Langston Hughes On The DL By Andrew Donnelly: An Analysis

Beginning in the 1980s, there has been a debate among many literary scholars and biographers over the speculation of whether Langston Hughes was gay. Although there is no hardcore evidence to verify this, there is a possibility he may have been “closeted.” Hughes lived during a time when homosexuality was being embraced among intellectuals whom permitted him to enjoy its culture even if he chose to do so in secret. Aside from one brief heterosexual relationship, Hughes remained single and never married, refusing to designate a sexual identity. In his article, “Langston Hughes on the DL,” Andrew Donnelly argues, “What’s truly queer in Hughes’s writing is his and his persona’s refusal to identify within a sexual category” (32). Donnelly goes

This particular circumstance forbade him the option to fully reveal his sexual orientation. Because he could not publicly reveal his true desires, literary scholars used the metaphor “closet” to describe his circumstance, or simply labeled him as “down low,” a term that is not acknowledged in the conversation of literary criticism but used in black culture by ordinary people. Tidewell and Ragar continue to argue that, “ the metaphor of the closet is appropriate for describing Hughes’s self-constructed silences. It is an image that supersedes questions of ‘was he or wasn’t he’ and allows a telling discussion of what it meant for Hughes to circle the wagon around his inner self for protection” (63). The metaphor “closet” seems to attract its readers. Donnelly argues that “this is what bell hooks calls Hughes’s ‘complex closeted eroticism’- not that we can get at the erotic appeal of his poetry by dismantling his closet, but that the structure of the closet itself functions as the erotic appeal” (30). In other words, he was considered a much more important symbol in connecting him to affiliations associated with queerness because some of his literary work is geared toward homosexuality at the same time refusing to fully identify as homosexual. Only recently Hughes’s less known literary works have implied some possibility of homosexual impulses. This includes his short stories “Blessed Assurance,” about a father, whom is tormented that his son has turned homosexual, and “Seven People Dancing,” as well as the poem “Café 3AM.” Without a doubt many scholars look to “Blessed Assurance” for proof arguing Hughes’s presumed homosexuality. Moore argues