As "midwife" to the Harlem Renaissance, Locke encouraged writers and artists to look to Africa for inspiration and to draw on African-American history as subjects for their work. He stressed the need to depict African-American characters and themes honestly and with an awareness of the need for "race-building."

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Although Locke is best known as a literary mentor and philosopher, he was also a patron of the arts. His interest in African-American art and its relationship to black culture persisted throughout his life. He not only collected both African-American and African art, he encouraged black colleges to train more art historians and to enlarge their collections of art.

In addition, Locke also became an expert on African-American music. He was one of the earliest critics to argue the importance of African-American music for American culture as a whole. He considered black music "the closest America has to a folk music."

During his long academic career, Locke wrote and edited many volumes on African-American culture, while also publishing philosophical works that articulated ideas of cultural relativism and pluralism. His conviction that all cultures are equally acceptable and share important common traits found a clear expression in the volume When Peoples Meet (1942), co-edited with Bernhard Stern.

Locke died on June 9, 1954 due to heart disease that resulted from a childhood bout with rheumatic fever.

In a note dated October 1, 1949, Locke described himself as a member of three minorities: a short black homosexual. Yet, he added, he would not have been part of a sexual minority if he had been born in ancient Greece; he would not have been discriminated against because of his race if he had lived in Europe; and, finally, his stature would be above average in Japan. This intimate note reveals Locke's awareness that cultural values are constantly negotiated and must constantly be referred to the social and historical forces that produced them.

The African-American gay male literary tradition consists of a substantial body of texts and includes some of the most gifted writers of the twentieth century.

Glbtq African Americans frequently experience racism in predominantly white glbtq communities and homophobia in heterosexual black society, but the multiple oppressions faced by black glbtq people are now being recognized.

Although largely invisible to the general public, a large body of twentieth-century gay male literature by American authors was published prior to Stonewall, some of it positive but most of it tinged with misery or bleakness as the price of being published and disseminated.

Most gay, lesbian, and bisexual American writers who adhered to Marxist-oriented parties and social movements between 1917 and the 1960s strove to hide their sexual orientation, and some even depicted homosexuals negatively in their fiction and drama.

The Harlem Renaissance, an African-American literary movement of the 1920s and 1930s, included several important gay and lesbian writers.

The relation of jazz to homosexual and transgendered experience has varied enormously over the course of its history, but, despite a hostile atmosphere, glbtq artists have made significant contributions.

A popular African-American sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance, James Richmond Barthé used his art as a means of working out internal conflicts related to race and sexuality.

Countee Cullen, an important member of the Harlem Renaissance, has coded references to homosexuality in much of his poetry.

A noted African-American writer from the 1900s through the 1920s, Angelina Weld Grimké fell into obscurity in the 1930s and was only rediscovered in the 1980s; her inability to act on her sexual desires inspired her writing and contributed to her ultimately abandoning it.

Langston Hughes, whose literary legacy is enormous and varied, was closeted, but homosexuality was an important influence on his literary imagination, and many of his poems may be read as gay texts.

Constrained by the social conventions of the time, the bisexual African-American novelist Nella Larsen was covert in her treatment of lesbianism.

The gay novelist, critic, and photographer Carl Van Vechten was especially interested in African-American culture and was an influential patron to many writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

Celebrating an ideal of manly love in both its spiritual and physical aspects, Walt Whitman has exerted a profound and enduring influence on gay literature.