Biblical gender bending in Harlem: the queer performance of Nugent's 'Salome.'

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."(1)

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 Barthe, Wallace Thurman, and Alain Locke - showed more discretion.(2) Nugent's openness was more like those Harlemites "in the life," who were indeed publicly shouting "I love prick" in the cellar clubs, buffet flats, 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.(3)

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.(4) 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 interfacial crowd of up to seven thousand, described by the singer Taylor Gordon as ranging "from bootblacks to New York's rarest bluebloods."(5) 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.(6) That Nugent appreciated the gender fluidity 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."(7)

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 figures 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 figure from the series, huge pendulous breasts capped by impossibly erect and massive nipples seem like gross caricatures of the female anatomy [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. 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 figures in Nugent's series are named after characters not associated with the Salome story, Nugent's parodic flirtation 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 reflect 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 reflect 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 sanctified realms of art and literature. Salome distills the loaded tensions between sexual and racial identities in the Harlem Renaissance.(8)