecstatically lost themselves in music, dancing, and the various hues that melanin produced. McKay's unusual tolerance for his queer characters and the evident homoerotic heat of his best-known novels could get lost in the richness -- and strangeness -- of his writing. His mastery of Black dialect (there were, of course, different varieties) was as accomplished as Charles Chestnutt (way earlier) and Zora Neale Hurston (somewhat later).  Commentary from both Black and white readers flattened McKay's writing, although from different perspectives. But all ignored his peekaboo bisexuality until the rediscovery of Black literature and post-Stonewall revaluations of unknown or underappreciated writing allowed for an honest examination of McKay's contribution to both. ( Romance in Marseilles , rejected by the publishers of McKay's other novels, smoldered in manuscript form until brought out just last year!) To paraphrase McKay's best biographer, Wayne F. Cooper, "McKay never openly explored or publicly acknowledged homosexuality as an aspect of his personal life. . . As in other areas of his life, he remained . . . highly ambivalent about his sexual preferences and probably considered bisexuality normal for himself, if not all mankind." During his life, few knew about McKay's homosexual proclivities. He was circumspect for the different times he lived in Harlem and was connected to the Renaissance during its glory years only by correspondence and the publication of his novels. Already a famous poet at the dawn of the Renaissance, his literary presence only grew with the success of Home to Harlem in 1928. He lived as an expatriate until 1934, and his homosexual activity, quasi-visible while he lived in Morocco was in Morocco. Secretive out of necessity, "unclubbable" to use the British expression (he belonged to no queer underground either in New York, London, or France), we nonetheless enroll the essential quixotic, flickering Claude McKay into the Queer Harlem Renaissance. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In the summer of 1920, Langston Hughes was riding the train to Mexico to visit his estranged father, a bitter expatriate who hated his homeland and referred to those of his race who stayed there as "niggers." Although he knew he wanted to be a writer, Langston hadn't found his voice, didn't know who he was or where he was going. He was seventeen years old, recently graduated from Central High in Cleveland. His writing up to that point had been derivative. Who knows himself well at seventeen?   Day was waning as the train began its passage along the Mississippi, deeper and deeper into the land of historical slavery and continued oppression. His grandmother had told him that the greatest fear of the slave was being "sold down the river" to the even greater cruelty and dehumanization of the Deep South. And yet ... all outside the window of the rolling train was the beauteous expanse of that same river gilded by the rays of the setting sun. Langston drew his father's letter from his pocket and wrote on the envelope:   I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins My soul has grown deep like the rivers.   One year later, in the 1921 June edition of The Crisis , the house organ of the NAACP edited by W.E.B. DuBois, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" introduced Langston Hughes to the world. Success was not instantaneous. It would be another five years before Hughes was able to publish his first book.   Since then, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" has become foundational to the African American canon, familiar to anybody who has acquired Black literacy. It has been set to music; Pearl Primus created a dance from it; it has featured in hundreds of poetry recitals wherever African Americans had any control over their education. It is the basis for the cosmogram in the lobby of Harlem's Schomburg Center under which Hughes' ashes are buried. Hughes became the bard of his people, and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was the opening note of that long and varied song.   Hughes was not a confessional poet. Although he surely experienced the sweep of ecstasy and despair, he used his emotions for his art. Otherwise they were not on display. (This is one of the reasons it's so difficult to ascertain his sexuality. He claimed to have loved several women, but we only have his claims. The most visible trauma of his life was his rupture with his extremely rich but toxic white patron during the Harlem Renaissance, Charlotte Osgood Mason.)   At seventeen, Hughes could only draw on the myths and oral traditions of his people in channeling the bardic voice. It is not Langston speaking; it is "The Negro." The historical content, such as it is, is generic in the extreme. (As a Jew, I thought it was my people who built the pyramids of the Nile.) And Abe Lincoln's stock among African Americans has fallen mightily since 1920 -- not quite considered The Great Emancipator any more.   