Homo History: Countee Cullen

Has it been a year already!? Just twelve months ago we celebrated Gay History Month – and, like clockwork, it’s that time again! For our first installment of this month-long look back, let’s shine some light on poet Countee Cullen.

Though no one seems to know for sure where the secretive Cullen came to be, we do know his mama birthed him in 1903 and named him Countee LeRoy Porter. That same mama ended up abandoning him, leaving Cullen’s grandmother to raise him.

The young Cullen attended high school here in New York, where he also met up with some other bold-faced names, like W.E.B. DuBois. DuBois helped the NYU graduate get his start in the poetry business by publishing Cullen’s words in The Crisis, DuBois’ seminal black magazine. From there, Cullen began circulating his work to Harper’s, Century and the National Urban League’s Opportunity. Cullen also published a number of collections, such as The Ballad of the Brown Girl and The Medea and Some Other Poems.

A key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Cullen later moved to Boston, where he received his Master’s from Harvard. His New York roots pulled him back to the Empire State, however, and in 1928 Cullen married DuBois’ granddaughter, Nina. That marriage didn’t last long, though, because Cullen took up with his best man and high-tailed it to Europe. He and Nina divorced two years later.

Despite acknowledging his homosexuality, Cullen married another woman, Ida Mae Roberson, in 1940. Even after this marriage, homoeroticism continued to dot his poetry. Though not explicitly gay, a number of Cullen’s collections deal with same-sex desire, which he often tinged with miscegenation. James Smethurst explains:

One of the most interesting aspects of many of these openly homoerotic poems is the linking of explicit homoeroticism with a miscegenation of black and white. Perhaps Cullen’s purpose in making the couples inter-racial was to heighten a sense of transgressive sex that also obscured something of the nature of the real social transgression by figuring sexuality within a racial discourse. These conflicted relationships are filled with anguish, bitterness and disappointment and much of the sexual conflict is displaced into racial conflict, but not to the extent that the homoerotic content of the poem becomes completely obscured. (Though perhaps it is obscured enough to evade the attention of those readers who for various reasons would prefer not to find it.)

On the next page you’ll find one of Cullen’s most homoerotic poems, “Tableau”. We’ve also included two other pieces, “Incident” and “Brown Girl Dead,” which we find absolutely heartbreaking.