Sex Lives of Poets: Langston Hughes

Candle-extinguishing butts, 3am afterparties, collections of seamen (and semen)--this dishy tour of Langston Hughes's love life will leave you gagging with the gays.


Please Support Breaking Form!
Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Pretty Please.....Buy our books:
     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.
     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

SHOW NOTES:

Watch Hughes recite his poem, "The Weary Blues" to jazz accompaniment on tv in 1958.

You can check out troves of Hughes's poetry here, here, and here.

Read Langston Hughes's poem "Café: 3AM"

Listen to Hughes read "Harlem."

Langston Hughes's first memoir, The Big Sea, about his seafaring travels--including upon the West Hesseltine where he said he had that fateful encounter with a sailor--can be found here.  It includes  the essay "Spectacles in Color" in which Hughes describes queer ballroom scene and Countee Cullen's wedding  to Yolanda Du Bois (with Harold Jackson, his boyfriend, serving as best man).

Faith Berry's biography of Hughes is Before and Beyond Harlem. Her papers are at the Library of Congress.

Read more about Arnold Ampersad's biography of Hughes:
Volume 1 (which covers 1902-1940 and does have a snazzy subtitle: I, Too, Sing America).
Volume 2 (which covers 1941-death and also has a snazzy subtitle: I Dream a World).

Other receipts for the episode can be found in the following essays and scholarship:
Hilton Als, "The Elusive Langston Hughes" (The New Yorker, 2015)

Juda Bennett, "Multiple Passings and the Double Death of Langston Hughes" (Biography, vol 23.4, 2000).Link through Project Muse.

Andrew Donnelly, "Langston Hughes on the DL" (College Literature, Volume 44, Number 1, Winter 2017). Link through Project Muse.

Mason Stokes, "Strange Fruits: Rethinking the Gay Twenties" (Transition , 2002, No. 92). Link through JSTOR.

Shane Vogel, "Closing Time: Langston Hughes and the Poetics of Harlem Nightlife," in Criticism (Vol 48.3, 2006). Link through Project Muse.

Jennifer Wilson, "Queer Harlem, Queer Tashkent" (Slavic Review , FALL 2017). Link through JSTOR.

Finally, visit Ann Patchett's bookstore online here: https://www.parnassusbooks.net/