But none of this matters. What matters are the incantatory repetitions, the watery flow of language, the evocative names, the crepuscular light of Abe Lincoln's journey, and that final, crystalline line that turns the bard into his people: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers." It is masterful.   For a lovely illustration of the poem, check out the E.B. Lewis children's book. http://eblewis.com/books/the-negro-speaks-of-rivers/ SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In 1926 a precocious 19-year-old poet and artist, Richard Bruce Nugent, penned the first positive depiction of same-sex desire in American letters. Looking back, this seems like an epochal achievement, and it issued from the heart of the Harlem Renaissance.  The Renaissance suffered a decline in reputation shortly after it was economically crushed by the Great Depression and the taste for literature and art shifted towards protest, a critique of capitalism, and, for Black artists, less kowtowing to white patrons. Eventually the cultural production of the Harlem Renaissance was rediscovered and canonized to some degree by different constituencies of the cultural and educational establishments. Langston Hughes had never gone into eclipse because of his lifelong prolific writing, but feminism had to uncover the grave (and the genius) of Zora Neale Hurston. The Black Arts Movement was partial to Claude McKay, and rising Black stars in academia, such as Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker, raised Jean Toomer’s stock as well as providing sophisticated analyses of the Renaissance oeuvre.  Picked over as the Renaissance was, nobody knew about “Smoke, Lilies and Jade.” This avant-garde prose poem appeared in a single issue of the arts journal Fire!!, and both the stream-of-consciousness style as well as the objectionable subject matter raised the hackles of the old literary guard. Nugent’s contribution was only one of many provocations brandished by the magazine’s editor, Wallace Thurman. (Thurman actually hoped the magazine would be banned in Boston thus raising its notoriety, but that didn’t happen.) When Fire!! appeared in November of 1926, it was either denounced by Black reviewers or pointedly ignored. Few copies were sold, and a real fire consumed most of the print run. Nobody appreciated Fire!!’s astonishing literary and artistic qualities, and one of the Renaissance’s signal achievements literally went up in smoke. Until, that is, a gay white chemistry professor, Thomas Wirth, became a collector of Black literary memorabilia while teaching at HBCUs during his professional life. Wirth was particularly fascinated by the Harlem Renaissance, and in the late 70s he was introduced to Nugent, then living in Hoboken and one step away from homelessness. Wirth and Nugent became friends, and when Nugent showed Wirth his one personal copy of Fire!!, the chemistry professor turned publisher and founded Fire!! Press in 1982 using plates made from Nugent’s original issue to put reproductions of the magazine back out into the world.  As the gay liberation movement picked up steam, Nugent was occasionally approached, not as a foundational creator of a queer aesthetic, but as one of the few living witnesses of the Harlem Renaissance. Jewelle Gomez, who worked on the 1984 documentary Before Stonewall, says that Nugent was a recalcitrant informant, never even admitting to being gay, and in his brief appearances on screen he says nothing particularly insightful or enlightening. The producers and directors of Before Stonewall didn’t know what they had before them, and Nugent was never one to boast of his accomplishments. “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” remained an unknown masterpiece, but that was all about to change. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

The literary lesbian output of the Queer Harlem Renaissance provides meager fare: a couple of windy, antique love poems by Angelina Weld Grimké; certain passages in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s private journal not meant for publication. That’s it. Compared to the blaring boastfulness of lesbian and bisexual women singing the blues, these strangled yelps are pitiful indeed. Patriarchy, white and Black, made every effort to stifle women’s voices; the higher the class, the more effective the muzzle.   Nonetheless, literary women of talent found ways to critique and skewer systemic male privilege, most notably Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen. Larsen’s two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), provide a “thick description” (to use a social science term) of the complex, shifting terrains that Black women of ambition and intelligence had to negotiate. Although respectfully reviewed at the time, they didn’t sell well and slid into the dustbin of history. Larsen’s writing career was amazingly short and ended disastrously with accusations of plagiarism. Larsen herself shied away from the spotlight and was not a good publicist for her art. Besides, what weighty and significant interest could “women’s writing” hold for posterity?   