Heroic "hussies" and "brilliant queers": genderracial resistance in the works of Langston Hughes

African American Review, Fall, 1994 by Anne Borden

At the end of the heavy breathing

the funerals of my brothers

force me to wear

this scratchy black suit.

I should be naked,

seeding their graves. (8)

Hemphill blends images of tragedy and injustice with nakedness, sensual yearning. Similarly, Brad Johnson's "Protest Poem" discusses a veteran's yearning:

i would like to become

a soldier and fight

my way to the finest

guerrilla i could find,

lick the musky sweat

from his body

and let him make love

to me.... (116)

Johnson's poem invokes the sensual to signify greater struggle. He suggests that to love another man is to cross a battlefield, and that love among Black men is, as Joseph Beam comments, "the revolutionary act" (240).

Read in the context of Hemphill's and Johnson's work, Hughes's "I Loved My Friend" contributes to a genderracially resistant Black male identity. The poem embodies a soft blue atmosphere of melancholy tenderness, of loss:

I loved my friend.

He went away from me.

There's nothing more to say.

The poem ends, soft as it began.

I loved my friend. (qtd. in Smith 30)

By naming his love, sexual or otherwise, for a Black man, Hughes simultaneously confronts a racist culture that treats Black people as objects of fear and scorn, and resists gender constructs which forbid the articulation of love between men. "I Loved My Friend" directly challenges racism and sexism in whites and internalized racism and sexism in the self.

Occupying marginal spaces within the Black community as gays and within the gay community as Blacks, Black gay artists offer a unique viewpoint on genderracial constructs of Black identity. Arguably less inhibited by the constraints of heterosexual gender roles in expressing love for members of the same sex, writers such as Hemphill and Johnson challenge genderracial self-hatred which contributes to destruction of Black male pride and community. Marlon Riggs comments on his development of Black male pride as a Black gay man:

I was blind to my brother's beauty/my

own

but now I see.

Deaf to the voice that believed

we were worth wanting/loving

each other.

Now I hear. (205)

Vega writes of his romantic connection with another Black man as a source of strength in the face of racism and homophobia:

You precious gem

black pearl that warms the heart

symbol of ageless wisdom,

I derive strength

from the touch of your hand. (106)

Like Vega, Hughes uses erotic experience as a touchstone for gender, race, and class concerns. "In Hughes's work," bell hooks remarks," sexual passion is always mediated by issues of materiality, class position, poverty"; gender, race, and class conflict "disrupts, perverts and distorts sexuality" (200). Social concerns and sexual expression are inextricably linked as Hughes inquires into the nature of power, meditates on hope, and envisions social transformation through his use of sensual imagery.

Hughes's Sensual Vision

In "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Audre Lorde discusses the potential power of sensuality in transforming conceptions of reality imposed upon us by "racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society" (59). She observes some of the ways in which the erotic(1) frees us to explore our own capacity for joy. Once this joy is actualized through the erotic, we can no longer settle for anything less in the full spectrum of our lives. Lorde comments: