3
Old Walt
In a chapbook published by the Beloit Poetry Journal in 1954 to commemorate the centennial of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the following poem by Langston Hughes appeared:
Old Walt Whitman
Went finding and seeking
Finding less than sought
Seeking more than found,
Every detail minding
Of the seeking or the finding.
Pleasured equally
In seeking as in finding,
Each detail minding,
Old Walt went seeking
And finding.1
This poem, titled simply “Old Walt,” was published alongside other tributes to Whitman by poets including Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and William Carlos Williams. David Ignatow, the editor of the volume, writes in the foreword of the imperative to pay tribute not only to “Whitman’s greatness as a poet,” but “also to the man.”2 Years later, Ignatow recalled that he “invited Langston to contribute a poem” to this work and “received [back] a short, tender piece.”3 The text itself gives us pause to wonder over the kind of tribute that it constitutes, for while it does focus in on “the man,” the sense in which it is “tender” is more debatable. It certainly pastiches elements of Whitman’s style and has in its ears that distinctive glut of present participles, the sonic pileup of “-ing” endings that often brings Whitman’s text close, or as close as it ever gets, to patterns of rhyme, as in the poem “We Two Boys Together Clinging,” which begins: “We two boys together clinging, / One the other never leaving, / Up and down the roads going” (LG, 111). The poem’s tenderness, however, depends less upon stylistic approximations than upon how to read, in the first instance, the name Hughes gives to his forebear. Is “Old Walt” merely an affectionate nickname, tender in its familiarity and its clear evocation of a patrilineage? Or does it suggest something edgier, something more along the lines of Allen Ginsberg’s rendering of Whitman in his poem “A Supermarket in California,” published just two years later in 1956? In Ginsberg’s poem, Whitman is an abject apparition who makes good on the epithet of the dirty old man: “I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the / refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.”4 As in Hughes’s poem, Ginsberg’s Whitman is “finding and seeking,” hiding in the hyperreal aisles of a supermarket, and it is his voyeuristic eye for “grocery boys” that casts his “old”-ness as dirty and perverse. Of course, Whitman’s love affairs with young men and the proximity of his sensibilities to discourses of boy-love are well documented, and Ginsberg’s poem demonstrates the minimal leap it takes to conceive of Whitman’s elder status as an erotic as well as historical or literary quality.
And yet Hughes’s poem, on this front, remains obstinate, and in the ambiguity of the nickname around which it is structured, we might say that “Old Walt” cruises its reader. Like Whitman’s own cruising poems, it leaves the space for particular kinds of readers—which is to say queer readers—to tease out and inflect its meanings. In his article “Langston Hughes on the DL,” Andrew Donnelly writes:
In this poem we have a Whitman looking. Looking for? Looking for pleasure or at least pleasured equally in the looking and the finding. Maybe he’s just curious. [ . . . ] Because it is a riddle, the poem seeks out the reader who is enough in the know to solve it, functioning not only as a description of looking but its own form of looking. Looking for the reader looking for Langston, the reader who can, by knowing, take pleasure in not knowing.5
There is a unique pleasure in being left in the dark, which here, paradoxically, is also a form of feeling seen by the poem. In courting the unknowable, the poem makes itself known. It is not only the possible codes suggested by the word “old,” then, but the very nature of an erotic and unresolved “looking” that here solicits the reader—as Donnelly writes in a footnote, the word looking “in the era of dating apps takes on much of the meaning that ‘cruising’ did in previous decades.”6 True as this is, the example of Whitman and Hughes, and the figure of Whitman as mediated by Hughes, suggests that this imbrication of looking and cruising has a much longer history, as I argue throughout this book. All of which is to say that Hughes’s “Old Walt,” a “short, tender piece,” is itself a text which not only thematizes cruising but enacts it, by framing the reader’s negotiation of it as an act of looking, a double take.
This chapter explores looking and cruising in Hughes’s writing and looks back to the particular queer milieu of early twentieth-century Harlem. Although, as with Whitman, the question of Hughes’s outness is a vexed one, as I address in the pages ahead, his writing is full of acts of “finding and seeking.” Seeking, as this poem suggests, can pleasure “equally” with the “finding,” and it also comes to stand in for the unresolved and unspoken threads of queer desire that can be read throughout his work. The nature of the look, once again, is bound up with photography and montage, but in this chapter I also defer to a later work to help excavate more clearly the visual textures of Hughes’s queer corpus. Isaac Julien’s 1989 film Looking for Langston, made and released at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United Kingdom and the United States, has done more than any other text to alter and vivify the discourse around Hughes’s queer legacy. Julien’s film not only places the poet’s queerness front and center but also, as its title suggests, illuminates looking as an optical space where the racial and interracial dimensions of desire play out. It has proven influential in visual studies for precisely this reason and features heavily in Kaja Silverman’s Threshold of the Visible World, a study I shall return to later. Anne Borden goes so far as to suggest that Julien’s reclaiming of Hughes, as one example of “the rediscovery of Hughes’s work by Black gay artists,” is a gesture akin to the way, in “Old Walt,” that Hughes “examines poet Walt Whitman’s life through the lens” of his own experience.7
It is the nature of this “lens,” however (that undertheorized analogy so often called upon in criticism), that determines the specificity of looking and cruising in Hughes’s work. Recalling Silverman’s use of the Lacanian screen in her reading of Fanon, the notion of the “lens” through which Hughes apprehends Whitman reveals a nexus of considerations: Whitman’s views on race, Hughes’s views on Whitman, and the complex intersections between race and queer desire that are addressed specifically in Julien’s film. On the surface, at least, Hughes seems like a committed disciple of the good gray poet, a primary mediator, historically speaking, between Whitman and subsequent generations of Black writers. He edited and introduced three anthologies of Whitman’s poetry (although only two were published) and frequently wrote about the importance of reading him. In a 1953 column titled “Like Whitman, Great Artists Are Not Always Good People,” Hughes uses the case of Whitman—who exemplified “American weaknesses in regard to race,” particularly “in his workaday editorials in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle,” where he sometimes “contradicted his own highest ideals”—to reflect upon the fact that “many great writers” and “artists” have “left, at their flaming best, a great light for others, burning even brighter perhaps from the embers of their own personal failures.”8 Hughes’s reframing of a critical relation to the past as a passing of the torch speaks in telling ways to poet Lavelle Porter’s recent essay on Whitman and so-called cancel culture, written at a time where we now know even more about the fact that Whitman “seems to have been seduced by the proliferation of racist pseudo-science in the post-Civil War era,” in stark contrast to the democratic and equalizing call of his poetry.9 Porter’s survey of this legacy makes good upon Hughes’s “great light” analogy when he writes that “there is no better place to look for nuanced critical engagement with Whitman’s complicated legacy than in the work of black intellectuals.” Hughes is a key figure in this regard, cognizant of Whitman’s racism but simultaneously firm in the decision to “choose to keep and cherish” the “best of him [ . . . ] not the worst.”10
While Hughes’s public avowals of Whitman’s work both emphasize and look beyond the question of Whitman’s racial politics, the potential of his resonance as a queer forebear for Hughes remains unspoken, the matter of more furtive “finding and seeking.” Donnelly points to a correspondence between Hughes and Alain Locke in which Hughes seems to feign ignorance about the coded meaning of Locke’s phrase the “Greek ideals of life,” but nonetheless plays along in asking Locke if he likes “the poems in the Calamus section,” which is to say that the queerness of Whitman’s text could hardly have been lost on him.11 Whitman’s text had a clear currency in the queer urban milieu of Harlem, where Hughes lived and worked. In Blair Niles’s 1931 novel Strange Brother, for example, a predictably tragic story about a closeted man exploring what Michael Bronski describes as “Harlem’s ambisexual nightclubs and homosexual milieu,” reading Leaves of Grass is framed as a rite of passage, an induction into queer culture. In fact, “it mentions so many authors and their books [ . . . ] that it functions as a basic reading list on homosexuality.”12
Whitman would have been a focal entry on such a reading list, and although he did not write explicitly about interracial love or erotic contact with Black men, there are clearly moments in his writing where his sexuality and racial politics are negotiated. The infamous vignette of the “Negro drayman” in “Song of Myself,” which Hughes included in Whitman’s Darker Brothers, his unpublished anthology of Whitman poems with African American and Native American themes, casts a fetishistic gaze upon the man of “ample neck and breast,” with the sun falling “on the black of his polish’d and perfect limbs” while the poet “behold[s] the picturesque giant and love[s] him” (“Song of Myself,” LG, 35). In this moment, poet Jericho Brown writes, Whitman predicts “the possibility for power in beings he can only fetishize”; this ancestral “queer poet” did not “expect,” Brown continues, “my black ass to be reading and admiring and questioning” his poems, even though his “poems knew I was on the way.”13 Paul H. Outka argues that, in this moment, “Whitman looks at the drayman with the same momentarily freed erotic gaze that the female ‘twenty-ninth’ bather has when she imagines joining the young men”—another canonical moment of looking in Whitman—and precipitates the poet’s “celebration of free black labor” and “explicit declaration of love for a black man.”14 And yet, if whatever freedom this act of looking supposedly confers (both on the poet as the “freed” gazer and the man as the freed slave) can then break down “the sexualised taboo against racial amalgamation,” Whitman’s representation of the drayman nonetheless anticipates the twentieth-century cultural fetishism around the Black male body, captured in James Baldwin’s statement that “to be an American Negro male is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol,” subject to the suspicious and fetishistic gaze of white men, both straight and gay.15 To conceive of the lens through which Hughes sees Whitman is thus also to observe the tense interrelations of queer and interracial desires, articulated in Hughes’s work—and in Julien’s adaptation of it—with recourse to acts of looking. And although “Old Walt” would seem to be Hughes’s most explicit nod to Whitman’s sexuality, so explicit is it in its implicitness, there is another short poem written by Hughes some thirty years earlier that looks back, I will argue, to Whitman’s “To a Stranger” and, in turn, to the politics of optical desire in 1920s Harlem.
