Refusing Erasure: Nugent, Fire!!, and the Legacies of Queer Harlem

Samantha King-Shaw

doi:10.7273/000003765

Generations of Black artists and writers have demonstrated the potential of art and literature to subvert the dominant ideologies that uphold and enable racial oppression and violence. This project excavates the work of two queer Black artists, Richard Bruce Nugent and Marlon Riggs, who worked in two very different time periods, the Harlem Renaissance and the cultural backlash of the late 1980s. The work of Nugent and Riggs constituted queer interventions in the larger movement toward racial equality, making visible racial and sexual oppression and suggesting connections between racial justice and queer liberation. Through a comparative textual analysis of Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” and Riggs’s Tongues Untied, I consider how each artist subverted dominant racist and heteronormative ideologies in mainstream society and Black communities. Grounding this textual analysis within the historical and sociopolitical contexts of the Harlem Renaissance and the late 1980s, I explore the fluctuations of Black queer cultural production during the twentieth century. Both “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” and Tongues Untied offer valuable strategies for survival in and resistance against an anti-Black and homophobic society. Positioning Riggs within the legacy of Nugent and the Harlem Renaissance points to the generative potential of radical and transgressive queer Black art. The comparative analysis of Nugent and Riggs is grounded in the history of the Harlem Renaissance, as this project builds upon the foundational studies of the Harlem Renaissance and the later work that marked the era as “queer.” Engaging tools from the fields of critical race theory, queer theory, critical legal studies, and cultural representations of race and sexuality, I analyze “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” and Tongues Untied structurally and within their historical contexts. Understanding the public reactions to each of these texts is crucial to recognizing their contemporaneous and current significance. Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” is regarded as the first explicitly homoerotic work written by a Black man, while Riggs’s documentary-style film Tongues Untied illuminated the experiences of gay Black men in 1980s America. Both artists received public criticism and attack for their transgressive work, and I analyze the lives of each text within the Black press. Richard Bruce Nugent and Marlon Riggs both carved out creative spaces in which queer Black identities could be represented, affirmed, and celebrated. The comparative analysis of “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” and Tongues United reveals complex thematic, spatial, and temporal connections between Nugent and Riggs, resisting a linear and heteronormative trope of lineage between the two artists. The enduring significance of each text illustrates the generative potential of transgressive representations of queer Blackness in art and encourages the imagination of alternative, liberated futures for queer Black communities. Demonstrating the rich queer cultural legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and the immense generative potential of Nugent and “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” this project suggests multiple avenues for future study. Further investigation of the discursive impacts of Nugent and his contemporaries on later twentieth-century queer Black artists will continue to productively complicate the “legacy” of the Harlem Renaissance, while inquiry into the contemporary significance of Nugent and Riggs may guide future art, activism, and academic work in pursuit of Black queer liberation.

Refusing Erasure: Nugent, Fire!!, and the Legacies of Queer Harlem

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