Isaac Julien | Looking for Langston / 1989

the hunger of shadows: cruising a film

by Douglas Messerli

 

Isaac Julien (screenplay and director) Looking for Langston / 1989

 

The Harlem Renaissance, the short-lived window (1924-1929) on what was actually a much larger picture of the burgeoning development of US black visual artists, dancers, poets, fiction writers, playwrights, actors, singers, and other creative beings who had migrated since the Civil War from the Jim Crow Deep South to Harlem and elsewhere in New York City was certainly as James Weldon Johnson described it, “the flowering of Negro literature.” But it was so much more, continuing and affecting black writing throughout the rest the century, including the international francophone movement of Caribbean and African artists of the Négritude group and, later in the century, black artists as diverse such as James Baldwin, Jacob Lawrence, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Essex Hemphill, and so very many others. Earlier influences on the movement such as the works of playwright Ridgely Torrence, the early writing of Claude McKay, and many others also cannot truly be separated from the so-called Renaissance. And many of the movements’ major impacts are still be felt today in the 21st century.

      Despite the importance of the actual performers and work, now fairly well documented, throughout much of the century the Harlem Renaissance seemed to be buried in history textbooks and in black memory; for young artists such as filmmaker, writer, and video artist such Isaac Julien coming of age in the 1980s it something yet to be fully discovered.

      Julien himself describes those days:

 

“I was a student doing a pre-foundation course in East London. This work was initially called something like ‘How Gays Are Stereotyped in Media,’ and I made it for my A-Level Communications Project, where one could make a video piece.

     I remember a teacher saying to me, ‘It would be really great if you made a film that explored how Black gays are stereotyped in media.’ I remember thinking, yeah, I could have done that. But you could say that my reply took almost a decade after making that very early work, which no longer exists. In art school at that time, one wasn’t really taught anything about Black art movements or the Harlem Renaissance. So when I found out about it, I was completely fascinated. I thought, there’s something called Black Modernism? My partner, Mark Nash, had a job teaching at NYU, and basically I asked him to go to see if he could get materials on the Harlem Renaissance, anything moving image.

    And he went to the archives at MoMA and found a song called “St. Louis Blues” by Bessie Smith. That started this whole tour—you could call it a Harlem tour—of going to different archives. Luckily, I came across a filmmaker who made a film about Langston Hughes, and we worked with the archivists. And eventually we came across an archive of instructional films in which we were able to see Black artists at work.

      Of course this was happening at the same time as the AIDS crisis, at the same time when these strong Black queer voices were emerging: Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, Black gay anthologies.”

      What surely also stood out to Julien in those heady days of discovery was also that so very many of these figures were also lesbian and homosexual. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. has observed, “The Harlem Renaissance was surely as gay it was black.” To name simply a few, and not all, many of the female writers, singers, and dancers who were lesbian or bisexual: Ethel Waters, Gladys Bentley, Bessie Smith, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Alberta Hunter, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset. Among the numerous male gay participants in the Renaissance were Claude McKay, Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, Jimmie Daniels, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Langston Hughes.

       And that list doesn’t include the white promoter of the Harlem scene, Carl Van Vechten, a fiction writer who later became famous for his photographic portraits of thousands of US celebrities and, in a private collection, his photographs of black male nudes, creating a dilemma for his own generation (still unresolved) that Robert Mapplethorpe’s black nudes would for those of Julien’s.

      On the list of homosexual males, I have put Hughes last because he was perhaps the most closeted of them all, and frustrated even his close friends such Cullen, Locke, and Nugent for his seeming lack of interest in their sexual gaze.

   But there was also a strong opposition of certain of The Harlem Renaissance supporters and participants such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who argued quite forcefully that artists must recognize their moral responsibilities, particularly that “a black artist is first of all of black artist.” Obviously writing about homosexuality or other social issues that didn’t directly relate to the black community were not in accordance with his views. With the publication of Wallace Thurman’s groundbreaking magazine publication of FIRE!!!, particularly given the inclusion of Richard Bruce Nugent’s highly gay erotic poetry-fiction Smoke, Lilies And Jade, A Novel, Part I, Du Bois and other major black leaders viewed the effort as decadent and vulgar. Even among the gay writers, Alain Locke criticized the publication of FIRE!!!, in particular for the inclusion of Nugent’s work, arguing that it promoted the effeminacy and decadence associated with homosexual writers.* The offices of the magazine soon after burned to the ground.

     As perhaps already the most well-known writer of the group, Hughes—although clearly aligning with Thurman and Nugent who at the time shared a room painted red and black, mockingly nicknamed by Thurman and Zora Neale Hurston as Niggerati Manor, a major meeting place of the black literary community—remained quiet as he did about his own sexuality. Moreover, Hughes’ major autobiographer, Arnold Rampersad, although recognizing that the poet demonstrated a preference for darker-skinned African-American men in his work and life, argued that Hughes was not homosexual, asserting that he was probably asexual and passive in his sexual relationships. Hughes’ estate for a long period would not permit the use of his poetry within a gay context, later, however, permitting several of his poems to appear in gay anthologies. Somewhat predictably, the Hughes estate attempted to censor Julien’s film because of copyright infringement, forcing the director to turn down the sound whenever one of Hughes’ poems was read.

     Numerous other critics and historians have argued otherwise, but that his not made the attempts to white-out Hughes’ name as a black homosexual artist and to dismiss the idea that the man might have had very real sexual urges for same-sex intercourse and acted on them accordingly. Julien’s reaction to this is quite clear in his comments in his interview with Stuart Comer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

      

“Langston Hughes is an icon, and also an emblem of the closet, a space that was enabling HIV infection, and AIDS, to become insurmountable in Black communities in America and England. Having sexuality not being articulated created terrible ramifications within these communities. And so the whole question of bringing Langston out, so to speak, really united intergenerationally with what the poet Essex Hemphill was contesting. What does silence look like? What does oppression look like in those spaces? Essex Hemphill was someone who was really at the forefront of articulating that. And my challenge was how to translate that cinematically and give it a kind of space that would resonate visually.”

