AUTHOR: Ellen McBreen TITLE: Biblical Gender Bending in Harlem: The Queer Performance of Nugent's Salome SOURCE: Art

Journal 57 no3 22-8 Fall'98 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. Just before his death in 1987, the African American artist and poet Richard Bruce Nugent vividly recalled how he had negotiated the politics of sexual identity in Harlem of the late 1920s: "I've been asked how I was able to write so openly about homosexuality in 1926.... People did what they wanted to do with whom they wanted to do it. You didn't get on the rooftops and shout, 'I fucked my wife last night.' So why would you get on the roof and say, 'I loved prick.' You didn't. You just did what you wanted to do."(FN1) Although not shouting it from the rooftops, Nugent was, in fact, openly gay, and in his work he outed himself again and again. His fellow cultural protagonists of the Harlem Renaissance-including closeted gay or bisexual authors and artists such as Countee Cullen, Richmond Barth, Wallace Thurman, and Alain Locke--showed more discretion.(FN2) Nugent's openness was more like those Harlemites "in the life," who were indeed publicly shouting "I love prick" in the cellar clubs, buffet ats, and rent parties of Harlem's thriving entertainment scene. Langston Hughes described the period as being a time "when the Negro was in vogue," and the homosexual body in Harlem--both black and white, male and female--was a celebrated mainstay within this vogue.(FN3) Well-known female impersonators such as "Gloria Swanson" presided as the headlining club hostess on West 134th Street. The blues singer Gladys Bentley sang of "sissies" and "bulldaggers," performed in male drag, and married her lesbian lover in a much publicized ceremony.(FN4) Harlem was also host to the country's largest annual drag ball--organized, appropriately enough, by the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows at the Hamilton Lodge, but known more commonly as the Faggot's Ball. Its popularity boomed in the early 1930s, drawing an interracial crowd of up to seven thousand, described by the singer Taylor Gordon as ranging "from bootblacks to New York's rarest bluebloods."(FN5) The Harlem press covered the Hamilton balls with a tone of bemused fascination and relative tolerance. The Amsterdam News and New York Age ran detailed stories on the events, often as lead news, with accompanying photographs or drawings, as well as interviews with the winning drag queens. (FN6) That Nugent appreciated the gender uidity of Harlem's popular performances is clear from his own detailed recollection of the period's entertainment: "'Male' and 'female' impersonation was at its peak as night club entertainment.... The Ubangi Club had a chorus of singing, dancing, be-ribboned and be-rouged 'pansies,' ... the famous Hamilton Lodge 'drag' balls were becoming more and more notorious and gender was becoming more and more conjectural."(FN7) This fascination with conjectural gender and the performance of identity informed much of Nugent's work. His Salome images of 1930, for example, illustrate female bodies, many of them named for biblical characters, performing a sexy burlesque of hyperbolized gender. The curves of these dancing gures are sparingly outlined in transparent strokes, so that their bodies are denied a sense of corporeality. They are surfaces on which Nugent placed exaggerated attributes that seem to mimic gender, rather than to express its authenticity. In one gure from the series, huge pendulous breasts capped by impossibly erect and massive nipples seem like gross caricatures of the female anatomy (g. 1). Pairs of interlocking triangles could

symbolize either a vagina and patch of pubic hair or an abbreviated costume worn to represent them. As in drag performance, Nugent relies on somewhat hackneyed tropes of overstylized femininity. Like a campy and impersonated Hollywood star, eyes and lips are heavily made up, and thin eyebrows are drawn in with a dramatic Dietrichesque arch. Yet the hyperbolized sexuality that Nugent gives to these biblical performers is drawn less from Hollywood than from a widespread gay understanding of Oscar Wilde's 1893 theatrical version of Salome and his characterization of her as a potent symbol of sexual transgression. Although several of the gures in Nugent's series are named after characters not associated with the Salome story, Nugent's parodic irtation with the signs of gender identity is in keeping with Wilde's subversive project--to reveal queerness within the very pages of the Bible. Nugent's Salome illustrations also reect a more immediate popular context--the sexually progressive entertainment of Harlem, in which identity was articulated along lines of performance. With their skin tones conveying a range of unnatural hues, however, these perverse bodies do not reect the goals of racial solidarity and uplift that Renaissance culture was expected to embody. They are the expressions of an openly gay African American man circulating in a self-conscious cultural milieu that clearly discouraged gay content in the more sanctied realms of art and literature. Salome distills the loaded tensions between sexual and racial identities in the Harlem Renaissance.