This model sharply contrasts with the characters' heterosexual middle-class aspirations. Faced with Jake's choice of settling down in a heterosexual relationship, Ray leaves Harlem (and his aspiring middle-class fiancée Agatha) for Europe. Banjo follows Ray to Europe where he encounters another soul-mate, the title character. Indeed, James Smethurst describes Banjo as "a gay screwball comedy . . . in which lovers meet, are attracted, are split up . . . and are ultimately reunited." Their friendship represents a "utopian marriage of the proletariat and the radical black intelligentsia."

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After a long period of neglect, McKay's signal importance for African-American literature is now fully established. What needs more emphasis is the crucial role played by his homosexuality in his life and work.

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.

Off and on over two centuries, New York City has also reigned as the capital of homosexual, transgender, and queer life in America.

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.

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.