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THE DRAG AESTHETIC OF LANGSTON HUGHES | Erin Blakemore via JSTOR

23 May , 2017  

Langston Hughes photographed in 1936 by Carl Van Vechten via Wikimedia Commons/LOC

Langston Hughes photographed in 1936 by Carl Van Vechten via Wikimedia Commons/LOC

How would you describe Langston Hughes? He’s been referred to as the Harlem Renaissance’s greatest poet, a creative powerhouse who was, at one point in his career, “critically, the most abused poet in America.” But for Sam See, Hughes was something more than a jazz poet—he was a drag poet, too.

See tracks the ways in which Hughes documented and responded to Harlem’s teeming drag culture in the 1920s. As a gay man, Hughes took part in Harlem’s spectacular drag balls, places where all races, genders, and social classes mixed in “the safest and most visible space in which queers could…[convene and cross].” Hughes saw Harlem culture itself as an extended show with “poems that perform in drag…”Read more

 

 


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