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A
Foreign. This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Professor Henry Louis Gates once remarked that the Harlem Renaissance was, quote, surely as gay as it was black. This is a quote you can find on the walls of a new exhibition at the New York Historical. Titled the Gay Harlem Renaissance, the show centers life in the 1920s and 1930s Harlem Era by spotlighting queer African American visual artists like Malvin Gray Johnson, performers like Ethel Waters and blues singer Ma Rainey, and Jamaican born literary writer and poet Claude McKay. It is a vibrant and often overlooked chapter of history. The exhibition features more than 200 objects combining intimate, everyday objects like paper tickets for advertising, rent parties to items that are dazzling, like the sleek walking stick carried by nightclubs. Jimmy Daniels. The exhibition is called the Gay Harlem Renaissance. It's on view at the New York historical through Thursday, March 8, 2026. Joining us now to discuss the exhibition is lead curator Allison Robinson. Hi, Alison.
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B
Hi. Thank you so much for having us today.
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A
And also along with us is the exhibition's chief historian, George Chauncey, author of gay New York 1890, 19 to 1940 and a professor of American history at Columbia University University. Hi, George.
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C
Hi, Allison.
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A
So, Allison, what was the original idea to have an exhibition that looked at the Harlem Renaissance? Excuse me, differently.
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B
Well, I am really happy to say that the origin of the idea is actually George's. When he joined the board of the New York Historical, he had the opportunity to pitch an idea that he thought would be captivating and dazzling and really impactful for our audience. And this is the topic, topic that he picked. It's been a real joy working with him on it for the last two years.
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A
George, why did you pick it?
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C
Well, as you mentioned, I published a book called Gay New York, Gay Life in New York from 1890s, 1940. And when Louise Mirror, the president of the New York Historical, asked me for an idea, I drew on that. And I'd written about Harlem. And it struck me that the vibrancy, dynamism of black LGBTQ life in Harlem in the 1920s and 30s is still one of the least known and least understood aspects of New York City's queer history. And that it would be a terrific exhibit for us to do, particularly since this year, 2025, as the centenary of the New Negro, the landmark publication edited by Elaine Locke in 1925, which really announced the cultural renaissance happening in Harlem. And Locke himself is one of the key figures in the exhibit. He was gay and mentored many of the young writers who he published who were also Gay.
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A
Allison, what is something that you learned in putting together this exhibit that you just didn't know before?
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B
I learned so much from this exhibit, and it was such a joy working with George, my co curator Ann, and our entire team of scholarly advisors who brought decades of experience with them. But one of the things that really touched my heart was, was the history of the Hamilton Lodge Ball, which was the largest drag show on the east coast, regularly had thousands of attendees coming from as far as Europe to come see the drag queens and drag kings. And it just seems such a beautiful celebration of black LGBTQ life in New York City.
- [03:42]
A
George, tell us more about this ball.
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C
Well, the ball was sponsored by the Hamilton Lodge, which was a black fraternal order, and it actually had a fairly sustained society ball they'd sponsored since the middle of the 19th century. In the 1920s, for reasons we still don't really understand, it went gay. It was basically taken over by female impersonators and male impersonators, as they were called at the time. And by the late 20s, as Allison said, it was the largest drag bowl on the east coast, drawing people from up and down the East Coast. The black press wasn't. Quite sure what to do with it at first of Harlem and the it started being attended by thousands of people who would rent space in the balcony and watch the performances. People would gather outside to watch the queens promenading in. And the black press delighted in it, Actually gave it more coverage than they did regular society balls. And for me, it conveys both the vibrancy of black LGBTQ life in this period and how open it was, unexpectedly open and visible and accepted it was in the black community of Harlem.
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A
I'm curious about that, Alison, because being queer was often criminalized at this time. How did the police respond to this community in Harlem?
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B
Well, in this period, we are seeing a collaboration between the police and private anti vice societies like the committee of 14, which are targeting saloons and spaces particularly that are catering to LGBTQ people across the city. But in Harlem, it was this really, I would say unexpected, but an open society where people could perform on nightclub stages, they could gather in red parties. There were queer friendly social groups that were forming all the time. And because there is a police presence that's across the city, it is present in Harlem. We don't want to say that Harlem is a bubble in any in that respect, but we. There's a balance between what's happening among the community and kind of the opportunities that they're creating for themselves.
