Not only did he write about the music, drama, and literature of the New Negro Movement, he also befriended many of its important artists and organizers, and was himself an influential patron. Van Vechten donated money for literary prizes and supported many of the younger generation of black writers, including Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen.

Sponsor Message.

Van Vechten's efforts to promote African-American culture also echoed in his photography. His provocative photographs taken from 1932 until his death document important African-American figures in the arts.

Van Vechten's philanthropic pursuits in African-American culture were inspired by his father who cofounded a school for African-American children in rural Mississippi. Like his father, Van Vechten had an interest in African-American culture. Unlike his father, however, he could not stay in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he was born on June 17, 1880; Van Vechten fled to Chicago.

While attending the University of Chicago from 1899 to 1903, he developed his interest in black music. His passion for the ragtime he heard in Chicago inspired the eight books of music and other arts criticism he wrote after he moved to New York City in 1906.

After his books of criticism, Van Vechten wrote seven novels. His most controversial is Nigger Heaven (1926), whose title and depiction of Harlem life sent shock waves throughout the African-American community. His novels are more than provocative, however; they weave romantic relationships between men and reflect his own life and the people he admired.

His first novel, Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works (1922), is as much a memoir as it is fiction. It is a tongue-in-cheek roman à clef that starts with a preface in which Van Vechten explains the purpose of the novel and introduces himself as our guide.

Whiffle, a flamboyant author who never completed a book and a close friend of Van Vechten's, writes a letter just before his death requesting Van Vechten to write a book about his life so that he may live on past his death. The novel furnishes guideposts to Whiffle's and Van Vechten's intimate relationship and mythologizes Whiffle.

Peter Whiffle is a nod and a wink to those readers who recognize the title character as a particular type, "the gay, faun-like Peter of Paris"; to those who do not, he is a mystery.

Van Vechten's second novel, The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), celebrates 1920s bohemian culture in New York City. The novel tells the story of young Harold Prewett, fresh from college, who is sent to New York by his father to reject the temptations of an uninhibited New York society revolving around its queen, Campaspe Lorillard. Prewett soon learns of his father's plans and rebels by leaving his wife of two weeks; he sails to Europe with the Duke of Middlebottom, whose stationery reads "A thing of beauty is a boy forever."

Van Vechten's five subsequent novels, including The Tattooed Countess (1924), Firecrackers (1925), Spider Boy (1928), and Parties (1930), return to the characters and places of his first two, connecting them to each other as well as to other new characters.

With his novels, Van Vechten creates a gay, bohemian society not unlike the one he lived in and the one he depicts in The Blind Bow-Boy, but with himself as its queen.

Prior to Stonewall, most gay artists were closeted, but they were inventive in creating codes for those in the know; after 1945 some adventurous artists developed independent networks for the distribution of works of gay art.

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.

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

Patronage--the sponsorship of artists and the commissioning of works from them--has remained a significant factor in the creation of queer visual culture in the modern era.

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.

African-American Blues singer Gladys Bentley openly flaunted her lesbianism in the 1920s and 1930s, but recanted in the 1950s in an attempt to salvage her career.

The female nudes and portraits of cross-dressed women made American artist Romaine Brooks's lesbian identity known to the world.

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

Ronald Firbank's witty, campy novels mock the dominant homophobic, materialistic culture of early twentieth-century England.

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.

In addition to becoming--with Alice B. Toklas--half of an iconic lesbian couple, Gertrude Stein was an important innovator and transformer of the English language.

Hostess A'Lelia Walker, the "joy goddess" of the Harlem Renaissance, especially valued the company of black glbtq artists and writers, which gave her gatherings a distinctly gay ambience.