(FN8) Harlem society had, in fact, both embraced and rejected its thriving gay community. The same papers that ran front-page, celebratory stories on drag ball winners also ran articles in support of the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell's much publicized efforts to out and banish homosexual ministers from Harlem pulpits during the early 1930s.(FN9) Other Renaissance critics campaigned vigorously for the projection of an image of the New Negro that would combat stereotypes of the lascivious and primitive sexual Other. Collier's magazine labeled Harlem a "synonym for naughtiness" in 1933, reecting the idea that Harlem itself was an escapist sexual commodity for downtown whites, many of them gay men, wishing to indulge in a rebel and exotic sexuality without fear of censure by their own social group.(FN10) Not surprisingly, Harlem's cultural leaders sought to counter this racist and touristic characterization. Homosexuals and gender impersonators were afforded a good deal of tolerance in Harlem, then, so long as their antics were conned to the space of performance. For many prominent critics, however, decadence, perversity, and blatant homosexuality were unacceptable themes in the higher forms of art and literature that they hoped could advance the race. W. E. B. DuBois, for one, argued for a single priority for all of Negro art--the moral uplift of black people. "All art is propaganda and ever must be despite the wailing of the purist," he charged. "I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda."(FN11) Though less Victorian in his aesthetics than DuBois, Alain Locke shared the idealistic notion that the race's "more immediate hope rests in the revaluation by White and Black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments."(FN12) Locke secured patrons for many of the artists and writers whom he felt would precipitate such a revaluation--those sympathetic to his guidelines for a distinct and authentic African American visual vocabulary, drawn from the shared heritage of an African sculptural tradition. He criticized those artists who, in sharing what he called the "blindness of the Caucasian eye," slavishly imitated European ideals of beauty. Locke, of course, played a central role in professionally establishing those whom we now recognize as quintessential Harlem Renaissance artists--Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, and the sculptor Richmond Barth--who were clearly working in step with the movement's aims.

When an image of a highly sensual black male body was homoeroticized within the connes of this dominating ethos, it was often neutralized by its African references. Barth's sculptural work is one articulation of this phenomenon. The Harmon Foundation successfully promoted his work in the 1930s, and major museums, including the Whitney in 1935, purchased his sculptures. As recently as 1989, his Feral Benga (Benga: Dance Figure) (g. 2) was praised chiey for its "spiritual quality," and as with most of Barth's work, it is read in terms of race alone, as being about the inherent beauty of the African body. The artist's own homosexuality, or his tendency to eroticize male bodies of color, is clearly absent from these discussions, symptomatic of a sustained erasure of sexuality within discussions of Harlem Renaissance art. (FN13) This clear prioritization of an essentialized, and thus protected, African Americanism has severely limited the critical discourses in which these potentially transgressive works could circulate. In 1930 Locke and other Renaissance critics would have been hard-pressed to nd praiseworthy, race-uplifting content in Nugent's depictions of homoeroticized white male bodies. Unlike his female gures, the men in Nugent's Salome series are more clearly marked as Caucasian. In one illustration, most likely of St. John the Baptist, Nugent elegantly