 

    There is no Langston Hughes directly portrayed in Looking for Langston, and since Hughes’ own poems are quieted, the dominant voices we hear are mostly the words of Richard Bruce Nugent, James Baldwin, and Essex Hemphill. No character in the film is described as representing Hughes, although there are some archival images included of the poet. The famed Cotton Club is represented by a stylized set on a British sound stage, and the landscape images are in London and the British countryside.

      There is also no coherent narrative except for the fact that each night mostly black men, notably one handsome white man, gather at the bar; and near the end of the film a group of policemen and mean homophobic and racist men gather to pound down the walls of the club, hoping to find the drinkers, dancers, and lovers within and bring them to justice either through arrest or brutal beatings. An angel who looks over the dancers in the club has warned them, however, and when the “law” arrives, everyone has disappeared almost as if they had lived in another time or space. They are still dancing, so reports the angel, in another place.

      And most strangely, except for the selection from Baldwin’s eulogy (read by Toni Morrison) and the recited poems, there is no language spoken in this cold nightclub. The eulogy from Baldwin reveals his own highly conflicted desire to be “at home with one’s compatriots” as opposed to being “marked and detested by them,” and with a deep feeling of irony and sorrow, he expresses the fact that “there is a level on which the mockery of the people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind.”

      “Tell Me,” one of Hughes’ poems also speaks to the sorrow of being the unintentional outsider:

“Why should it be my loneliness / Why should it be my song / Why should it be my dream / deferred / overlong?”

       As critic Martina Kudláček, writing about this film in Bomb magazine in 2019 reminds us that “The lack of candid language for queer desire in the early twentieth century, beyond poetry and prose, illuminates why Black queer narratives have often unfolded spatially and in many parts.” There is, frankly, even in poetry, no way to even describe their sexual love in straight-forward narrative form. Dialogue in this film would be meaningless. In a scene in which Langston’s ghost follows him through a field to deliver him up to a nude man, the receiver answers from Nugent’s “Smoke, Lillies, and Jade,” answers, “I’ll wait.” The language had yet to evolve.

       The film, accordingly, asks us to be cruisers, so to speak, to ourselves be on the lookout for Langston. He is the handsome lone drinker at the bar, the one who celebrates in the drunken madness with the white gay man, or the man who takes home strangers, including at one point, who appears to make up a threesome. Perhaps Hughes will not even bother to show up. As one of the poems observes, there is throughout "the hunger of shadows."

      But we live through the film in the process of “looking,” observing everyone and everything closer in order to ascertain what the poet’s gay life, if it openly existed, might have been like. To whom was he attracted: “Beauty” (Matthew Baidoo), the name of one of Hughes’ central gay figures and of Nugent’s fiction as well, James (Akim Mogaii), Gary (John Wilson), Marcus (Dencil Williams), Dean (Guy Burgess), Carlos (James Dublin), the Leatherboy (Harry Donaldson), or the Angel himself (Jimmy Somerville)? Most viewers identify Hughes as the character named Alex (Ben Ellison). But that is not the point: Langston is a part of all of these men, who lived in a world in which their love could not be openly expressed and whose feelings and identities were thwarted for it.

     These characters float in an out of the frame of archival photos, as we watch them in their elegant tuxedos, drinking, dancing, and making love. If you’ve forgotten how very sensual black-and-white can truly be, you much watch this film again and again—if you can find it; the DVD seems to have vanished except for university collections, the film being shown primarily on special occasions by museums.

      Meanwhile, we must also recognize that the original film, like many of British director Derek Jarman’s works—an important influence upon Julien and the New Queer Cinema in general—was taking a position of gay activism in its search for a man declared by so many to be straight. Asked by Comer how the film was received at the time of its release, Julien responds: 

    

“Looking for Langston arrived in New York, and in the United States, with a certain excitement. It was a work that was being made with a community in mind; there were simply not many films being made about these experiences.

     In the film I was using Langston Hughes in a metaphorical manner, and his estate did not like the film, which was questioning the heteronormative aspect of how the estate had created Langston. This was something that was always contested within Black communities. And I do think the Hughes estate used copyright as a form of censorship. But when I was making the film, I was aware that I would have an encounter like that. That’s where the activist part comes into play—pushing against the ways in which certain historical characters were constructed.”

    

     What he doesn’t mention is that when the film premiered in New York in 1989, The New York Times Reviewer unwittingly attempted to do what the film itself was decrying, to wipe the famous US poet clear from the gay world in which he was involved. In response to the attempt of the estate’s censorship, she responded: “That issue should not obscure the fact that Mr. Julien's film would have been much more honest and effective if it had simply left Hughes out from the start. Looking for Langston is not about the poet's life or work; it is Mr. Julien's fantasy of beautiful, gay black men during the Harlem Renaissance.” Clearly that reviewer never found Langston—or perhaps just wasn’t looking very hard.

   For several years now I have used an image from the film for my primary computer page. In this dark smoky room, two men are dancing. The image appears only for an instant near the end of the film. I have found my Langston Hughes in the man at the right.

 

*For a fuller discussion of Robert Bruce Nugent’s relationship with Wallace Thurman and Nugent’s writing and career as a painter, read my essay, “Between Heaven and Hell,” on Nugent’s long fiction Gentleman Jigger in My Year 2008: In the Gap (Los Angeles, Green Integer, 2015).

 

Los Angeles, September 23, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).