Subway Faces
In the summer of 1923, twenty-one-year-old Langston Hughes set sail for Africa. He had first come to New York from Mexico two years previously to enroll at Columbia University, though his primary education during this period was in the ways of Harlem, a few blocks east of the campus. Harlem already had a reputation as a city-within-a-city, a unique hub for African Americans and the Black intelligentsia. During his student years, Hughes made a name for himself as an emerging young writer and caught the attention of figures like Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who edited Crisis magazine, an African American periodical published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Hughes’s focus turned away from his schoolwork and toward poetry, and he began to publish short poems in Black magazines. By 1923, however, he desired to see more of the world; he left his studies at Columbia and boarded a ship that anchored at Jones Point, a small town in upstate New York, where he stayed for a while. In June, he found work on the West Hesseltine, a ship that would take him much farther afield to the Western coast of Africa. So began a nomadic period in Hughes’s life, which took him to Africa and subsequently to Europe and comprised, according to Arnold Rampersad’s biography, a cultural and even erotic education among sailors aboard the various ships. His time at sea was also a journeying beyond the page.16 Although he packed a box of books to take with him on this first journey on the West Hesseltine, he soon decided to throw them overboard, in essence throwing away the material remains of his unhappy time as a Columbia student. But, as Rampersad writes, in an oft-repeated anecdote:
One book only did Hughes save. He had flung overboard the symbols of his hurt. But he had also kept the symbol of his best self, and of what he hoped to be. He saved his copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: “I had no intention of throwing that one away.”17
Among the symbols Rampersad identifies in this recollection, Whitman’s text provides a symbol of constancy, a trusty companion, or a guiding light (to return to Hughes’s own metaphor). By the time Hughes “returned to America” in November 1924, George B. Hutchinson writes, he “had determined what his vocation would be,” and his “absorption of Whitman was as thorough as that of any other North American poet of his generation.”18
Whitman’s continuing resonance for Hughes was about more than some transtemporal sense of universality, but rather suggested that Whitman’s text could constantly renew itself in the light of Hughes’s vocation. “Leaves of Grass,” he wrote in a much later essay called “Walt Whitman and the Negro,” is “as contemporary as tomorrow’s newspaper.”19 Toward the end of 1924, not long after he returned to Harlem, where he was staying with Countee Cullen in his family home at 2190 Seventh Avenue, Hughes published “Subway Face,” a poem that bore Whitman’s imprint but spoke very much to “contemporary” urban experience. The poem’s exact compositional history is unclear—it could have been written from a nostalgic distance or, alternately, upon Hughes’s return to the city after a long period—but it appeared thus in the December 1924 edition of Crisis, which was itself a form of “newspaper”:
That I have been looking
For you all my life
Does not matter to you.
You do not know.
You never knew.
Nor did I.
Now you take the Harlem train uptown;
I take a local down.20
The magazine, full name The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, was founded by Du Bois in 1910 as the official publication of the NAACP, with the aim of disseminating information about culture, politics, current affairs, education, and employment among African American readers. Hughes’s poem appeared in the magazine at the bottom of the last page of an NAACP bulletin detailing recent civil rights cases and the arrangements for the organization’s annual meeting in New York in January. Although the shift between these modes of writing—from the informative reportage authored by a collective “we” to the intimate and particularized address of Hughes’s “I” and “you”—was part and parcel of the miscellany format, there is something uniquely arresting about the placement of this poem in the magazine. “Subway Face” distinguishes itself from the political content that surrounds it as if it were a furtive counterdiscourse, just as the poem’s speaker establishes the poem’s intimate interlocution from within the crowded quotidian space of the subway. The poem’s presence in a portable publication, one that could no doubt have been read during subway journeys, lends it a metapoetic immediacy, as though it might, by chance, come to narrate its reader’s own live passage through the setting it describes: a subway station in, or close to, Harlem.
Like Baudelaire’s “À une passante,” which Thibaudet supposed could suture the everyday wounds of urban estrangement sustained by its wandering readers, Hughes’s “Subway Face” extends empathy by example, uttered by a speaker who experiences an uncanny excess of feeling toward a stranger spotted on the subway. As a portrait of a passing moment it trades in readerly relation; in the narration of an experience recognizable among many of its readers, who may or may not be encountering this poem while occupying the very space of urban encounter that it describes, as if its “I” were speaking for them, instrumentally, in paraphrasing a commonplace or everyday thought. But frequency, here, does not preclude intensity, an intensity felt in the forging of a sudden intimacy that seems both determined: “I have been looking / For you all my life,” and unrequited: this “does not matter to you.” The sentimental narrative of an unlived life is the incipient occasion for the poem but is quickly shot down. By the stanzaic break that separates the poem’s units, the uncertain present of encounter has become an impossible and irretrievable past: “You never knew. / Nor did I.”