eroticizes his male subject as the object of Salome's forbidden desire (g. 3). Wearing a meticulously groomed golden beard and a well-coiffed crown of long hair, he coyly tempts his admirers with one loose curl. St. John's rened features and thin pink-stained lips are far more effeminate than those of Nugent's female characters. At the same time, signs of the saint's hesitant masculinity are understated. His penis is accid and unassuming, and in conjunction with his turned glance and beautifully teared cheek, it symbolizes his rejection of Salome's aggression. His armband of thorns draws drops of blood, however, and foreshadows his impending martyrdom at her hands. The Salome series was not Nugent's rst irtation with Oscar Wilde and European n-desicle decadence nor with blatantly homosexual themes. In 1926 Nugent's prose poem "Smoke, Lillies, and Jade" had appeared in the highly controversial and short-lived literary journal Fire!!, which the artists of 267 House created, as Hughes remembered, to "burn up a lot of the old stereotyped Uncle Tom ideas of the past."(FN14) By publishing material that dealt explicitly with prostitution, miscegenation, and homosexuality, the group also clearly intended to burn up what was perceived to be the stiing, moralistic aesthetics of an older, conservative generation of cultural leaders. "Smoke, Lillies, and Jade" describes an explicitly homosexual relationship between the autobiographical Alex, a young black artist "content to lay and smoke and meet friends at night ... to argue and read Oscar Wilde," and his male Latin lover Beauty.(FN15) The following passage reveals Nugent's understanding of Salome's transgressive love for John the Baptist as being about homosexual desire, a parallel to Alex's own illicit feelings for Beauty. While gazing at his sleeping lover, Alex muses: "his lips were so beautiful ... quizzical ... Alex wondered why he always thought of that passage from Wilde's Salome when he looked at Beauty's lips ... he would like to kiss Beauty's lips."(FN16) The poem's frank homoeroticism and Wildean allusions made the work unacceptable to its Renaissance critics. DuBois lambasted an artistic philosophy that would "turn the Negro renaissance into decadence," Benjamin Brawley complained of its "sordid" and "forbidden themes," and the literary editor at the Baltimore Afro-American reported, "I have just tossed the rst issue of Fire!! into the re."(FN17) Locke deplored the poem and the "effete echoes of its contemporary decadence," tellingly suggesting that the less amboyant poet Walt Whitman "would have been a better

point of support than a left-wing pivoting on Wilde and Beardsley."(FN18) By invoking Nugent's homage to Wilde and the artist Aubrey Beardsley, Locke makes clear that he is referring to Nugent's invocations of Salome. Beardsley's 1894 illustrations for Wilde's play had brought the queer subtext of the drama to the surface by focusing on the gay relationship between the Page of Herodias and the Syrian soldier, and by emphasizing the lack of gender distinction between Salome and John the Baptist, which underscored the perversity of Salome's forbidden desire. Beardsley's images reveal the original basis for what was a widespread queer understanding of the play.(FN19) Although Nugent would have known them, his own Salome series is additionally informed by both the production history of Wilde's play and its notorious associations with gender impersonation and homosexual drag. Unlike the exclusively misogynist representations of Salome dominating Symbolist art and literature, the gay subtext of Wilde's play transformed Salome into a queer heroine. A moral outcast from the Bible now became a popular, provocative symbol of sexual rebellion, so much so that a painstaking military investigation of "prominent queers" at a Newport naval base in 1919 disclosed that drag queens there had assumed the nickname "Salome."(FN20) Her reputation was further "tarnished" by scandalous early twentieth-century productions of Wilde's play. The female dancers Maud Allen and Ida Rubenstein were both hysterically maligned for degenerate homosexuality after their performance as this sexually deviant character.(FN21) A 1922 silent Hollywood lm version starred the Russian actress Alla Nazimova, decked in impossibly colored Art Nouveau wigs and accompanied by a cast of all male (and purportedly gay) dancers, who strutted in makeup, tights, and pasties.