Say My Name

Abstract

In a letter to Langston Hughes dated 5 December 1928, Harlem Renaissance writer and personality Wallace Thurman begins with an admittedly informal salutation. Dear Lank-yyank-yank, he writes (115). Lank-y-yank-yank? Any new piece of information about the notoriously private and unreadable Hughes is always welcome, and one wonders if Thurman's pet name for the famous poet offers some sort of a clue. What could possibly earn a person named Langston the quasi-obscene sobriquet of Lank-yyank-yank? What would such a name imply? What activities might it suggest? Apart from a letter to Alain Locke in which Hughes mentions his fondness for Walt Whitman's Calamus poems (Rampersad 69), this seems as close as we're likely to get to any hint of the inscrutable Hughes's sex life. As Thurman tells Hughes in another letter, anticipating our own project of looking for Langston, You are in the final analysis the most consarned and diabolical creature, to say nothing of being either the most egregiously simple or excessively complex, person I know. Pee on you!! (122) We now know about Hughes's rather unfortunate nicknameand Thurman's facility with the pithy put-down-through the welcome publication of The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader, edited by Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III. Along with Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, published in 2002, this collection of Thurman's writings forms part of a renewed interest in heretofore minor figures in the Harlem Renaissance, and both offer the scholarly treasure troves of easy and expansive access to both published and unpublished materials. They also form part of a burgeoning scholarly interest in one particular aspect of 1920s Harlem: its location as the birthing ground of one of the country's earliest and most diverse queer cultures. Indeed, for queer black studies, Harlem in the 1920s has become both a central possibility and a central problematic. On the one hand, the Harlem Renaissance provides an ideal opportunity to witness and interrogate the sometimes dizzying interaction of race and sexuality in the early part of the twentieth century. At the same time, however, scholars are struggling