In seeking to capture the irretrievable as a condition of the urban everyday, the poet here invests aesthetically in strangers in much the same way the photographer Walker Evans did. Evans produced his well-known series of subway portraits in New York some years after the publication of Hughes’s poem, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Evans’s mode of catching a glimpse was covert and controversial; he hid his 35 mm Contax camera beneath his coat and allowed the lens to peek out in the gap between two of the coat’s buttons. He kept the camera’s release in his coat pocket, so that he could subtly capture shots at a moment’s notice, and was often accompanied on these subway journeys by his friend Helen Levitt, who was also a photographer. The ethical murkiness of Evans’s project—capturing subjects who are totally unaware that they are being photographed—is also what produces its extraordinary results. These portraits capture forms of interpersonal nudity unique to transportation like the subway. As Luc Sante writes in the published edition of these photographs, since “the protocols of subway-riding advise turning your gaze inward, you can take off the face you wear for the benefit of others,” such that “the subway rider, then, is naked.”21 In his “sociology of the metropolis,” Georg Simmel identifies public transportation as a disquieting forum of faciality:
The person who sees without hearing is much more confused, more at a loss, more disquieted than the person who hears without seeing. [ . . . ] Before the development of buses, trains, and streetcars in the nineteenth century, people were not at all in a position to be able or to have to view one other for minutes or hours at a time without speaking to one another. Modern traffic, which involves by far the overwhelming portion of all perceptible relations between person and person, leaves people to an ever greater extent with the mere perception of the face and must thereby leave universal sociological feelings to fully altered presuppositions.22
The epistemological problem of the face in the crowd or on the train—on the one hand the symbol of a disquieting anonymity and on the other the “symbol of all that accompanies the individual as the prior condition of one’s life, all that is stored up in a person”—itself provides an imaginative opportunity.23 As in Whitman’s “To a Stranger,” the speaker of “Subway Face” fills in the gaps with the sensation of an unknown shared past only now made uncannily familiar, read in the lines of a strange face: you must be “he I was seeking,” or, “I have been looking / For you all my life.” And like Whitman’s poem or indeed Evans’s subway photographs, “Subway Face” implies that this dual process of looking and imagining is a process akin to ekphrasis. “Subway Face” stages a relationship between title and text; the eponymous face is rendered, in the title, as a visual object that is then not mentioned again, such that the poem proper seems to be responding to it, like an introspective caption to an image, written in the face of estrangement. The poem’s brevity also lends itself to the delineated, imagistic form of the snapshot; or rather it is as if the poem were the internal soundtrack to a moment that fades from view almost as soon as it has begun, as the two strangers take trains in opposite directions.
While the title, as a compositional and aesthetic frame, lends the poem a sense of visuality, it is this interchange between Harlem and downtown that offers further details as to this scene. Although the identity of neither speaker nor addressee is established, the departure at the poem’s end offers hints, with the implication of a momentary exchange between two people from different parts of the city. Brian McCammack points out that during the “quarter-century between the World Wars,” public transportation such as the New York subway, which first opened in 1904, was “integral to urban culture” and enforced proximity between strangers who might never otherwise meet.24 The “same subway platform could take a rider uptown to black Harlem and downtown to white Manhattan,” and the space of the subway car itself “was often crowded and forced different races, classes, ethnicities, and genders into closer proximity than was experienced in even city streets or public park,” bringing “black and white bodies closer together than any other public situation” (1074–75). The stylistic economy of Hughes’s short poem thus belies the complex sociological background of the milieu in which it is uttered and suggests any number of star-crossed readings; of an erotic or affective potentiality thwarted by racial, socioeconomic, and geographic divisions.
Unlike Hughes’s later poem “Subway Rush Hour,” from 1951’s Montage of a Dream Deferred, which muses upon “mingled / black and white / so near / no room for fear” (CPLH, 423) and points more decisively to the fact that “public transportation was not always a site for fleeting attraction” but “at times, represent[ed] an incipient interracial physical threat,” “Subway Face” reflects less upon interracial tensions than upon a profound sense of division that the ephemeral proximity of a subway ride paradoxically makes legible.25 The melancholy of the two lovers is also a melancholy of two cities, estranged, passing one another by at an interchange. “Passing,” another poem from Montage of a Dream Deferred, eulogizes Harlem from the vantage of “the ones who’ve crossed the line / to live downtown,” those who “miss you, / Harlem of the bitter dream, / since their dream has / come true” (CPLH, 417.) This conception of mobility as an ambivalent victory, a “dream [ . . . ] come true” that brings its own losses, speaks to the title’s implication of passing through or passing on. And, with its focus on the implicit color “line” that divides uptown from downtown, it is hard not to think of the implications of another Harlem text with the same title. Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing—famous for, among other reasons, its “tragic mulatto” plot centered on mixed-race women who pass for white—politicizes the present participle of its title in suggesting that the act of passing is by itself imbricated with performance and the legibility of race, just as Hughes’s poem registers the pathos of assimilation.
Like “To a Stranger,” “Subway Face” also passes for one kind of poem about the condition of urban modernity. Although its focus on race is explicit, the ambiguity of its address renders a capacious interpretive space and makes it available to a conventional heterosexual reading; queer desire is not readily or explicitly proscribed. And yet, this unmarked and unspoken quality is itself consonant with Whitman’s strategy of queer address in “To a Stranger.” As Shane Vogel writes, “Hughes’s 1920s poetry archives spaces and temporalities that seek to escape empirical confirmation and refuse identificatory foreclosure,” such that queer meanings can be detected not according to the evidentiary burden of proof, but the conspicuous quality of that which is absent or implicit, as in Whitman.26 While this poem’s melancholic charge would seem to derive from the arbitrariness of passing, the quotidian fact of “two trains traveling in opposite directions on a fixed schedule, precluding any deeper connection,” this interpersonal estrangement reads as a substitute for a deeper sense of queer love’s impossibility in the glare of public life.27 The tyranny of train timetables, an instrument of state and “straight” time, wins out in this poem against the fragile, incipient moment of connection, able to circumvent the racial, social, and sexual conventions of the commute for just an instant. And, while “Subway Face” gestures outside the here and now to an imagined past and future, it hardly glimpses, unlike Whitman’s poem, at the utopic, but rather bears witness to its dissipation. The frozen image of the subway face thus lingers as a symbol of the insurmountable, a visualized monument to the could-have-been, and in turn reveals the politics of passing; the sense that the transient act of looking makes visible the various forms of social division that determine our relations with others in the space of the urban everyday. If “Subway Face” wears its queer resonance only quietly, its account of the look might then be better illuminated, as I will now explore, by a queer analytical frame that sees Hughes as a poet intimately invested in representations of Black and interracial desire and, simultaneously, in the refusal of the white gaze, with the look once again its instrument.
Isaac Julien’s Langston
The first frame of Isaac Julien’s 1989 film Looking for Langston features, not exactly the subway, but an elevated train as it speeds across a Manhattan bridge. This shot is anticipated by the ambient street noises that play over the film’s opening titles, which function here like a series of dedications or epigraphs: “A Meditation on Langston Hughes (1902–1967) and the Harlem Renaissance,” “With the poetry of Essex Hemphill and Bruce Nugent (1906–1987),” “In Memory of James Baldwin (1924–1987).”28 It is immediately clear from these titles that this is a film functioning on multiple levels, temporally speaking, for it quickly establishes various dramatis personae, composed of a multigenerational list of dead queer Black writers linked to Harlem, as well as the then-contemporary D.C. poet Essex Hemphill. The opening frame, merging the sound and the image of the train and shot from below on street level, makes literal the multiple levels of the film’s hermeneutic scheme while also establishing the public exterior of its Harlem setting. It soon becomes clear, when the film cuts from historical footage of Harlem to a shot of a man in black tie crying before an arrangement of carnations, with an overlay of Toni Morrison’s 1987 eulogy for Baldwin, that we are at a memorial service. A Black man—Hughes, we presume, and played by Julien himself—lies in an open casket, surrounded by mourners, and Julien has recently contextualized his rationale:
The AIDS epidemic was just reaching its height. [ . . . ] I was spending more and more time going to funerals, thinking about what it would be like to die in one’s twenties. In Langston I extended this feeling to seeing how I would look in a coffin. That was also my little allusion to Roland Barthes’s ideas about the death of the author, as well as a swipe at the cult of authorship in the film industry.29
This troubling of authorship conditions the directionality of the film; as Kobena Mercer writes, the “film looks for Langston, but what we find is Isaac,” and the film’s offering of a “visual equivalent of a dialogue with [ . . . ] different cultural traditions” informs the “promiscuous intertextuality which the film sets in motion,” gestured to immediately in the inventory of the opening titles.30 Such promiscuity also serves to illustrate the simultaneity of two different temporalities, both a cultural past and a morbid present, temporalities whose copresence resists the linearity of progress narratives. As the camera pans away from this funereal scene it descends, slowly, to the story below, to an ornate and cavernous room adorned with a disco ball on the ceiling. A number of men, both Black and white, are frozen in poses; some are dancing cheek to cheek, others are drinking at the bar, looking squarely at the dance floor, while another looks ahead while leaning against a pillar. A small arrangement of flowers can be seen in the bottom right-hand corner of the shot, and we are led to assume that this is a wake of some kind (not least because the dancing cast members are described in the film’s closing credits as Dancers at the Wake).