(FN22) Nugent had only to look to his friend and fellow dancer Hemsley Wineld for a contemporary Salome in drag. Wineld played the part at the Greenwich Village Cherry Lane Theatre in 1929, one year before Nugent executed his series.(FN23) And in a 1984 interview, Nugent recalled dancing with Wineld in a Salome production at the Alhambra Theatre.(FN24) Through dancing in particular, Nugent understood the construction of his own gender as a literal performance: "I was, at one time, something that not many dancers were: I was tall, I was seemingly masculine and strong, I behaved--on the stage--in a masculine manner."(FN25) As a gay African American who remembered moving to New York to "pass" for white, Nugent was particularly sensitive to the performative aspects of both sexual and racial identity.(FN26) The female faces of Salome, represented as cross-gendered, cross-racial dramatic masks, reected this sensitivity. Unlike Nugent's other gural illustrations, such as the Drawings for Mulattoes that appeared in Johnson's Ebony and Topaz (1927), the female bodies of Salome do not engage the dynamics between recognizable white and black racial tropes.(FN27) Their physiognomy, as well as skin and hair color, turn existing racial categories on their heads. With a set of dyes commonly used to colorize black-and-white photographs, Nugent created unnatural pale green and violet esh. A pair of his dancers sport outrageous pink and aqua wigs, playing fast and loose with physical details that are widely viewed as immutable markers of race and gender but function here as so many costumes to exchange. The Salome gures are performers, parodying the fantasy of stable identity categories. In doing so, they operate in a way similar to what Judith Butler describes as the drag performative, disrupting the "regulatory ction of heterosexual coherence," which conceals those discontinuities "in which gender does not necessarily follow from sex, and ... sexuality ... does not seem to follow from gender."(FN28) In his writing as well, Nugent focused on this bodily disorganization. His 1933 "Narcissus" describes a character between the poles of gender:

And the beauty of it pained him so: The smile so double sexed and slow: Faint fair breasts and male torso-Male into female seemed to ow,--(FN29) The identity performatives of Nugent's Salome are found in later works as well, many of which depict the body in the space of an actual theatrical stage. In a series of pen-and-oil set designs, executed for an unrealized production of the Gilgamesh epic, Nugent uses theatrical fantasy to undo compulsory heterosexuality and its dominance in works of literature. In these designs, he reread the male friendship between the beautiful young king Gilgamesh and his mythic counterpart Enkidu as one of homosexual love. This interpretation draws on the spirit of Edward Carpenter's 1917 gay reclamation project Iolus, an anthology that sought to establish a gay literary tradition in Shakespeare, Whitman, and Byron. Known as the "bugger's bible," Iolus circulated among Nugent's friends in Harlem and was recommended to the poet Countee Cullen by Locke himself.(FN30) This resurrection of a gay canon was a project Nugent consistently undertook, and following the example of Wilde's Salome, once again he continued to recast biblical characters as queer performers. A series of 1947 watercolor sketches includes sexy pin-up versions of the pairs Jesus and Judas and David and Goliath (g. 4). Nugent employed a plethora of phallic visual puns to describe homosexual lust between the adolescent David (with "faint fair breasts" and slender waist) and his enemy, a hypermasculinized, unzipped Goliath. His illustration parodies stereotypical gay male relationships, with an older predatory man targeting a younger object of beauty. In a gesture that underscores his erotic intentions, Goliath grasps a thorny, erotic, rodlike plant, growing from behind and between David's legs. Images such as these playfully dismantle heterosexuality as the biblical norm. Although Nugent's visual work is infrequently considered in Harlem Renaissance scholarship today, it is clear that his colleagues, perhaps even more than Nugent himself, took his work seriously. Even Locke, who did very little in terms of promoting him, praised Nugent's brilliance in a 1932 letter to the Washington, D.C., patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason. He wrote to her, "The younger Negroes here ... are about on their last legs, with the exception of Nugent, a genius."