This exhibit will be in the Murray-Green Library on the 10th floor of the Auditorium Building from April 1 - April 30, 2011
The exhibition spotlights gay life in Harlem during the artistic movement that defined black culture in the 1920S and '30S, as well as profiles its leading gay, lesbian and bisexual participants.
According to noted African-American historian Henry Louis Gates, the Harlem Renaissance was "surely as gay as it was black, not that it was exclusively either of these." With few exceptions, the writers, artists and performers of this seminal period in black history were closeted, but nonetheless imbued their work with coded references to their sexuality.
As the result of a northward migration of African-Americans and the displacement of black communities elsewhere in New York City, Harlem became the center of black cultural and intellectual life in the years after World War 1 (1914-1918).
The 1920S and 1930S are variously referred to as the New Negro Movement or the Jazz Age and, more recently, as the Harlem Renaissance. The artists, writers, musicians and
performers working in Harlem during this period gloried not only in black artistic achievement but also in black identity. The art, literature and music produced shaped black culture for generations and influenced American society at large. With homosexuals in legal and social limbo, the Harlem Renaissance celebrated sexuality with a level of tolerance remarkable for the time.
The Harlem Renaissance was, as Langston Hughes stated, an era "when the Negro was in vogue." Carl Van Vechten's articles in Vanity Fair and The New York Times ' are often credited for introducing the New Negro Movement to whites. Harlem attracted not only those supportive of its artistic achievements but also those who sniffed the winds of fashion.
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