For Tony Fisher, this scene typifies the film’s parody of the “still photograph” through “cinematic tableaux vivants,” but it also shows that in this film, “Hughes has entered the subterranean world of film, and like Orpheus before him, his song continues to be heard.”31 Like many of the film’s images, the resonance of the wake scene, which in its dressing appears to be set in the 1920s and the 1980s simultaneously, is left to viewers’ imaginations: Is this an imagined, utopic space, or the space of the afterlife? Is this the space of Hughes’s “dream deferred,” an incipient and yet-to-be dreamscape that is, paradoxically, located in the past? This scene catches us, Fisher suggests, in the “nexus of gazes that Julien sets up,” both in this scene of looking in the “form itself,” which leaves us “waiting, as in a (death) watch to see how the next shot will unfold, or who will be looking at whom,” such that “the film tense we are dealing with here, therefore, is not historical but topological.”32 Just as, in “Subway Face,” Hughes goes underground to picture the act of gazing, Julien introduces the film’s titular motif at the level of the subterranean, in a sequence of images characterized by “their solicitation of the look” such that “it can only be the spectator’s look to which these images are addressed, and which they interrogate,” serving to dramatize “either what it means to look ‘for’ or ‘against’ Langston.”33
It is tempting to account metaphorically for the film’s use of aesthetic and temporal levels, to imagine its form as an architectural, multistoried framework, or as Fisher’s topological network. Muñoz, on the other hand, describes the film’s cinematic structure as a “transhistorical and transnational ‘weavelike’ texture” that “can be understood as a product of the discomfort caused by traditional Western genre constraints,” and the credits of the film signal that it contains an interwoven narration of American Voices—like those of Hemphill or Toni Morrison—and a British Voice, that of Stuart Hall.34 Indeed, to write about Looking for Langston today, in the light of the extensive critical work on it, is to encounter all manner of metaphors that seek to weave from the film’s multiple layers and threads a sense of coherence. It is no doubt the sense of interpretive plenitude it offers that has made it a mainstay in African American studies, queer studies, and film studies departments, and the optical aspect of the title is a particularly rich site of inquiry. Julien describes, in an interview with Fisher, the film’s focus on looking as bound up with his interest in “the scopic—in looking, in the visual field.”35 “I think the scopic is very important,” he continues, “in relation to the construction of black gay desire. [ . . . ] It becomes important to visualize what the Harlem Renaissance might have looked like in relation to black gay men.”36 The film’s backward glance to the era of the Harlem Renaissance—or, at least, its burlesque reconstruction of that era’s aesthetic in 1980s London—shares in the erotics of the archive, of visually reanimating Black gay forebears out of physical books and photographs, while also making larger claims about the relation between Black gay desire and the scopic; its nuances, pleasures, and its potential for violence.
Kaja Silverman suggests that “the film’s title promises looking without a discovery or conclusion, a looking which is more akin to browsing,” but it also “indexes more even than this browsing or cultural cruising” and “designates Langston as he on whose behalf a certain kind of looking is solicited.”37 Silverman’s play on the title suggests that the film looks, squarely and publicly, at Black gay desire in a way that Hughes never could, or chose not to, unlike his “out” Renaissance compatriot Richard Bruce Nugent, whose 1926 prose piece “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” is heavily quoted in Julien’s film and is regularly cited as one of the first queer texts published by an African American author. Julien’s film may stop short of outing Hughes in any direct way, which is to say addressing the exact nature of his sexuality or sexual relationships, but this is because it bears an altogether different relationship to history. Unlike Arnold Rampersad’s biography, published just three years beforehand and controversial for its supposedly evidence-based denial of Hughes’s homosexuality, Julien’s film, in his own words, was “never intended” to be “a life of Langston Hughes” but “was always going to be about his status as a cultural icon and, in terms of repressed gay desire, what that might symbolise.”38 Hughes is less the agent or object of Julien’s looking than its locus: the name “Langston Hughes,” shortened familiarly in the film’s title, delineates as much a discursive and visual terrain for exploration as it does a fixed and historically identifiable figure.
Looking, then, as the rich and compelling body of work on Julien’s film suggests, is itself a contested site, where the various intersections of race, performance, and desire are made visible. Silverman undertakes an extended close reading of two of the central looks in the film, which are both closely tied up with the practice of cruising, in order to explicate the distinction between Black love and the white gaze, opposing discourses in accounts of interracial desire and its politics. In the first of these Alex, the closest the film has to a protagonist, is “shown looking from his perch at the bar toward Beauty (Matthew Baidoo), a Black man who sits drinking at a table with a white man. Beauty, who initially has his back to Alex, turns and smiles at him with answering desire.”39 Like the sensation Benjamin describes in relation to the aura, of “eyes staring at one’s back,” this moment registers the sensation of being looked at from behind, and Silverman frames the harmonious “answering” as a form of ethical exchange in which both lookers become aware of themselves and each other as desiring subjects, provoking the jealousy of Karl, the white man at the table. Julien makes sparing use here of traditional film syntax, the only “moment” in the film that has “recourse to the traditional reverse shot formation” (108). The close-up that makes visible Beauty’s glance back also illuminates Baidoo’s face in a soft, bright light, which not only speaks to the idealizing or exalting dimension of the reciprocal glance between desiring subjects—something that is also signaled, Silverman suggests, by the recurring presence of angels throughout the film—but also recalls the lighting effects of portrait photography and, in particular, the black-and-white portraits of George Platt Lynes, whom Julien has cited as an influence on the film’s style.
This explicit invocation of the look in relation to the image, and of cruising in relation to photography—and it is worth mentioning here that Sunil Gupta collaborated with Julien on the photographic elements of the film and took a series of stills—establishes an interweaving of aesthetic and erotic considerations that pertains throughout the film’s middle section in a fluid, essayistic manner, marked as it is by visual and thematic refrains. The look between Alex and Beauty is cut short by Karl who, jealous that Beauty has literally had his head turned, bangs a champagne bottle on the table to summon him back. Alex looks on, somewhat dejected, before turning back to the bar. To put it bluntly, this optical set-to illustrates how the white gaze, here embodied by Karl, who jealously ties Beauty to him, serves to obstruct the possibility of Black love, a possibility glimpsed in this moment of the look. Immediately afterwards, however, this formulation is complicated by the entrance of another Black man called James (played by Akim Mogaji), who ascends the stairs and joins Alex at the bar. He looks flirtatiously at Karl, his lip curling slightly upwards, and in another reverse shot formation, Karl is shown to be stopped in his tracks, evidently solicited by the directness of this glance. James nods to Alex with the suggestion of complicity, as if he has taken care of something for the both of them, and Alex then turns back to the bar and sips another glass of champagne, as if freed up to imagine what comes next.
At this point Julien turns to a tableau that, in Silverman’s words, “can best be described as a dream within this dream” (109). James and the white man are standing by a bed, touching one another in a fixed pose, while Alex and Beauty lie naked together on the bed. The bedroom tableau is intercut with a pastoral scene where Alex and Beauty assume a similar standing pose in a field, the former in his signature dinner suit and the latter naked, while passages from Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade”—from which the names Alex and Beauty derive—are read as a voice-over. This might seem at first like a utopic landscape, a natural elsewhere in which the Black lovers are free to look and commune away from the stratified gazes of the bar, and yet the lingering presence of Alex and the white man serves to worry this scene’s happy ideality. Similarly, Silverman writes, certain visual disjunctures in this scene emphasize that “what Alex ‘sees’ when he thinks about Beauty is somehow in excess of that figure himself” in order “to foreground once again the investitory potential of the look” and the fact that “the body” is “not intrinsically ideal, but is rather exalted” by the “openly fantasmic” and “dramatically defamiliarizing” context into which “it is inserted” (111). This sequence, attributable perhaps to Alex’s reverie, illustrates how, in the act of cruising, imagination begets imagination; how Alex’s fantasy of consummation with Beauty precipitates the appearance of this pastoral and no less libidinal landscape, one akin, perhaps, to Whitman’s “Paths Untrodden.”
