Langston Hughes: A Mysterious Poet

Langston Hughes was a private, mysterious poet, whose sexuality became the focus of curiosity by his critics and readers before and after his 1967 passing. While there was limited scholarly works that accurately biographed his life, there was indeed a plethora of critical reviews and analyzations of his writing itself by various writers and poets (Summers 3). His work was different in that it mostly remained gender ambiguous and defied stereotypes about what it meant to be a man, a woman, straight, and gay. While Hughes never admitted nor denied being gay, his work, which included poetry, essays, and short stories, often referenced homoeroticism in subtle ways simply because “black identity was viewed as incompatible with homosexuality” (Summers …show more content…
Not long after, while working a variety of odd, underpaying jobs, Hughes finally saved up enough money to move to Chicago to live with his mother. During his young adult life, he attended Columbia University in 1921 but graduated from Lincoln University in 1929. Some of his first collective works were The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew, written in the last half of the 20s and discussed confliction between social and internal ideas, morals, and relationships (Vogul 400). It was during this time period where he expressed desire to escape these governing spaces and he ultimately “inscribes a queer time consciousness” (Vogul 400). While Hughes later traveled to Africa and Europe working odd jobs and also selling many of his works to magazines, one of his most notable works were recognized in the 1940s when he wrote his first autobiography The Big Sea. Here he discusses his internal and external struggles he endures while “passing” as a white man in Africa, after enduring racism because of his skin color for so long in the states (Bennett 673). He later wrote “Who’s Passing for Who” which also discusses the politics of passing because “because he was fascinated with identity as something unstable and ‘“queer,’” where his works gradually began to fall outside social norm barriers, as he explored his own identity (Bennett 678). Ten years later he wrote Café: 3 a.m., his first and most notorious works about homoeroticism that forced its readers to confront homosexuality and homophobia, leaving them questioning if this story was a direct reflection of Hughe’s own experiences and desires (Bennett 681). It also discusses the surveillance and the forced privatization of homosexuality. Hughes was also an activist, speaking at numerous political events, mostly in support of