All that changed with the recovery of women’s literature in the wake of the second-wave feminism that transformed culture, academia, and public discourse in the 60s and 70s. The writings of Hurston and Larsen, having languished in obscurity for decades, entered the canon of American literature through the recovery efforts of African American and feminist literary critics.   And then, in the case of Passing, a lesbian subtext was teased out, cogently argued by Deborah E. McDowell in her hugely influential introduction to the 1986 reprint of Larsen’s novels. Thousands of students read it in hundreds of courses on Black writing or feminist writing or both. From that point on, Passing was received as a lesbian or proto-lesbian classic.   Now here is where things get interesting. Larsen’s biography is complicated and bursting with jostling contradictions to be sure, but no whiff of same-sex attraction emanates from its surface. Of course the patriarchy hurt her, and the men in her life – especially her husband -- were disappointments, but what else was new for a woman of her race and generation? If Larsen “revealed” her lesbian tendencies in her writing, it took over half a century for anybody to notice.   And what was there to notice? McDowell’s interpretation is solidly grounded, especially to those of us, children of the New Criticism, who have been trained in the art of close reading, but the homoerotic subtext didn’t leap off the page in the manner of, say, Nugent’s “green and purple story . . . in the Oscar Wilde tradition,” to quote Langston’s description.   Nonetheless, and even though it is based on an interpretation, Passing is now regarded as a queer achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. That is why Time Magazine pegged its belated discovery of the Queer Harlem Renaissance to the film’s Netflix debut and that is why NewFest screened that same film as a Centerpiece offering.   I’ll take it because there’s not much else to take on the distaff side of the literary queer Renaissance. But what about Larsen herself? Let us say that she wrote a queer novel. That doesn’t make her queer nor does it make her a “queer icon.” Blair Niles was a white woman who published a novel with a sympathetic gay protagonist just two years later (Strange Brother), yet nobody is fighting to enroll her into the ranks of queer icons.   Let us end with the Nella Larsen passage at the top of this piece. Her direct, suggestive prose delivers the thought with a punch. It describes the debilitating effect of unrelieved discontent. “She felt shut in, trapped.” Larsen could be ascribing a closeted homosexual desire to her protagonist … or it could be something else entirely. That is the genius of her style. It’s visual, concrete, meticulously observant in its cyclorama of New York City and the mores of its inhabitants. Yet it also leaves room for interpretation. “Authors do not supply imaginations. They expect readers to have their own, and to use it.”   Well, we used it, Nella. Welcome to the Queer Harlem Renaissance. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

The Charleston reigned supreme as the dance of the Roaring Twenties. There were other shorter-lived crazes, most notably the Black Bottom, but the Charleston endures in popular memory. And, like all popular dances that swept through white America, it had its origins in African American culture. A close look at the social history of any of these dances (the fox trot, the Lindy Hop) will enmesh us in the tangle of American racism, but as the Charleston will celebrate its centenary in 2023, let us begin in 1923. But actually, we have to go back to 1921 with the huge, unexpected success of the all-Black musical, Shuffle Along, and its introduction of Black styles of dancing and music to Broadway. The impact of Shuffle Along rippled out, with nine African-American musicals opening between 1921 and 1924. White producers were anxious to get in on the act, literally speaking, One literal white, George White, figured that if he lured the stars and librettists, Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, to write a knock-off of Shuffle Along, success was assured. Miller and Lyles obligingly created a sequel for themselves: same characters, same setting (Jimtown), same blackface minstrelsy. So unapologetic was the theft that White wanted to name his show Shuffle Along of 1923 until threatened with legal action.  