The dream sequence ends as the film returns to the funeral scene and then back underground to the wake, where footage of the bar and the dance floor is overlaid with “Blues for Langston,” a song by San Francisco musician Blackberri. The song’s lyrics draw upon Hughes’s poetry—“Whatever happened to the dream deferred?”—and seem to apostrophize Hughes himself from within the film’s transtemporal diegesis: “I’ve seen how far you’ve come.”40 These lyrics speak powerfully to the sequence that comes next, which shifts throughout between the images and vernaculars of past and present. The historical “Langston” milieu of the film is connected explicitly to contemporary cruising culture and, in turn, to the insidiousness of the white gaze, thus making use of “Langston Hughes and the black tradition as enabling texts for black gays to tell their stories,” in Manthia Diawara’s words.41 A man leaves the bar for another indeterminately pastoral space, a cemetery just beyond the city limits, but this is less an ideal landscape than one imbued with the danger and excitement of public cruising. Essex Hemphill reads the poems “Where Seed Falls” and “Under Certain Circumstances,” both taken from his 1986 collection Conditions, while a Black and a white man approach each other in the cemetery and begin to kiss, both of them dressed in the contemporary leather “clone” style.42 Hemphill’s texts evoke a landscape of shadows, of “wild lips” and “certain streets,” and his words “I want to court outside the race,” but “love is a dangerous word / in this small town” figure the sociological and racialized “attitudes” related to cruising that Julien engages in the scene that follows, as the film returns to the wake.43
In this scene, Blackberri’s song “Beautiful Black Man” accompanies a scene of triangulated looking, where Julien’s camera alternates between close-ups of Alex, Karl, and Marcus, played by Dencil Williams, in a series of shots where it is unclear who is looking at who. For much of the scene Karl, a dark-skinned Black man, looks down or away, while Blackberri sings “you’ve been made to feel / That your beauty’s not real.”44 This anthem of self-love plays over an exchange of looks that reveals the power of the look—in a community obsessed with looks and types—to diminish and belittle Black men about their appearance. This racialized dimension of the look as an element of cruising is then linked to larger questions of race and representation; first, there is archival footage of Black sculptors creating busts and statues, while Blackberri implores: “be proud of your race.” Afterwards, Julien cuts to footage of Black painters at work, and a white crowd in an art gallery, while Stuart Hall’s voice-over offers the following commentary:
White patrons of the Harlem Renaissance wanted black artists and writers to know and feel the intuitions of the primitive. They didn’t want Modernism. They wanted Black art, to keep art and artists in their place.
The white gaze, gestured to thus far in Julien’s film as an erotic phenomenon, is here also revealed as an institutional mechanism that fetishizes a whole category—“black art”—with recourse to the same “primitive” stereotypes through which the Black male body is apprehended and viewed as hypervirile and hypersexual.
The particular fetishism for the Black male body in white gay culture is explored in the next scene of the film, which “dramatizes a look,” Silverman writes, that “is the very opposite of that attributed to Alex” in his earlier exchange with Beauty.45 The objectifying capacity of the white gaze is here signaled by an opening shot of Karl, who “looks ahead of himself at an unspecified object” while “smoke passes between him and what he sees, as if to suggest that his look is somehow mediated.” Over a jazz bass-line, Essex Hemphill reads “If His Name Were Mandingo,” a poem whose Black speaker clearly addresses a problematic white gay man who exploits and objectifies a Black hustler for his own pleasure: “If he’s not hard on / then he’s hard up / and either way / you watch him.”46 Hemphill’s poem is direct in its critique and, in its eponymous invocation of the Mandingo figure, a trope which elides a West African identity with the hypersexuality of the Black phallus, recalls his own essay on the fetishistic photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. In this rallying prose piece, titled “Does Your Mama Know About Me?,” Hemphill identifies the white gay objectification of the Black body as one of the major fault-lines in the so-called gay revolutionary movement, for “the post-Stonewall gay community of the 1980s was not concerned with the existence of Black gay men except as sexual objects,” and “the Black male was given little representation except as a big, Black dick,” as is “strikingly revealed” by Mapplethorpe’s portraits of Black men.47 It is apt, then, that in Looking for Langston Karl is shown to peruse and stroke reproductions of Mapplethorpe’s images, which are hung as screens within the smoky atmosphere of the film’s vacant set. This moment in the film makes clear on a visual level the same process of objectification that is explicated in Hemphill’s poem: the way that the immediate “look” at an erotic object, signaled by Karl’s stare at the start of this sequence, draws upon preceding representations in problematic ways, bringing a visual bank of material to bear upon an immediate optical perception.48
Silverman writes of this scene—which culminates in Karl’s flippant handing-over of cash to James, after a sexual tryst prefigured several scenes earlier—that “Karl not only apprehends the Black men who command his sexual interest through the intervening agency of the screen (foregrounded here through the smoke which mediates his vision), but that he also comfortably inhabits the viewing position that has been culturally assigned to him with respect to those men.”49 The “screen” Silverman mentions here throws into relief the look-as-photograph analogy that I draw upon throughout this book, and which is palpable here in Julien’s film. The rendering of Mapplethorpe’s photographs as visual screens gives concrete expression to this notion of a mediating threshold that both conditions the white man’s gaze and also affirms the privilege of his vantage, and it suggests an elision between the look as induced by cruising, on the one hand, and by visual artworks on the other. Silverman expands on the notion of the screen earlier in The Threshold of the Visible World during her analysis of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks:
Fanon speaks again about the involuntary nature of his identification with negritude, and about the destructive effects of that identification upon what was previously his bodily ego. [ . . . ] However, in this passage, Fanon also makes clear that if he is “photographed” in this guise, this is not because of the special power and productivity of the white look with respect to the black body, but rather because of the mobilization in the viewing situation he describes of the screen of “blackness.”50
It is not Fanon who describes himself as “photographed” in the moment he encounters a white onlooker. Silverman borrows this term from Lacan to refer to the “screen,” the “intervening agency” administered by the culture at large, which shows a subject how they are viewed by others via the gaze. The screen governs the visual regime of a given culture and is correspondingly made up of archetypal cultural matter through which the subject is (mis)represented. For Fanon, the “screen” of his blackness is composed of the “legends, stories, history, and above all historicity” that are mobilized by the white gaze to frame him and, in turn, to put him in his place.51 The gaze and screen may be culturally embedded phenomena, but they are experienced by Fanon with violent immediacy in the instant of the look, which is reported in his text through the verbal hailing “Look, a Negro!” To think of this projecting look as photographic—which Silverman does by way of Lacan’s “screen” and its surrogacy in the figure of the camera—is germane, for it captures the way in which the gaze is inflicted upon the subject with the immediacy of a snapshot. But this analogy also speaks to the way the screen mediates this immediacy, such that the subject is not merely “photographed” but perceived as already photographed, a palimpsest or composite of “historicity.”