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A
Yeah, George, will you talk to us about that balance a little bit.
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C
Yeah, that's a great point that Alison made, and I think it's something that we had to struggle with. And anyone who writes about this history does how to balance the real oppression of queer life in this period and the resilience of people who created lives in that context. So we tell the stories of people who were arrested, who lost their jobs, who spent time in reformatories, but they came out of this and continued to live queer lives and often were in the community itself, were much more open than people have generally realized. You see the different decisions that people made about how to respond to both the threat of the police and, of course, the hostility that some people felt, even in the black community towards LGBTQ people and, say, the blues singers we talk about or the writers we talk about, some of whom were very open. Someone like Gladys Bentley, who performed wearing a tuxedo on top hat and was famous for walking down 7th Avenue with a girlfriend on the arm completely out there, versus someone like Ethel Waters, who was very conventionally feminine and never talked about queer desire, did not sing any songs along those lines, but had a girlfriend all through the 20s, a dancer named Ethel Waters. They were known in the black performance circuit as the two Ethels. And that's part of what you need. People need to understand, and we hope people will take away from this, that even though there was the. The hostility within the community of performers, there was a lot of openness, and people understood who was who and protected them.
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A
A new exhibition at the New York Historical celebrates black LGBTQ life, art, and culture during the Harlem renaissance of the 20s and the 30s. It's called the Gay Harlem Renaissance. I'm talking with lead curator Allison Robinson and chief historian George Chauncey about the show. Okay, so we've heard of the Cotton Club. Everybody's heard about the Cotton Club. Alison, what areas of social life. What don't we hear about?
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B
Well, the Cotton Club was one of just many nightclubs that popped up in Harlem in the midst of prohibition. We're seeing alcohol is made illegal nationwide, and yet Harlem is becoming an epicenter of nightlife to the point where it's being labeled the Paris of New York. And in many ways, you know, we think about the Cotton Club because it's a space that catered to the white downtowners who were seeking thrilling and a new experience, something novel. But also within that, there are dozens of clubs, hundreds of rent parties, all of these spaces that are created by black people, that are spaces where black LGBTQ people can Gather and form communities and find each other. And while the Cotton Club is part of that, of course, Ethel Waters found her fame on the. On that stage. We know that it's just one part of the larger ecosystem in the neighborhood. Neighborhood.
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A
This is all happening around the Great Depression. George, in presenting this, how did you present both the elite of the time with the experiences of the average person, the average queer person at the time?
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C
That's a great question. It was really important to us to talk about both the elite and ordinary Harlemites. So we talk about the writers, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Elaine Locke, others who are famous in literary circles and are still read in college courses today, but we also. And who built very strong gay social networks and supported one another, even though most of them publicly, except for Bruce Nugent, kept their sexual, same sex desires private, well known amongst themselves, but not to the larger public. But then you go into nightlife in Harlem, as Alice was describing, you have the elite clubs that white downtowners were going to. You also had popular clubs. Smalls, paradise, probably the best known. The a famous and much beloved club in Harlem because it was the biggest black owned nightclub. And Ed Smalls, its proprietor, was known to stand at the door to welcome his regular customers.
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B
And.
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C
And some of the queer men would call him darling and he'd say, fine, come on in. And very welcoming scene. People felt very accepted there. The rent parties that Allison mentioned are another classic example of this. Rent parties were a creative solution to the dilemma faced by poor, ordinary, working class Harlemites. On the one hand, they had low wages because of racist job discrimination, and on the other hand, they had to pay some of the highest rents in New York City because housing segregation kept them confined to Harlem. So how do they manage that? They often throw something they called rent parties. A party at the end of the month before the rent was due. You charge admission, people could come in, you'd make some extra money by selling food. There'd be music, lively, entertaining. People would often dance. What's striking about this is that at most of these parties, both straight and queer couples could openly socialize together. We have an investigator's report. Someone who's shocked to see straight couples and lesbian couples and gay male couples dancing in erotically suggestive ways, side by side. Clearly, everyone's accepting everyone there. And this, to me, is really one of the more remarkable examples and evidence for how accepted black LGBTQ people were in the poorer districts of Harlem as well as in the elite literary circles.
