Question

Discuss the Harlem Renaissance as related to African Americans and LGBT cultures.

Answer 1

It was during the Harlem Renaissance that a subculture of LGBTQ African-American artists and performers appeared in Africa. The artists incorporated people like Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Moms Mabley, Mabel Hampton, Alberta Hunter, and Gladys Bentley. Areas like Savoy Ballroom and the Rockland Palace entertained drag ball spectacles with honors and granted for the valid outfits. Langston Hughes described the balls as "spectacles of color." George Chauncey, author of Ga-y New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Ga-y Male World, 1890-1940, drafted that when this period "perhaps nowhere were more men willing to venture out in public in drag than in Harlem."
Throughout the first night of the Stonewall riots, LGBTQ African Americans and Latinos likely were the massive percentage of the protestors because those groups massively visited the bar. Homeless black and Latino LGBTQ youth and young grown-ups who slept in nearby Christopher Park were likely amongst the protestors as well.