To be an agent of the white gaze like Karl is to be given the power, at the level of consciousness and of representation, to inscribe the nature of your relation to the other and to the other’s body. With this power, correspondingly, comes the capacity to disappear behind your own vantage in a way that marked bodies cannot; think again of the generic homosexual in Bersani’s psychoanalytic account of cruising, who is able to cruise happily in a sea of identification made up of inaccurate replications. For those, on the other hand, for whom this identification is “involuntary,” and structured around a de-idealizing image that is given “back” against their will in the moment of encounter, the “screen” is a violent phenomenon. In this same passage, Fanon describes the moment of being looked at as a brutal fragmentation where the “corporeal schema crumbled,” and “it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person.” The “corporeal consequences of this forced identification with an abhorrent visual imago,” Silverman writes, manifests as “the fantasy of a body in bits and pieces, as a violent mutilation.”52 This self-splitting is not a matter of multiplication but scattering, and Fanon describes “this revision, this thematization” by the screen as “an amputation, an excision.”53 That same act of violence is also visited upon the Black male body by the excision performed in the framing of Mapplethorpe’s images, which, Hemphill argues, are “insulting and endangering to Black men” because of the “conscious determination that the faces, heads, and by extension, the minds of and experiences of some of his Black subjects are not as important as close-up shots of their cocks.”54 While Looking for Langston is concerned throughout, like Hughes’s “Subway Face,” with faciality as the surface upon which looking is inscribed in all its ambivalence, it also illustrates here the corporeal violence of faciality’s elision, its exclusion from the frame, in a process where the look becomes an exclusionary and tyrannical form of objectification.
Julien’s film thus ultimately poses the question of what it means to reclaim the act of looking; to identify and reject the violence of the white gaze and wrest from it more ethical forms of interracial exchange and, in particular, forms of Black love unbothered by it. If the “Mandingo” sequence is an example of the film’s critique at its highest pitch, the exact relation of this critique to Hughes’s work is less clear. Yet in its collapsing of temporal and historical boundaries—it features an act of problematic looking that occurs within the diegesis of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance setting, but is off-set by 1980s artists like Mapplethorpe and Hemphill—this scene locates a politics of interracial desire in this earlier tradition, and even suggests that the white gay fetishization of the Black body is analogically equivalent to the annexing and exploitation of Black Renaissance artists by white patrons. “Things haven’t changed much,” Blackberri sings in “Blues for Langston,” as if the film’s contemporary vantage was from a culture really no more enlightened about matters of race and sexuality than that of the 1920s, perhaps even less so.55 Hughes, on the surface at least, never explicitly engaged the issues of queer interracial desire that Julien meditates upon, but at this juncture we should perhaps heed the opening line of Blackberri’s song: “Whatever happened to the dream deferred?” Hughes’s late photographic works from the 1950s, like the aforementioned collection Montage of a Dream Deferred as well as The Sweet Flypaper of Life, his collaboration with photographer Roy DeCarava, ostensibly seem a world away from the queer, libidinal milieu of Julien’s Harlem. But if we look again and look closer, we find parallel interrogations of the complex interplay between Black bodies and the white gaze, and between looking and desire, performed covertly among the intricate relations of text and image.
Hughes’s Harlem Montages
At the end of Looking for Langston, a group of thugs and policemen descend ominously upon the wake and bang down the door with batons and weapons. At this point the party also revs up—glasses are broken, looks are served, and the dancing breaks out from the previously established ballroom formality into something distinctly more 1980s. Essex Hemphill reads his poem “The Brass Rail” over Royal House’s track “Can You Party” while the mourners dance. The men outside continue to break down the door. When they eventually break in, clearly hungry for blood and arrests, there is no one there. This ending throws into relief the phantasmic space that governs the film while also engaging a fantasy of undetectability, where queer and subterranean acts of world-making—like those historically associated with the bars and clubs of the Harlem Renaissance—are untouched by the violent force of the law. But this ending also speaks, indirectly, to perhaps the most explicit invocation of deviant sexuality in Hughes’s poetry, which can be found in the poem “Café: 3 a.m.” (CPLH, 406), from the 1951 collection Montage of a Dream Deferred. It reads:
Detectives from the vice squad
with weary sadistic eyes
spotting fairies.
Degenerates,
some folks say.
But God, Nature,
or somebody
made them that way.
Police lady or Lesbian
over there?
Where?
The poem’s title—which could equally be imagined as the name of a photograph or painting, an alternate title for Edward Hopper’s iconic Nighthawks, for example—points to a space both vivid and nonspecific, and leaves us to imagine for ourselves the neon glow of the café. The associations of this late-night demimonde, however, are made clear from the poem’s intricate vantage. Here Hughes displays, Donnelly writes, a knowingness about “what goes on at such suspicious places in the after-hours,” but this poem also reveals that the “the closet is always a problematized form of knowing, in that the logic of ‘it takes one to know one’ has an alibi when that knowledge takes the subjectivity of state surveillance,” and here it is the “state and not the poetic voice that is looking for fairies.”56 Much is ambiguous in this poem, from the scene being observed to the position of the speaker, as well as the status of the “police lady” or the “Lesbian,” but what is clear is the attribution of a scopic and even panoptic violence to the gaze of the state, given localized expression here in the image of police’s “weary sadistic eyes.”57
Policing has its own punitive stake in cruising—think of plainclothes officers luring gay men in public bathrooms—but it’s also its own mode of looking. It may not engage in the same forms of vexed eroticizing that I have been concerned with in this chapter, but it nonetheless still defers to stereotypes to cast its judgments and suspicions. It does not so much objectify as subjectify, to recall Judith Butler’s account of Althusser’s notion of “interpellation,” for the policeman’s reprimand—embodied verbally by a phrase like “Hey you!”—has the “effect of binding the law to one who is hailed,” one who “appears not to be in a condition of trespass prior to the call,” and it is this interpellative “call” that “initiates the individual into the subjected status of the subject.”58 What Hughes’s bleary-eyed tableau suggests, in its replacement of cruising with the activity of “spotting,” is that the process of subjectivization which Butler characterizes as verbal, after Althusser, might also take place at an optical level, with just a look, performed by the “weary sadistic eyes” of the law. That Butler’s well-known account of interpellation and its slippiness precipitates her analysis of gender subversion in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 film Paris Is Burning, a documentary about the Harlem drag balls of the 1980s, which were contiguous with the fluid spaces of the Harlem Renaissance and contemporary with Julien’s Looking for Langston, is no accident. Both Hughes’s “Café: 3 a.m.” and the ending of Julien’s film imply, in more or less furtive ways, that queer people of color are particularly vulnerable to, and disproportionately affected by, the optical force of state surveillance.
The notion of the “down low” or the DL, a trope that seems to literalize the subterranean aesthetic Julien mobilizes, is one way in which Black queer sexuality is policed, but also potentially liberated. Most commonly pertaining to men of color who sleep with men without being “out,” the DL flouts the logic of the closet and of coming out as an essentializing ritual of homosexuality. Although the DL may risk perpetuating stereotypes related to social and sexual wiliness and renders the down-low subject’s sexuality vulnerable, in so far as it is something to be found out, the anti-identificatory element of the DL has numerous appeals and functions. Not least, as Donnelly suggests in citing the work of C. Riley Snorton, that it proposes “a racialized resistance to white universality” and its associated questions, like “why don’t they just come out?,” which “presume a logic of progress to individual and group development that universalizes white middle-class experience as the only—and the correct—experience.”59 Just as the scopic and transhistorical form of Looking for Langston lights upon a strategy for claiming him as a prophet of queer Black sexuality from the vantage of the late twentieth century, the twenty-first-century analytic of the “DL” similarly offers a way of recuperating Hughes’s closetedness. Although, as Donnelly concedes in his conclusion, Hughes’s “reticence remains a problem,” insofar as “it lines up with homophobic silence, then and now,” the “existence and persistence of structures like the DL should tell us that these are not only byproducts of that homophobia but represent a felt need on the part of many people to reorganize the way we think about sexuality” and “challenge” the “racial obliviousness of essentialized homo-, hetero- and bisexuality.”60 Hughes’s reticent poetics—“Café: 3 a.m.” is one of extremely few texts that explicitly refers to homosexuality—can thus be seen in the light of the DL as a strategy of resistance not only against the police state but also against the white gaze, which is by turns fetishistic and essentializing.
