“So why would you get on the roof and say ‘I loved prick’”: A Literary Study of Internalized Homophobia in the Harlem Renaissance in the Works of Richard Bruce Nugent, Wallace Thurman, and Nella Larsen

Abstract

This thesis explores the way in which literature from the Harlem Renaissance was influenced by internalized homophobia. The Harlem Renaissance remains an academically interesting and culturally relevant movement, and I turn to examine literary representations of sexuality and the ways in which the stories and characters are motivated by internalized homophobia. Internalized homophobia describes the personal phenomenon of internalizing external stigma associated with homosexuality, consequently negatively impacting one’s relationship with one’s own homosexuality and further influencing mental health as well as intrapersonal relationships. I examine the works of three different Harlem Renaissance authors: Richard Bruce Nugent, Wallace Thurman, and Nella Larsen to explore three different representations of internalized homophobia in Harlem Renaissance literature. Furthermore, I have also chosen to examine biographical and literary historiographical aspects of the texts, as I believe this is integral to properly understand the true motivations of the texts as intended by the authors. Nugent, being the only openly homosexual writer and artist of the Renaissance, depicts the receiving end of internalized homophobia in his literature and how this negatively impacts the openly queer, often autobiographical, protagonist. Thurman serves as the quintessential homosexual figure in denial, as both him and his literary characters vehemently deny any homosexuality, resulting in rampant internalized homophobia poorly concealed in his novel Infants of the Spring. Finally, I examine Larsen’s Passing, and argue that the characters confounding behavior in the novel is not only explained by sapphic motivation, but by unchecked internalized homophobia. Passing also presents the ways in which the Black sapphic woman would struggle with internalized homophobia to a higher extent than her male peers. Though there has been much academic interest and research made on the queer culture of the Harlem Renaissance and homosexual elements of key writers and texts, I argue that internalized homophobia is an integral part of these Harlem Renaissance texts. Lastly, I consider the ways in which internalized homophobia is complicated in the intersection between sexuality and race, and in Larsen’s case, with womanhood.