Runnin’ Wild opened in October and ran a respectable 228 performances. The musical might have subsequently disappeared into well-deserved obscurity but for the flaming success of a dance number created and staged by Black female choreographer, Elida Webb. (She had also been a dancer in Shuffle Along. ) But Webb hadn’t invented the moves. They had already come to Harlem from South Carolina. In order to raise money for his orphanage in the first years of the 20th century, the African-American Reverend Daniel Jenkins of Charleston formed a brass band made up of his charges. At that time the Jenkins Orphanage band was mainly performing Gullah, or “geechee music.” True to that tradition, the ensemble featured young dancers performing “geechie” steps in front of the band as if conducting. There are various stories about how the dance moves came north, but come they did. James P. Johnson, the composer of Runnin’ Wild, claimed that some of his music was inspired by “geechie dancers” he’d seen while playing in New York dance halls. For Runnin’ Wild , Johnson wrote “The Charleston,” the angular, upbeat composition we all know and love (if grudgingly). Webb’s staging was, by all accounts, brilliant. While a single female performer (Elisabeth Welch -- quoted in “T’Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness”) sang and performed the moves that were soon to go viral, a chorus of Dancing Redcaps provided polyrhythmic “Juba patting.” James Weldon Johnson, the past and future author of the Harlem Renaissance (whose full flowering was still a couple of years away) testified as a member of the audience. They did not wholly depend upon the orchestra—an extraordinary jazz band—but had the major part of the chorus supplement it with hand and foot patting. The effect was electrical and contagious. It was the best demonstrating of beating out complex rhythms I have ever witnessed; and, I do not believe New York ever before witnessed anything of just its sort. From the Broadway stage, patronized by white audiences, the dance spread everywhere . . . and lasted through the decade. Fun Queer Harlem Renaissance factoid: One of the Dancing Redcaps was Pete Nugent, brother of Richard Bruce Nugent. Pete Nugent went on to an extremely successful dance career. Though they both spent their lives in the same city, Richard never mentions his younger brother.  SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

For those Americans who have sufficient cultural literacy to know about Josephine Baker, the clip we carry in our head is of a gangly young Black woman shaking her banana-skirted booty for Parisian audiences during the 1920s – the decade the French refer to as “les annees folles.”         That’s it. One of the greatest and longest-lived European entertainers reduced, in her home country, to a comic stereotype. And yet, on November 30 of last year, a cenotaph of Josephine Baker was placed in the Paris Pantheon, the highest posthumous honor a grateful country can award its most illustrious artists and citizens (a cohort that includes Alexandre Dumas, Marie Curie, and Voltaire). What’s missing for the citizens in the land of her birth?         Just about everything. Europeans in general and the French in particular are familiar with her long successful career as a dancer, singer, model, movie star, and Kardashian-style celebrity we have come to expect: four marriages, fabulous sums of money earned and spent, a chateau in the south of France. Few Americans know that she was awarded a Croix de Guerre for her service as a spy and courier in the French resistance. They don’t know about her personal commitment to racial harmony in adopting twelve children from around the world, her so-called “rainbow tribe.” They most egregiously don’t know about her work in support of the American civil rights movement during the 1950s and 60s. (She was one of the speakers at the 1963 March on Washington.) The French, of course, do know about Josphine’s extraordinary life, and they have fashioned their own nation-glorifying Josephine legacy. Theirs illustrates, as was the case with so many African Americans escaping the stultifying strictures of Jim Crow America, how this extraordinary woman could thrive and blossom in the revivifying atmosphere of liberté-egalité-fraternité. The journalist Laurent Kupferman, who drafted the initiative to honor Baker with a Pantheon interment, told The New York Times, “Josephine Baker embodies the Republic of possibilities. How could a woman who came from a discriminated and very poor background achieve her destiny and become a world star? That was possible in France at a time when it was not in the United States.” Actually, it was possible for Florence Mills, Ethel Waters, and Madame C. J. Walker to “achieve their destinies” without moving to France, but let us not descend to historical cases to prick that ideological bubble. And as for “the Republic of possibilities” – the phrase could only provoke derisive laughter from the millions of former subjects of the French Empire, some of whom had perfectly mastered French language and culture only to find themselves discriminated against and excluded. (Read Frantz Fanon’s “Black Skins, White Masks” for an early and eloquent indictment of how French racism operates so damagingly in France and her colonies.) And finally, because this is a Shoga blog, there is Josephine’s least-trumpeted legacy – her sex-positive approach to bisexuality. She catapulted out of St. Louis poverty by attaching herself to the