In both 1951’s Montage of a Dream Deferred and 1954’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life, Hughes’s furtive or down-low solicitations of readers in the know—readers perhaps imagined, or idealized, as Black and/or queer—draw upon visuality and the intertexture of the poetic and the photographic. The look, once again, becomes multiplied as an erotic and aesthetic phenomenon, a “problematized mode of knowing” that pertains to the ways in which both persons and artworks can be both intransigent and flirtatious. The former text, Lawrence Goldstein writes, foregrounds the “notion of moving pictures” and “intends to put the reader in mind not only of jazz structure but of the fluidity of film”—another parallel between Julien’s essay-film and Hughes’s form—“as the poet turns his attention to one scene after another without transition or argument.”61 The numerous vignettes of Montage comprise a composite text that bears witness to the unpredictable undulations of daily life in what Hughes describes as “a community in transition,” in an introductory note where he also suggests that “this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances” and “sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session, sometimes the popular song” (CPLH, 387). Although Hughes neglects to refer to the work’s cinematicity here, it would appear to be coterminous with the “jam” aesthetic he describes musically, for both montage and jazz provide analogs for the jamming together of words, scenes, images, and forms, an aesthetic assemblage whose variety dons the spontaneity of session musicians improvising together.
And yet, Hughes’s use of “jam” here to account for the methodology of his work as a whole also offers a more surprising resonance. In the same year that Montage was published, a book called The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach appeared. It was written by Donald Webster Corey, the pseudonym of the gay writer and professor Edward Sagarin, an early figure in the homophile movement. Although, as Martin Duberman notes, Sagarin later became a controversial presence in the conversations around homosexuality and argued in his later years that it should be pathologized as a form of deviance, his 1951 book was perhaps “the first full-scale nonfiction account of gay life in the United States,” particularly by “an author [who] spoke as an insider, an avowed homosexual.”62 In a chapter on linguistic patterns, the author states that although “gay is used throughout the United States and Canada, straight is hardly known on the West coast,” and in San Francisco “the gay circles refer to other people as jam: ‘She’s gay, but her husband’s jam,’ a person will say.”63 Corey concedes that the term was also used on the East Coast, if less regularly, and the OED traces usages in 1930s Massachusetts. While it is unclear whether “jam” as a gay slang term would have been in Hughes’s lexicon, it does offer another kind of optic upon the aesthetic variety of his work, with the suggestion that his composite poetic-photographic texts render a hybrid sexuality, too—heterosexuality as mediated, covertly and colloquially, by a queer vision.
In this regard jam, as both a jazz term and a gay term, shares in the poetics of the DL and the fact that, as Donnelly writes, “Hughes’s most erotically charged poems are heterosexual scenes” where the poet’s “cross-dressing” as female speakers offers a perspective through which he “can explore masculinity as the object of desire.”64 This feature of Hughes’s writing again refers back to Whitman, whose “twenty-ninth bather” in Leaves of Grass is the consummate example of what Michael Davidson describes as the poet’s adoption of “a feminine position in order to participate erotically with other males,” such that “sexual and textual acts interlinks in ways that force the reader to become, as it were, a third participant in Whitman’s mediated desire.”65 This central act of looking in Whitman’s text itself looks back at its readers. A version of this figure—the woman who watches from her “fine house by the rise of the bank” and “hides handsome and richly drest aft the / blinds of the window” (LG, 34) to first watch and then, more ethereally, to join the young men bathing—also manifests in Hughes’s work. She can be found not in a poem, however, but a photograph, a Roy DeCarava image that emerges around halfway through the narrative of The Sweet Flypaper of Life. The photo shows a woman sitting in a window, the translucent net curtains parted above her, as she looks outside into the daylight.66 She is facing away from the camera, with the emphasis of the photograph being upon what remains unseen, for the woman’s vantage is focal to the image but inscrutable to the viewer, though we presume the aerial shot of young Harlemites walking the streets on the next page offers a glimpse at what she sees. Below the photograph, Hughes’s caption reads:
Every so often, ever so once in a while, somedays a woman gets a chance to set in her window for a minute and look out.
New York is not like back down South with not much happening outside. In Harlem something is happening all the time, people are going every which-a-way.67
While the image, viewed by itself, could suggests any number of readings, from the voyeurism of female desire to the relegation of women to private and interior spaces, Hughes’s narration ties it to the plot at hand. The Sweet Flypaper of Life is narrated by Sister Mary Bradley, an “elderly, pious and hardworking African American woman” who “tells of the various travails of her extended family, their ups and downs, their children [ . . . ] and through this the various vicissitudes of urban life.”68 If we attribute the gaze shown in this image to Sister Mary, as Hughes and DeCarava’s photo-text instructs us to do, it becomes a proud and wholesome look upon the “every which-a-way” of daily life in Harlem, shot through with a recollection of life in the South. Her way of seeing, from one or several stories up, is ostensibly aboveboard; it may be a little nosey, but it also serves simply to celebrate the vibrancy of the Harlemites, young and old, who can be seen walking outside on the street.
Sonia Weiner suggests, however, that in his text Hughes adopted a “trickster strategy, which not only appealed to the white publishers and their readership, but also spoke to African American readers through a complex network of signifying, conveying meanings that might have escaped many non-African American readers.”69 The “trickster, who can weave a web of words in order to mask meaning” shows us that “behind or beneath every stereotypical reading of the narrative, an alternative reading exists that denies the stereotype, belies the literal meaning, and resurrects the power of the image” (156). The screen, or some form of it, is once again reclaimed in the construction of this “trickster” aesthetic: “Like a smoke screen, the words of Hughes’s narrator provide a way of reading the images without actually seeing their subjects in all their complexity, paving the way for the book’s publication” (162). In a series of readings of sequences in the text, Weiner argues that moments of friction between text and image open up a suggestive hermeneutic space in which the potentially stereotypical elements of the work—such as DeCarava’s quasi-documentary aesthetic, which risks playing to the white pseudoethnographic gaze, and the narrative voice Hughes constructs for Sister Mary, which at times resembles the trope of the “mammy” figure—are overturned and subverted, if only for readers in the know.
If Hughes’s narration proscribes a more limited and limiting narrative alongside the images, which in turn provokes us to think about the nature of Black representation itself, as Weiner argues here, I would like to build upon her work in suggesting that this quality of the photo-text similarly figures unspoken desires, which are expressed once again, as in the image of the woman behind the window reminiscent of Whitman, in terms of looking. The Sweet Flypaper of Life is a work concerned throughout with looking—the cover image shows a young girl’s eyes looking directly out at the viewer—and the photograph of the woman looking out of the window ushers in a series of images that reflects upon the optical arena of everyday Harlem. Various street personages are shown—women, children, a man sitting with a baby on a stoop, which is the Harlem equivalent of the “front porches” common to houses in the South, as Sister Mary tells us.70 “But almost everywhere where there’s something to set on or lean on,” she continues, “somebody is setting or leaning. In what few parks there is, some just set on a park bench [ . . . ] and hold their hands.”71 The photograph that accompanies this caption is of a well-dressed man sitting alone on a park bench, looking into the distance, while on the next page the same image is shown again except now as a close-up shot of his hands, in an approximation of the filmic syntax of zooming in. This pair of images is somewhat inscrutable, its exact inference unclear. Is the implication that many people in Harlem can be found “setting or leaning,” which, like the figure of Sister Mary’s nephew Rodney and his “lazy somewhat perfunctory lifestyle,” risks “stereotyping a particular version of African American manhood”?72 Or is the man waiting for something, or someone? The zooming in on his hands is at once leading, by suggesting a significance for this detail of his comportment, and leads us nowhere, leaving us with the lingering sense of something unspoken.
