“ 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. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

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

Ask even a well-educated reader of Harlem Renaissance literature who was the most prolific novelist of the time, and you’ll probably get a wrong answer. Furthermore, this same person published many personal essays, had a essay in The New Negro, and acted as a mentor to several younger writers of the Renaissance. And she’s pretty much unknown. Why? The answer is in the pronoun.  In the masculinist histories of the Harlem Renaissance, Jessie Fauset is consistently belittled, ignored, or relegated as subordinate to W.E.B Du Bois because she worked as a literary editor of The Crisis from 1919 to 1926. This is deeply unfair. Though she helped to usher in a crucial period of artistic flourishing, and was herself a vital participant in that flourishing, she was not destined to get much credit for it. Fauset wrote and published four novels during the Harlem Renaissance. None of them got much love, although notice was taken of her first, There Is Confusion (1924), mostly because so few novels written by African Americans had been published up to that time. Presumably to mark that achievement, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, the editor of Opportunity , a journal published by the National Urban League and, under Johnson, one of the leading outlets for young black writers, set about to organize a dinner in Fauset’s honor. What he really wanted to do was bring together white editors and publishers as well as black intellectuals and literary critics to kickstart a Negro literary movement that would raise the profiles of such promising but still untested writers as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and promote the fame of Jean Toomer ( Cane ) and Claude McKay ( Harlem Shadows ) who had published earlier in the decade. Nobody was enthusiastic about There Is Confusion , and in truth it was a bad novel. (I gave up trying to read it after the first 60 pages.) The publication of Fauset’s novel provided the occasion to celebrate books by Negro writers but could not be positioned as exemplary. Johnson asked Alain Locke to be the Master of Ceremonies for what became known as the Civic Club Dinner, and the former philosophy professor and future editor of The New Negro smoothly steered the dinner’s course around its putative guest of honor and her unfortunate book.  Fauset was deeply hurt and angry. Years later, in 1933, she wrote a scathing letter to Locke declaring that he, with “consummate cleverness,” had managed, on that evening in 1924, to “keep speech and comment away from the person for whom the occasion was mean.” For the would-be midwives of what was first known as “the Negro Renaissance, the Civic Club Dinner was a brilliant success. Out of it came the idea for The New Negro anthology, and a host of African American writers eventually got published through this skillfully planned introduction to the white world of publishing, criticism, and interracial schmoozing. It set the table for the banquet of the Harlem Renaissance. Although Fauset went on to publish three more novels, the second of which, Plum Bun (1928) is purported to be pretty good, she is little read today, in spite of the rising profile of the Harlem Renaissance, and even less discussed. As a writer of fiction, Fauset had several strikes against her. She had little talent for telling a good story. Because she was half a generation older than the younger writers of the Renaissance, she was hamstrung by the Victorian writing that she had imbibed as a daughter of the light-skinned Philadelphia African American elite. And finally, she produced “women’s writing,” centered around love and courtship and marriage. No wonder she was destined for noblivion. Still, the role she played in the lead up to and early years of the Harlem Renaissance deserves more recognition than she gets. In his essential history, When Harlem Was in Vogue , David Levering Lewis wrote of Fauset, “There is no telling what she would have done had she been a man, given her first-rate mind and formidable efficiency at any task.” The distaff writers of the Harlem Renaissance were slighted then and continue to be slighted now. As a woman you have to be a really good writer – and suffer decades of neglect – to come out of the Renaissance with any reputation. Who can you name besides Nella Larson and the transcendent Zora Neale Hurston?  SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Think about it. Up until the defeat of pleasing tonality by exponents of modern music some time in the 20th century, classical music sat at the apex of valued musical genres. Popular music was always more widely appreciated and influential, but a symphony or an opera was presumed to express the highest aspirations and achievements of a people or a nation – of Western Civilization.   This was still the case in the America of the 1920s which witnessed the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance. Although no one disputed the contributions and leadership of African Americans in so many vernacular forms (ragtime, blues, jazz), the “supreme achievement” of classical music remained a whites-only enclosure, ferociously defended by white critics, musicians, and impresarios.   That didn’t stop a stubborn minority of Black performers and composers, genuinely inspired by the classical tradition, from trying to make their mark. However, the unrelenting hostility of post-Reconstruction society either slapped these would-be acolytes down (e.g. Will Marion Cook) or forced them to incorporate grotesque elements of minstrel sensibility (e.g. Sissieretta Jones’ Black Patti Troubadours) into their performance.   