(FN31) Nugent's idiosyncratic efforts to avoid a traditionally successful career explain, in part, why his work has never been included in the Renaissance canon. But it is also true that his references to European n-de-sicle decadence, as well as his treatment of blatantly gay themes, put him at odds with the self-conscious "positive" image making championed by the Renaissance's midwives. Nugent did not glorify an African heritage or depict the details of black life--other than his own perhaps--and his Salome series was drawn from his appreciation for a play by the gay and white Oscar Wilde. Wallace Thurman understood his friend's problematic position, describing it through the character Paul Arbian in his 1932 roman clef Infants of the Spring. Arbian, most likely lampooning Nugent's own sentiments, claims "Oscar Wilde [as] the greatest man that ever lived." Arbian's fate, however, is sealed by this inopportune choice of role model: "He sits around helpless, possessed of great talent, doing nothing.... Being a Negro, he feels that his chances for notoriety la Wilde are slim."(FN32) Nugent's themes were theatrical and campy, perhaps too similar to the queer transgressions of Harlem's own popular entertainment, from which other culture makers wished to distance themselves. Works like Salome out Nugent as gay, but not so clearly as black, and as an artist, he was encouraged to prioritize one identity over another. Homosexuality was seen as an unspeakable, private identity that could do nothing but threaten a collective African American

identity, the coherency and ownership of which, not surprisingly, was jealously guarded. Nugent recalled late in life: "I remember DuBois did ask, 'Did you have to write about homosexuality? Couldn't you write about colored people? Who cares about homosexuality?' I said, 'You'd be surprised how good homosexuality is. I love it.' Poor DuBois."(FN33) ADDED MATERIAL Ellen McBreen is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. This essay is a revised version of a paper given at The Harlem Renaissance Reconsidered, a panel organized for the College Art Association 84th Annual Conference in Boston in 1996. I would like to thank Robert Lubar, Linda Nochlin, Jenny Liu, and the members of the 1995 Identity and Difference colloquium at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. 1. Richard Bruce Nugent. Untitled, from the Salome series, 1930. Transparent Japanese dye on paper. 8 1/2 11 (21.6 27.9). Estate of Richard Bruce Nugent 1998 Thomas Wirth. 2. Richmond Barth. Feral Benga (Benga: Dance Figure), 1935. Bronze, 19 1/2 (49.5). The Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey. Purchased by exchange. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles W. Engelhard. 3. Richard Bruce Nugent. Untitled, from the Salome series, 1930. Transparent Japanese dye on paper, 8 1/2 11 (21.6 27.9). Estate of Richard Bruce Nugent 1998 Thomas Wirth. 4. Richard Bruce Nugent. David and Goliath, 1947. Ink and transparent Japanese dye on paper. 8 1/2 11 (21.6 27.9). Estate of Richard Bruce Nugent 1998 Thomas Wirth.
FOOTNOTES

1. Richard Bruce Nugent, in Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 289. 2. See Amitai F. Avi-Ram, "The Unreadable Black Body: 'Conventional' Poetic Form in the Harlem Renaissance," Genders 7 (1990): 32-45; Alden Reimonenq, "Countee Cullen's Uranian 'Soul Windows,'" Journal of Homosexuality 26 (1993): 143-65; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "The Black Man's Burden," in Michael Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 230-38. For a good historical summary of lesbian life in Harlem, see Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). For material on literary lesbians in Nugent's artistic circle, and how the gay male sexual politics in Harlem's literary community often prevented promotion of their work, see Gloria Hill, Color, Sex, and Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 3. For an excellent account of the gay subculture in Harlem of the 1920s, see George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 244-67. See also Eric Garber, "A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem," in Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, eds., Hidden from History (New York: New American Library, 1989), 326-28, and David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Knopf, 1981). 4. Eric Garber, "Gladys Bentley: The Bulldagger Who Sang the Blues," Out/Look, Spring 1988, 52-61. 5. Taylor Gordon, Born to Be (New York: Covici-Friede, 1929), 228; cited in Chauncey, 258. 6. See Chauncey, 257-63, and the reproduction of the Amsterdam News illustrations from the 1930s, 262.