The text continues on the next double page with the sentence: “Yet there is so much to see in Harlem!”73 The “yet” is curious, both a swift moving on but also, perhaps, an exoneration of the man from the picture before—his behavior may be strange, or sedentary, and yet “there is so much to see in Harlem!,” so who can blame him for looking? More intriguingly still, this sentence is the caption to an image of a street with a long fence, with two men looking through holes in it like peeping toms. Although it is clearly intended for comic effect and engages in a form of visual word play, where we see that what there is “to see” is in fact people themselves trying to see something, but it also inflects this sequence of optically focused images with a sense of the scopophilic or voyeuristic. As with the image of the woman behind the curtain, we cannot see what these men see, but this time the optical scenario is in reverse, for they are looking from the vantage of a public space into a private one. Although these respective images of men looking simply pass by, giving way to images of torn down tenements and street vendors, they establish an undercurrent in which looking is felt as something furtive and mysterious. Thus, when this sequence of reflections concludes with Sister Mary’s statement “Somebody always passing,”74 which accompanies an aerial shot of a man walking the street in a suit and hat, it is hard not to think of passing’s wider resonances throughout Hughes’s Harlem corpus, where he “invite[s] the reader to the position” where “lines of difference [ . . . ] cross” in order to observe the “closet door as a meeting place of queer and non-queer identities.”75 Such observations are at play in a whole range of transient tableaux, from the passing moment of interracial contact on a subway platform in “Subway Face” to the issue of racial passing in the short story “Passing”76 and the passing from uptown to downtown, as in the poem of the same name (CPLH, 417).
Indeed, this image of passing in The Sweet Flypaper of Life illuminates that Hughes’s cruising of the reader through this hybrid work is often intratextual in nature, which is to say that he recovers sites and motifs from his poetic texts in order to gesture, albeit furtively, in particular directions. Another example of this is the subway sequence earlier in the book, which begins with the image of someone seen descending behind the distinctive railings of a subway entrance, with Sister Mary’s reflection that “I done rid a million subway cars, and went back and forth to work a million days for that Rodney.”77 In this same passage, just above the image that immediately follows, of a subway car empty but for a lone passenger reading a paper, Sister Mary prefaces it with a quasi-imperative caption that she employs throughout the book: “Now you take the subway:” This deictic labeling of particular images not only suggests that the reader’s seeing of an image is in fact a taking or a taking in, as if we ourselves possessed the capacities of a camera; this specific sentence is also almost identical, linguistically, to a line from “Subway Face”: “Now you take the Harlem train uptown.” The echo of that poem, with its focus on loss and transience, cannot help but inflect the solitude of this image, its almost eerie rendering of a passenger with no other subway faces to connect with. “It’s lonesome at night,” Sister Mary reminds us, beneath a photograph of a woman standing alone on a subway platform, “But at the rush hour—well, all it took was the Supreme Court to decide on mixed schools, but the rush hour in the subway mixes everybody—white, black, Gentile, and Jew—closer than you ever are to your relatives.”78 This caption directly recalls the compositional situation of “Subway Rush Hour,” from Montage of a Dream Deferred. Just as that poem hints at an interracial erotics in its description of “Mingled / breath and smell / so close” (CPLH, 423), the double-voicedness of Sister Mary’s musing similarly gets at the potentially erotic intimacy of the subway, for while being “closer than you ever are to your relatives” has a spatial and respectable meaning when uttered by Sister Mary, it simultaneously hints at a kind of closeness that exceeds the familial, like Whitman’s delineation in “Among the Multitude” of a stranger “Acknowledging none else, not parent, wife, husband, brother, / child, any nearer than I am” (LG, 115).
The Sweet Flypaper of Life is thus a fitting title for Hughes and DeCarava’s hybrid text, for flypaper, like the work itself, is palimpsestic in nature, capturing and layering the things that seek to pass it by. However gruesome this eponymous image may be, it is recuperated by the metaphorical sweetness—figured by the designed sticky sweetness of flypaper—that is conferred upon life itself, a life full of noticing and capturing, in contrast to the “bitter dream” of those who have left Harlem in the poem “Passing” (CPLH, 417). In fact, as works both invested in the textual and the photographic, Sweet Flypaper and Montage share a fixation upon sweetness that is bound up with questions of looking and of representation more broadly. For example “Island [2],” the final poem in Montage (and the second called “Island”), imagines Harlem’s position “Between two rivers / North of the park” in terms of the color line, but also of taste and sweetness: “Black and white, / Gold and brown—/ Chocolate-custard / Pie of a town” (CPLH, 429). This conception of Harlem’s multiplicity as delectable resembles one of Hughes’s straightest and stickiest poems, “Harlem Sweeties,” from the 1942 collection Shakespeare in Harlem, which is set, playfully, in the Sugar Hill area of Harlem and instructs its readers to “Cast your gims / On this sepia thrill: / Brown sugar lassie, / Caramel treat / Honey-gold baby / Sweet enough to eat” (CPLH, 245). Enumerating forms of “feminine sweetness” among the Black and brown women of Harlem, Hughes renders the erotic specular economy of heterosexual Harlem as a “luscious” and delectable milieu, and in so doing reclaims a fetishizing language that might merely be fetishistic and diminishing in the wrong hands, in a manner akin to the way he repurposes the potentially stereotypical nature of Sister Mary’s narration to more subversive hermeneutic ends in Sweet Flypaper.
The Montage poem “125th Street” (CPLH, 407) similarly engages the act of linguistic reclamation in coded and confectionary terms:
Face like a chocolate bar
full of nuts and sweet.
Face like a jack-o’-lantern
candle inside.
Face like a slice of melon,
grin that wide.
Returning to the faciality of public urban space—the title could be referring to the street itself, one of Harlem’s main thoroughfares, or to the subway station of the same name—this poem evokes a veritable “jam”: crowded, “full,” and “sweet.” It enacts in miniature the sequence’s larger principle of montage in offering a series of faces encountered on 125th Street and visualized as part of daily life’s sweetness. While the first two images conjure faces whose appeal lies within, either as the “nuts” in a chocolate bar or the light inside a “lantern,” the third is a face whose appeal lies in its exteriorization, a “grin” the width of a “slice of melon.” This final image invokes erotics of the smile as a collusive and affective gesture, like the “secrecy our smiles take on” in Frank O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke with You” (CP, 360), but it also points clearly at the politics of the watermelon as a racialized symbol. This “particular fruit,” as Hughes himself writes in a 1944 letter, has “been used lo these many years to make Negroes a funny picture race.”79 Indeed, the image of the watermelon smile has continued to be a site of political wrangling for contemporary Black poets like Terrance Hayes, whose 2002 poem “Sonnet” repeats the line “We sliced the watermelon into smiles” fourteen times, and exposes through incantation the reductiveness of watermelon’s associations to Black culture.80
In jamming together the various loaded matter of this poem—a “chocolate bar,” a “melon,” a “grin”—Hughes’s “125th Street” both creates and critiques a “funny picture.” It is, in this regard, like another Montage poem aptly titled “Movies” (CPLH, 395):
The Roosevelt, Renaissance, Gem, Alhambra:
Harlem laughing in all the wrong places
at the crocodile tears
of crocodile art
that you know
in your heart
is crocodile:
(Hollywood
laughs at me,
black—
so I laugh
back.)
In its critique of Hollywood’s racist depictions for the pleasures of the white audiences (and indeed the word “crocodile” could easily be replaced here by the word “white”), this poem crystallizes the nature of Hughes’s resistance to the white gaze. Harnessing African American clichés in his late, quasi-photographic works, Hughes “laugh[s] back” not only at Hollywood but at an entire image culture in which Black bodies are either ridiculed, exoticized, or fetishized, as if it were all just a “funny picture.”81 Hughes’s riffing upon sweetness in these late works conjures images of Blackness and interraciality that elude the tyranny of the screen and thus laugh, as in this poem, “in all the wrong places.” Although these images do not pertain particularly to queer desire in a manner akin to Julien’s recovery of Hughes’s work, they light upon a contested interpretive space where suggestive meanings emerge, and desire is made legible, out of the interplay between the visual, the verbal, and the unsaid. In looking for Langston, then, perhaps we need look no further than the closing montage of Julien’s “movie,” interspersed with close-up shots of its characters smiling and laughing “back” at us through the fourth wall of the camera, before they disappear entirely, ready in waiting for the “finding and seeking.”