Due to tectonic shifts in American society – the Great Migration and the widespread dissemination of recorded sound – a space was made for Black classical performers and composers to practice their art. The first African American recording company, Black Swan of 1921, was created by its founder Harry Pace specifically to record Black voices in various genres. “Companies would not entertain any thought of recording a colored musician or colored voice. I therefore decided to form my own company and make such recordings as I believed would sell.” Two of the first three pressings were highbrow offerings that appealed only to the Talented Tenth. This was the musical preference of Pace, a friend and colleague of W.E.B. Du Bois. He had no love for blues and jazz.   Black Swan, named after the sobriquet bestowed upon Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, the best-known Black concert performer of the 19th century, would have died a quick, unmemorialized death had not its recording manager, Fletcher Henderson, and musical director, William Grant Still, not recognized that concessions had to be made to popular taste. White people weren’t going to buy recordings of Black classical artists and neither were most African Americans. They stumbled upon a young, unknown Ethel Waters who recorded two blues numbers for them – both smash hits – and the rest is history.   And what of Black classical music? It would not go away. Black voices of deep and genuine talent found white patronage and, usually after Herculean struggles requiring a European stamp of approval, were able to melt the wax of racial hostility blocking the ears of music aficionados. Any African-American, man or woman who was recognized as having scaled the Parnassian heights of classical music represented a badge of racial pride and provided proof that the Negro could be the equal of any White performer. (This last belief, that the artistic achievements of African Americans would forcibly open the minds and doors of white society, was a basic tenet fueling the early impetus of the Harlem Renaissance.)   In March 1925, Survey Graphic, a magazine focusing on sociological research, produced an issue on “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” guest-edited by Howard University professor (and closeted gay) Alain Locke. This was the opening volley of what was then known as “the Negro Renaissance” on the national stage. (All that material was later expanded into the stand-alone best-seller, The New Negro.) And whose portrait graced the cover of Survey Graphic? Renowned classical tenor Roland Hayes. The biography and career of Roland Hayes was prototypical of the Black artist overcoming all obstacles (poverty, lack of formal education, unremitting racism in the world of classical music) to realize his dream of becoming a celebrated tenor. Hayes was born in Curryville, Georgia in 1887, to tenant farmers on the plantation where his mother had once been a slave. At the age of twelve a visiting church pianist introduced the boy to some phonograph records of Enrico Caruso, “That opened the heavens for me,” he wrote. “The beauty of what could be done with the voice just overwhelmed me.” From such unpromising beginnings, Hayes wrested a musical education for himself, bulldozed his way through the racism that would not let him make a career in the music he loved, and eventually gave a command performance at Buckingham Palace in 1922. With European approbation, the American barriers fell, and when Hayes returned to the States in 1923, his career traversed a triumphal series of African American “firsts.” Having conquered the white preserve of classical music, Hayes was a canny choice for the cover of the New Negro Survey Graphic. This was as far from the minstrel image as one could get. But although Hayes lived in Harlem for most of the 1920s, he was never central to the Harlem Renaissance and was rarely enrolled then or later. And we end with one telling lacuna: out of all the essays in The New Negro discussing the various genres of music, there is nothing on the contributions of the Black performers and composers of classical music. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

When people ask where the name of my production company comes form, I flippantly reply, “Shoga is Swahili for faggot.” It’s a throwaway line with a lot of discomfort running around underneath. But let us begin – 1st person - with my encounters with indigenous forms of same-sex activity.   I was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin getting a higher degree (and remember my honorific is Dr. Robert Philipson!) in Comparative Literature with a specialization in Black and African studies. I had decided that I couldn’t make any claims to a credible understanding of African literature without having tackled writings composed, not in the languages of the former colonial powers (French, English, and Portuguese), but in an indigenous African language. With its 400-year tradition of written composition, Swahili, the language that grew from the permanent commercial outposts that Arab traders (and slavers) established along the East African coast, was an obvious choice for me.   In 1985, I was studying Swahili language and culture on the Kenyan coast when I learned about (and saw) men who dressed and lived as women. The name applied to these men was used as a term of endearment between women, shoga. [plural, mashoga]. When denoting a man, the meaning became, to use the endearingly Victorian definition of the 1939 Standard Swahili-English Dictionary, “(2) a catamite; (3) an impotent male person who associates with women, often as a servant.” (One could spend pages and pages unpacking the assumptions of class, religion, and the state of medical knowledge behind these definitions, but let us not go down that rabbit hole.)   