7. Richard Bruce Nugent, "Gloria Swanson" study, Federal Writers Project New York, Negroes in New York, reel I, biographies section, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; cited in Chauncey, 252. 8. For a recent discussion of these tensions, see James Smalls, "Public Face, Private Thoughts: Fetish, Interracialism, and the Homoerotic in Some Photographs by Carl Van Vechten," in Thomas Foster, Carol Siegel, and Ellen E. Berry, eds., Sex Positives? The Cultural Politics of Dissident Sexualities (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 144-93. 9. Chauncey discusses Powell's purging efforts and its news coverage, 254-56. See also Adam Clayton Powell, Against the Tide: An Autobiography (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1938), 57-59. 10. Faderman, 68. 11. W. E. B. Dubois, "Criteria of Negro Art," Crisis 32 (October 1926): 296. 12. Alain Locke, "To Certain of Our Philistines," Opportunity (May 1925): 155. 13. Gary Reynolds and Beryl Wright, eds., Against the Odds: African American Artists and the Harmon Foundation, exh. cat. (Newark: Newark Museum, 1989), 154. Margaret Vendryes has recently corrected this erasure in "Expression and Representation of Identity: Race, Religion, and Sexuality in the Art of the American Sculptor Richmond Barth," Ph. D. diss., Princeton University, New Jersey, 1997. 14. Langston Hughes, "The Twenties: Harlem and its Negritude," African Forum I (Spring 1966): 18. 15. Richard Bruce Nugent, "Smoke, Lillies, and Jade," in Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists I (New York: Fire Press, 1926): 34. 16. Ibid., 37. 17. W. E. B. Dubois, "Books," Crisis 33 (December 1926): 81-82; Benjamin Brawley, "The Negro Literary Renaissance," The Southern Workman 56, no. 4 (April 1927): 178; Baltimore critic cited in David Levering Lewis, "Harlem My Home," in Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America, exh. cat. (New York: The Studio Museum of Harlem, 1987), 71. 18. Alain Locke, The Survey, August 15-September 15, 1927, 563. 19. See, for example, Beardsley's Woman in the Moon, A Platonic Lament, and John and Salome. For an expanded discussion of these images as illustrations of the gay subtext in Wilde's drama, see Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Sicle (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 149-68. 20. See George Chauncey, "Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era," in Hidden from History, 298. 21. See Showalter, 159-62; and Michael Kettle, Salome's Last Veil: The Libel Case of the Century (London: Hart-Davis, 1977). For a more recent study of the Allan case, see Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998). 22. Ethan Morrden, Movie Star: A Look at the Women Who Made Hollywood (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), 22; cited by Showalter, 163. 23. "Obituary," Herald Tribune, January 16, 1934, in Helmsley Wineld Clippings File, Dance Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. 24. Richard Bruce Nugent, interview by James Hatch, "An Interview with Bruce Nugent: Actor, Artist, Writer, Dancer" (New York: Hatch-Billops Collection, 1982), 99. 25. Ibid.

26. Richard Bruce Nugent, interview by Jean Hudson, New York, April 14, 1982, Special Collections, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York. 27. Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 107-12. Gubar discusses Nugent's interracial gures as coded narratives about the interdependence and "double-consciousness" of both black and white. 28. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 135-36. 29. Richard Bruce Nugent, "Narcissus," Trend I (January-March 1933): 127. 30. Chauncey, Gay New York, 283-84. 31. Quoted in Lewis, 288. 32. Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring (New York: Macaulay Co., 1932), 59; my emphasis. 33. Quoted in Kisseloff, 288.

Source: Art Journal, Fall 1998, Vol. 57 Issue 3, p22, 7p Item: 505717240