In our neighborhood, a central message of Delight is that Black historical past is American historical past, and Black LGBTQ+ historical past is African American historical past, too.
A son of the South, whose father was an evangelist, Levi Sandy (L.S.) Alexander Gumby (1885–1961) was born in Maryland. As soon as celebrated as a lot for his mental actions as for his amorous exploits, he earned the appellations “the Rely,” “Mr. Scrapbook,” and “the Nice God Gumby.” Recognized now as a significant exponent of the “Negro Renaissance,” Gumby is among the many most forgotten Blacks ever to have lived in Harlem. Largely, this obscurity is as a result of he was homosexual.
Irrespective of who you’re, at present’s assault on DEI is an assault on daring to be totally different from what’s regarded as the norm: white and heterosexual. Prior to now, not conforming to this societal expectation risked hazard, difficulties, and stigma. With out ever declaring it publicly, in Gumby’s day, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Huey Newton, James Baldwin, and plenty of others might need lived their fact and been LGBTQ+ of us, however solely on the “DL.” “Nobody who was queer then was out,” mentioned photographer Marvin Smith, who met Gumby.
Celebrities like Little Naz X, Billy Porter, and Queen Latifah have proven that nevertheless troublesome it’s, it’s definitely simpler to be queer and well-known these days, however what was it wish to be same-gender-loving, to be totally different, in a time when if you happen to have been queer, you needed to deny it?
Attending Dover State Faculty in Delaware to please his grandmother, Gumby found early in life that he was not minimize out to be a lawyer. On the similar time, he discovered he was what was typically described at first of the final century as “mental.”
Then, as now, if one deviated from heterosexuality and lived in a smaller city, transferring to a giant metropolis, the place it was simpler to search out others who have been additionally such as you, was a good suggestion.
Gumby got here to New York round 1904. A devotee of theater, music, and artwork, a minimum of for the “Sportin’ Life” character within the musical “Porgy and Bess,” it was the attract of “the quick lifetime of the bohemian,” mentioned his good friend Richard Bruce Nugent, that drew him right here. Spending practically the subsequent 50 years in Harlem and Morningside Heights, like many earlier than and after, be it as a bus boy, a waiter, a postal employee, or a servant, Gumby did no matter was required to turn into a “New Yorker” authentic.
Why does he matter? Over the course of his life, moreover at all times being looking out for folks to hook up with, Gumby gained renown for compiling greater than 300 scrapbooks. Organized by class, every is full of clippings and different ephemera documenting African-American attainment and historical past. “The Gumby assortment is a useful useful resource. Any scholar writing about Black People within the twentieth century should seek the advice of it!” mentioned David Levering Lewis, who first used the scrapbooks whereas researching his e-book “When Harlem Was in Vogue.”
The primary repository of Gumby’s assortment was on the second-level parlor flooring of a Victorian rowhouse-turned-rooming home at 2144 Fifth Avenue. Reconfigured right into a loft, the area was divided into dwelling quarters, a workspace for producing his albums, and the entrance “salon” with a fire and a ribbon of west-facing home windows overlooking the road. Right here, displaying the volumes he made together with art work, uncommon books, and different “Negrophilia,” he established the Gumby Guide Studio that, between 1925 and 1931, turned a well-known rendezvous in creative circles.
What made it so particular was that it was a secure place and bastion of range. At the moment, anybody most likely has an LGBTQ+ good friend or co-worker, and a minimum of one who’s Black or white as effectively. Again then, for most individuals, even in progressive New York, this was not so. All through the Twenties Harlem Renaissance, be they school children or kings, everybody wished to enterprise to Harlem for unlawful alcohol, reefer, jazz music, and intercourse. For a season, innumerable whites got here uptown to go “slumming,” as native clergymen complained, “to present their morals a trip.” However nevertheless lengthy they spent gawking voyeuristically, few ever got here to know or befriend Blacks right here. Nor have been they more likely to talk about African masks, Florence Mills’s singing, or the deserves of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.
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On the Gumby Guide Studio, visitors did all these issues and much more.
Gumby favored to boast of his studio soirées — that they have been “the primary unpremeditated interracial motion in Harlem.”