I saw the most mashoga in the remote, extremely traditional town Lamu. They walked the streets wearing colorful women’s wrappers (kangas) rather than the more subdued kanzu of male attire. They were noticeably effeminate but not ashamed or fearful. Some of them entered into domestic arrangements with other men, but these “husbands” were not mashoga.The term for them was basha, the king in a suit of playing cards. The Swahili seemed pretty relaxed about these kinds of relationships. There were also masculine-presenting men who had sex with other men, but these blended in with the others, and I learned no Swahili term to refer to them. I know they existed because I bedded one of them while in Lamu.   Three years later I spent most of 1988 at the University of Dar Es Salaam as a researcher in the Kiswahili Institute. Although Dar es Salaam is technically part of the Swahili coast, it had, under colonialism, burgeoned into a cosmopolitan city with populations from all over East Africa. The homophobic attitudes of the inland tribes combined with the catastrophic religious teachings of Christianity to make for a very unfriendly atmosphere. Whatever gay life that might have existed in Dar (and there surely was some) was invisible to me, and as a catamite, I felt completely isolated. I reluctantly returned to celibacy with occasional lapses into lust-powered friendships towards some of the men with whom I came into contact. All were presumably straight, and it was rare that I made anything approaching a pass. Sometimes I detected what I imagined to be reciprocal interest, but most of the time I simmered in silence. On one occasion a young man offered to spend the night with me, but I’m not a seducer by nature, and I couldn’t get beyond his passivity. And then there was Haroub in Zanzibar … (Read the Highlight of the Month.)   There are two discourses of same-sex desire in Africa. The Western one with which we are so familiar, “gay” and its variants, is a colonial and post-colonial import and has aroused all kinds of toxic opposition – xenophobic (“the white man brought it here”), religious (“Sodomite”), political (“my President advocates throwing them all in jail”). Indigenous forms of same-sex desire are sprinkled throughout the continent, but they exist in differing social conditions, lexicalized in different languages, and accorded different degrees of tolerance and visibility. There’s no uniformity about any of this, but nobody has proposed ridding Swahili society of its mashoga. They are a home-grown phenomenon and have been integrated for centuries.             “Gays,” however, are another kettle of swish. They can be ostracized, persecuted, and even killed with impunity. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Farrokh Balsara was born in Zanzibar’s Government Hospital on September 5, 1946 to Parsee parents, followers of Zoroastrianism. Farrokh’s father, Bomi Bulsara, came from Bulsar in Gujurat – hence the family name – and moved to Zanzibar to work in the High Court as a cashier for the British government. Farrokh’s first years of schooling were at the Zanzibar Missionary School, where he was taught by Anglican nuns. At the age of eight, his parents sent him to a Church of England school in India. When he was almost done with his secondary school and completing his final year back in Zanzibar, the 1964 revolution overthrew the ruling elite, and the Bulsaras permanently relocated to Middlesex, England. By this time Farrokh was calling himself “Freddie” and took on the name “Mercury” in 1971, one year after forming Queen. Queen went on to one of the biggest careers in rock music: 18 number-one albums, 18 number-one singles, 10 number-one DVDs, over 170 million records sold. Freddie Mercury wrote Queen’s most famous single, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and was the most flamboyant of the band members, but in the era of glam rock and heavy metal, Freddie’s style didn’t necessarily peg him as gay. Freddie’s deepest emotional relationship was with Mary Austin to whom he was engaged until he confessed to her that he was bisexual. They remained best friends. During the 80s, Freddie delved deeper and deeper into the gay life of London and New York, eventually modeling his look after the “Castro Clone” – tight clothes over a worked-out body, short hair, prominent moustache. It was an odd game of hiding in plain sight. Everybody in Freddie’s inner circle knew about his sexual orientation but he stayed silent on the subject for the rest of his life. Of course coming out in the 80s would have negatively affected his career and possibly the trajectory of the band as well. During the 80s, AIDS was spreading throughout that community. After displaying some signs of illness, his own HIV infection was confirmed by the late '80s. Even after developing AIDS, he denied reports about his illness and being gay. He was more upfront with his bandmates, but never told his family why he was ill .It wasn't until November 23, 1991, that he issued a statement that said in part: "Following enormous conjecture in the press, I wish to confirm that I have been tested HIV-positive and have AIDS. I felt it correct to keep this information private in order to protect the privacy of those around me." He died the next day. Freddie’s connection to Zanzibar is relatively slender, but Stone Town houses a small Freddie Mercury museum placing the first eight years of his life in socio-historical context and goosing up quotes from childhood friends and family that were curated after his death. As you might imagine in this conservative Muslim society, no mention is made of Mercury’s sex life or the fact that he died of AIDS at the age of 45. I asked a few Zanzibaris with whom I felt comfortable if they knew that Mercury was a shoga, and their response was a wry acknowledgment that of course, everybody knew! You just didn’t talk about it in polite society SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts