After arriving in Harlem from Los Angeles in 1925, Wallace Thurman—editor, publisher, playwright, poet and novelist—edited a couple of journals before launching the boundary-pushing literary magazine FIRE!!. Contributors included poet Langston Hughes, anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston, out gay artist and playwright Bruce Nugent and others. The stories, poems, essays and drawings it featured tackled a wide range of taboo topics relating to race and sexuality.

Thurman’s groundbreaking first novel, The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), explored the nuances of skin-color bias within the Black community. Author of the play "Harlem," staged on Broadway the same year, he became the first Black manuscript reader at a mainstream publishing house.

Shortly after arriving in Harlem, Thurman was arrested for having sex with a man and publicly denied being gay. His marriage to a woman lasted six months; his wife sought a divorce on the grounds that he was a homosexual and refused to admit it.

After touring the Black Vaudeville circuit, Ethel Waters moved to Harlem in 1919 and became an entertainment icon. As a blues singer, she recorded hits like “Stormy Weather” and her version of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”

She was the first Black woman to integrate theater on Broadway when she starred in Irving Berlin's 1933 musical "As Thousands Cheer." She became the first African American to star on her own television show—the 1939 variety special “The Ethel Waters Show”—and the second to be nominated for an Academy Award.

Her three marriages ended in divorce, and in the 1920s, Waters, who frequented Harlem’s lesbian circles, had a romantic relationship with dancer Ethel Williams. Known as “The Two Ethels,” they lived together in Harlem. Later in life, she announced that she had rededicated her life to Jesus Christ and toured with evangelist Billy Graham on his crusades.

Already an award-winning poet in high school, Countee Cullen expanded his literary reputation during his college years when his work appeared in Harper’s, Crisis, Poetry and other renowned periodicals. When he entered Harvard University to pursue a master’s degree in English, he published Color, the collection of poems that established Cullen as a leading young artist of the Harlem Renaissance.

His sonnet “From the Dark Tower,” published in FIRE!!, decried racial injustice, stating it would not last forever and would ultimately make black people stronger and more resilient. “We shall not always plant while others reap…"

Cullen’s very public 1928 wedding to the daughter of racial justice leader W.E.B. Du Bois—Harlem’s premiere social event of the era—ended shortly after the honeymoon when Cullen confessed his love for men to his new wife. With Cullen conflicted about his sexuality, his mentor, philosopher and writer Alain Locke, steered Cullen to gay-affirming material of the day.

Cullen had relationships with Black and white men, a fact reflected in some of his work. He dedicated his poem “Tableau” to a white ex-lover:

“Locked arm in arm they cross the way, The black boy and the white,

The golden splendor of the day, The sable pride of night.

From lowered blinds the dark folk stare, And here the fair folk talk,

Indignant that these two should dare in unison to walk.”

Alain Locke, a prolific writer, philosopher and educator, was considered the “dean” of the Harlem Renaissance. The first African American selected as a Rhodes Scholar in 1907, he obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University in 1918. His 1926 anthology of African American writers, The New Negro (which included his own work), became a cultural and artistic cornerstone of the Harlem Renaissance.

In Locke’s New Negro philosophy, race transcended heredity, the limitations of the past and the politics of civil rights. Instead, he saw race (and the arts) as an arena for individual and collective empowerment.

Locke, who taught for decades at Howard University, was secretive about being gay. But in his circle, he encouraged and supported other gay African American writers in the Harlem Renaissance and exposed them to pioneering and gay-affirming literature about sex and sexuality. Some, like Langston Hughes, were the object of his unrequited affections.

Clad in her signature white tuxedo and top hat, Gladys Bentley belted out songs with bold, risqué lyrics to audiences in Harry Hansberry’s Clam House. Her performances at the queer haunt on West 133rd Street also drew straight crowds and celebrities to see her play piano and sing popular songs rewritten with double entendres.

Reacting to her show, writer Langston Hughes called Bentley “an amazing exhibition of musical energy—a large, dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard—a perfect piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm.”

The most “out” of the women who popularized blues music in the 1920s, Bentley married a white woman in a civil ceremony in 1930. Later in life, she married a man and published “I Am a Woman Again” in Ebony magazine in 1952, stating that hormone shots cured her lesbianism. Critics note that the story was published during the McCarthyism era, when gay and lesbian people were being targeted for investigation under a climate that linked homosexuality with communism.

Bruce Nugent was one of the few African American writers who declared himself out publicly. Along with some other leading new Black literary figures of the time, he criticized Black writers who appeased white society to achieve racial equality.

His stream-of-consciousness short story “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” published in FIRE!!, described a homoerotic and interracial encounter. Also a visual artist, Nugent published illustrations in FIRE!! and exhibited paintings along with other Black artists of the time.

Later in life, he married Grace Marr and they lived together for 17 years until her death in 1969. His work resurfaced in gay anthologies in the 1980s. The 2004 film Brother to Brother conveyed Nugent’s recollections about the Black gay artists of the Harlem Rennaissance.

“People did what they wanted to do with whom they wanted to do it,” Nugent said shortly before his death in 1987 about writing openly about homosexuality during the Harlem Renaissance. “You didn’t get on the rooftops and shout… You didn’t. You just did what you wanted to do.”