lesbian blues singer Clara Smith. Already married twice by age 15 (Baker was the family name of her second husband, and that one she held onto), Josephine used her sex and talent to move her career through the early Harlem Renaissance (passing through Shuffle Along as a chorine and probably sleeping with Eubie Blake along the way) to her 1925 introduction to Paris where she exploded like a supernova. That propulsive energy overwhelmed and seduced both men and women – but, of course the women we heard less about than the two French husbands (one of whom was gay himself) and the crowned heads of Europe. La Baker, as the French referred to her, also formed liaisons with fellow American expatriate Bricktop, French author Colette, and Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Josephine Baker’s bisexuality is not part of either her American legacy (Black female sex symbol blows up abroad) or her French one (Black female sex symbol grows into citizen of the world). Josephine didn’t advertise her affairs with women, but one can hardly fault her discretion on the topic given the times. She came late to the civil rights movement, prompted less by a lifelong hatred of Jim Crow than by her humiliating run-ins with it in the 1940s after decades of insulation as a French celebrity. She was never affected by homophobia and died six years after the Stonewall Riots. Nonetheless, the bisexuality of France’s latest Pantheon honoree and America’s least forgotten showgirl of the Harlem Renaissance is part of the historical record. That too is Josephine Baker’s legacy however else that legacy is manipulated and misrepresented for other agendas. We have our own agenda, and Josephine Baker – her beauty, her humor, her self-delusion, her enormous talent, her flickering humanity, her wounded pride, and unquenchable spirit – belongs to us as well. We too are her Rainbow Tribe. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. 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In terms of African American history, 1922 wasn’t particularly notable. Nor was there much to celebrate. A vigorous effort to outlaw the barbarous practice of lynching on a national level, the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, was scuttled in the Senate by Southern lawmakers. (Shamefully, a federal anti-lynching bill still hasn’t been passed!) Marcus Garvey’s gloriously delusional schemes for restoring Africa to the Black man (with, of course, Marcus Garvey as its emperor) began to sink literally (the dissolution of the Black Star Line) and organizationally (Garvey arrested for mail fraud). There is a theme to tease out from the centenaries of 1922 if one is inclined to impose retrospective significance on unrelated events. Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association advanced notions of Black pride and Black unity – a diasporic consciousness – as no other movement had before. As an organizer and political leader, Garvey was a disaster; as an ideologue, mythmaker, and weaver of dreams, he was nothing less than epic. But for Garvey, as for the European colonizers he so decried, Africa was little more than a tabula rasa awaiting the imposition of Civilization. (Check out the history of Liberia for the 19th-century version of that “Negro” arrogance.) Up until the 1920s, most African Americans were either vaguely or pointedly ashamed of their African origins. They were only taught what the white man had preached: that the Dark Continent had yet to shed its infantile savagery and that Africans had contributed nothing to Civilization. And this brings us to another centenary, the publication of Harlem Shadows by the poet Claude McKay. McKay is a complex, contradictory, sometimes tortured writer, not always consistent in his views on race, literature, and ideology but always in the vanguard of writers who were dealing with the larger perspectives the 20th century made available to African Americans. In 1922, Harlem Shadows preceded the Harlem Renaissance, announced the Harlem Renaissance, and fertilized the Harlem Renaissance by inspiring the younger writers who followed.  McKay was born and raised in Jamaica and didn’t encounter America until he came in 1912 at the age of 23. Having grown up in a majority-Black colony where the racial hierarchy was maintained by ideological state apparatuses (government and education) rather than by violence, McKay had learned something about ancient African glory. He speaks of this in the Harlem Shadows poem entitled “Africa.” Yet the final lines of this sonnet sadly echo the Western ignorance of his ancestral land. Honor and Glory, Arrogance and Fame! They went. The darkness swallowed thee again. Thou art the harlot, now they time is done, Of all the mighty nations of the sun. But through this Western-imposed gloom, there comes a glimmer of light. In 1922, Professor William Leo Hansberry of Howard University teaches the first course ever in African history and civilization. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts