""As for the increasingly fashionable tendency to assert, without convincing evidence, that Hughes was a homosexual," Rampersad wrote, "I will say at this point only that such a conclusion seems unfounded, and that the evidence suggests a more complicated sexual nature.""
"Three years later, Isaac Julien's film Looking for Langston claimed Hughes as queer, to the applause of the Black gay poet Essex Hemphill. In 1993, queer studies scholar Scott Bravmann criticized Rampersad for requiring conclusive evidence that Hughes slept with men when he didn't do the same regarding Hughes's presumed heterosexuality. Four years later, Charles Nero took issue with Rampersad's reliance on Hughes's not wanting to be considered gay; that hardly constituted proof, Nero observed, that Hughes did not desire men."
"Also at issue was the politics of the archive. Rampersad's two-volume biography drew from Hughes's public and private writings. But those archival documents, the dissenters pointed out, were also influenced by the politics of sexuality. If a writer fears retribution for being queer, then that writer may not record such desires in a diary. In this light, the very documents that scholars read to understand the past may misrepresent or obscure the sexuality of people in an earlier era."
A 1986 biography of Langston Hughes provoked controversy by calling claims he was homosexual unfounded and suggesting a more complicated sexual nature. Subsequent creative works and scholars reclaimed Hughes as queer and criticized the demand for conclusive evidence of same-sex relationships while assuming heterosexuality. Critics argued that archival records reflect heteronormative pressures that silence queer desire, causing gaps and misrepresentations in the historical record. Archival silence and researchers' assumptions therefore complicate biographical reconstruction and the recognition of queer lives among twentieth-century Black writers, including cases with partial documentation of same-sex relationships.
Read at The Nation
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]