Box Turtle Bulletin

Born On This Day, 1906: Richard Bruce Nugent

(d. 1987) When the Harlem Renaissance literary magazine Fire!! published his short story “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” in its first issue in 1926, Richard Bruce Nugent became the first African-American writer willing to declare his homosexuality in print — and he would remain so for the next thirty years. It was supposed to be Part One of a novel, but Fire!! never returned for a second issue and the novel was apparently never completed. Alex, the story’s main character, is gay:

Alex turned in his doorway … up the stairs and the stranger waited for him to light the room … no need for words … they had always known each olher ……… as they undressed by the blue dawn … Alex knew he had never seen a more perfect being .. . his body was all symmetry and music .. , and A;Jex called him Beauty … long they lay … blowing smoke and exchanging thoughts … and Alex swallowed with difficulty … he felt a glow of tremor … and they talked and … slept … [Ellipses in the original]

Oddly, thats not what drew the ire of other Harlem Renaissance critics. It was this: Alex makes out of an ivory cigarette holder “inlaid with red jade and green;” he blows smoke rings and dreams about wearing a long cape “very full and lined with vermilion;” he lies about “in a yellow silk shirt and black velvet trousers;” he drinks “stance liquors from curiously beautiful bottles;” he reads Wilde, Freud, and Bocaccio. Critics slammed the story’s decadence and exoticism — with “decadence” standing in as coded language for a kind of a Roaring Twenties type of homosexual that had gained a certain degree of fashion and notoriety in New York.

In 1925, Nugent had been attending the “Saturday Evening” salons of poet Georgia Douglas Johnson in his native Washington, D.C., where he was introduced to the leading African-American thinkers of the day, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, and Waldo Frank. He also met poet Langston Hughes (Feb 1). The two of them became fast friends and moved to New York. Nugent, Hughes, Cal Van Vechten (Jun 17) and several others became integral players in Harlem’s intellectual and artistic life, with Nugent becoming the most notorious. Van Vechten once wrote to Hughes that he saw Nugent at a society dinner in evening clothes “with his usual open chest and uncovered ankles. I suppose soon he will be going without trousers.”

Nugent wasn’t just a writer, but also a dancer, painter and illustrator. The apartment complex in Harlem that he shared with Wallace Thurman and other artists became known as Niggeratti Manor, where Nugent had painted the walls with murals, some depicting homoerotic scenes. Other illustrations appeared in Fire!! as well as two other African-American publications Opportunity and Palms, and other New York art magazines. Meanwhile, he continued to write short stories and even took his turn on the stage, appearing on Broadway and in an early production of the play Porgy (later adapted by George Gershwin for Porgy and Bess) In 1937, he published what is often considered his finest work, “Pope Pius the Only.”

In 1952, he married Grace Marr, with whom he shared accommodations and with her three brothers. The marriage was her idea; she thought she could “change” him. It’s unclear why he went along with it. He warned her that it was a bad idea, but marry her he did. The relationship was never consummated. Meanwhile, Nugent remained an active booster of Harlem’s literary and arts scene throughout the rest of his life. He was also a harsh critic of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1968 exhibition on the Harlem Renaissance which, astonishingly, was put together without the involvement of Harlem artists. In 1983 he was interviewed for the film Before Stonewall. He died in 1987. In 2002 Duke University Press published Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent a collection of Nugent’s most important writings, paintings, and drawings, many of them made available for the first time. Gentleman Jigger, a previously unreleased, vaguely-autobiographical novel that Nugent wrote during his Niggeratti Manor days, was published in 2008.