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A
Allison, in the show, there are literary giants like Langston Hughes and Nella Larson. Some sexualities are well known, have been confirmed. Others have not. How did you walk that line in the show?
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B
That was a really important point that we wanted to. I hope the siren is not too loud.
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A
We live in New York. We know what it is.
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B
That was a point that was really important to us to make in the exhibition, that there are so many different ways of expressing oneself's gender identity, your sexual identity, and also how those experiences get translated into the work that these cultural giants are producing. So, on one one hand, you might have figures like Langston Hughes who played his personal life very, very close to the vest. But we do have two examples of his queer poems that are in the show. One is in an interactive phone, which I love because we got to work with an actor and a poet to bring these queer romantic poems to life. We also have some of his work on the wall. But then we also have Wallace Thurman, who was more open about his sexuality within his personal circles. He lived with a lot of other queer writers in Harlem, and we can see that this aspect of his identity is something that is not only coming to life in his work. It's also a really important part of the community that he's working with.
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D
George, I wanted to ask about the.
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A
Great Migration during this period, how invested were black LGBP LGBTQ people from the south coming north and bringing their traditions with them?
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C
Yes, that's a great question. So this is, of course, the era of the Great Migration. Harlem had become a black neighborhood in the first decade of the 1900s, and by the 1910s, the great majority of black New Yorkers lived there. But the size of the population grew enormously in the wake of the First World War, which prompted a Great Migration from the Jim Crow South. Many people fleeing the oppression, the lack of political rights, the lack of employment opportunities in the south to go to Harlem, which they regarded as and called a promised land. Amongst them were many LGBTQ people who often had been more open, even in the south, than their white counterparts were able to be. But when they came to Harlem, they, like other black migrants, suddenly were part of a much larger, freer community where the numbers of people allowed them to organize politically, to develop a cultural sphere that they controlled, that where they weren't literally under the gun, they were in so much of the South. And this really created the spaces that made it possible for many LGBTQ people to express themselves.
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A
We got a question that says, how important was Carl Van Vechten? Who wants to answer?
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C
Sure. Okay. So he was a key figure. He's a complicated figure for sure. So he was a wealthy white writer and critic who became utterly fascinated by Harlem and black culture in the 20s. Like many white New Yorkers, as Allison said, he would go uptown to go to the incredible clubs, but he also got to know the sort of the. The more hidden life of black Harlem, being invited to both society parties and underground clubs and so forth, and became a real friend and a real advocate for the Harlem Renaissance. And at the same time, in the late 20s, published a book called I'm Not Going to Use the Word but in Heaven. Just a kind of shocking title. Shocking today for sure. And shocking in the 1920s. And many of his friends, black friends, broke off with him for a while. Most eventually came back. But it was a real shock to Harlem to see him contributing to this notions and sort of playing on the stereotypes of black sexuality in Harlem. So he was both a booster, an advocate, a participant, and a complicated figure who really antagonized a lot of people.
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A
Before we wrap, I've got about a minute. Alison, I'm going to let you talk about this. There is going to be a new wing at the New York Historical. It'll be a permanent home for the American LGBTQ Museum. What can we expect in 30 seconds?
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B
Oh, my gosh, sorry. No, we're very excited about the new wing. We'll have a floor dedicated to LGBTQ history. We will have a gallery with Stuart Wiseman's shoes. We have a number of exhibitions opening that are going to allow people to wander through the space. We have classrooms. It's really a multi purpose experience that I think people of all ages will enjoy.
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A
We look forward to that. Alison Robinson and George Chauncey. The name of the exhibition is the Gay Harlem Renaissance. Thanks for sharing with us.
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C
Thank you.
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B
Thank you, Alison.
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A
There's more, all of it on the way. We're going to be talking to the Rockettes.
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D
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