Creator Maxwell Bodenheim confirmed the spirit of equality and inclusion he skilled from his first Gumby Studio go to: “If you combine Black and white, the result’s grey — the colour of unassuming meditation.” Between intense video games of “Fact or Dare,” presided over by journalist H.L. Mencken or impresario Carl Van Vechten; at lunches for Countee Cullen, teas for Harlem’s demure Debutantes Membership or artwork displays for Richmond Barthe, town’s most discerning artists and intellectuals combined and mingled at Gumby’s studio with ease.
Then, a number of years after 1929’s inventory market crash, all the things got here falling down, virtually with out a hint at first.
Propping up the Gumby Guide Studio was the bibliophile butterfly’s someday boyfriend, a stockbroker named Charles W. Newman. As soon as Newman misplaced a fortune and his studio closed, Gumby was promptly hospitalized, affected by exhaustion and tuberculosis. Together with his many mates internet hosting a minimum of two “go fund me” advantages, the Amsterdam Information gave a working account of his progress as Gumby lay abed for the subsequent 4 years.
Lastly launched, he acquired one other shock. A good friend with whom he entrusted his scrapbooks had saved them in a cellar that flooded. One other, whom he had given uncommon books and papers to maintain secure for him, offered some because the Nice Melancholy worsened.
In an odd manner, it was racism that enabled Gumby to breed his misplaced scrapbooks and kind a brand new library. “[B]ook sellers, [dismissing as insignificant ] all such Negro gadgets, threw [them] apart once they purchased out personal collections …,” he wrote. “There was merely no market.”
Residing in an SRO condominium, working as a waiter within the Columbia College college eating room, even with fairly meager wages, Gumby was in a position to capitalize on such boorish attitudes. Furthermore, effectively into his 60s, regardless of his age and lowly standing, as he confessed whereas corresponding with Nugent, he was in a position to have trysts with Columbia college students, largely outdoor, in parks.
By way of his work, Gumby turned acquainted with a Columbia professor who induced him to present his scrapbooks to the college, to be preserved in Butler Library’s uncommon e-book room. Employed for practically a 12 months to arrange them, Gumby added new volumes to his authentic present yearly till his loss of life from tuberculosis in 1961.
Of late, even within the Black neighborhood, there’s been a widespread homophobic backlash that scorns queers of each selection. It’s the very tiniest group, the one which does probably the most to precise their identification — trans folks, who’ve been focused most. “That’s sooo homosexual,” children will say as a taunt; in the meantime, Candice Owens expresses disgust that queer individuals are so omnipresent, rubbing the general public’s nostril in “their mess.” Even some queers, “regular homosexual” folks, with children and nation homes, insist, “There are solely two genders!” And “the backlash in opposition to us solely started once we began to give attention to trans rights.”
In Gumby’s period, somebody might need defined the classification of homosexuality as a psychological dysfunction as equivalent to popping out and turning into extra seen, which solely occurred as we got here to really feel that it would affirm our identities with out risking violence or loss of life. Its rising demonization has, of necessity, elevated advocacy. Castigating or vilifying these we think about extra outré outcasts is not going to assist. Making an attempt to move is not going to hold us secure when neither wealth, the Aristocracy, excessive navy honors, nor conversion to Christianity saved Jews from Hitler’s loss of life camps. Nor has wealth, schooling, and excessive social standing totally insulated Blacks from racism and rancor.
A decade after Alexander Gumby died, in 1970, Huey P. Newton wrote, addressing the Black Panthers, what Gumby already knew about frequent trigger and allyship :
“No matter your private opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the varied liberation actions amongst homosexuals and girls (and I converse of the homosexuals and girls as oppressed teams), we should always attempt to unite with them in a revolutionary trend … We should acquire safety in ourselves and due to this fact have respect and emotions for all oppressed folks. We should not use the racist angle that the white racists use in opposition to our folks … I’m now injecting a few of my prejudice by saying that ‘even a gay generally is a revolutionary.’ Fairly the opposite, perhaps a gay might be probably the most revolutionary.”
In a quiet manner, a minimum of in book-lined rooms, defying the restrictions an unjust society imposed on him at beginning, Gumby was a fierce homosexual revolutionary.
