Though his queerness is now largely accepted as a matter of fact by scholars and dedicated readers, questions still swirl around Langston Hughes’ sexuality – how he saw, defined and lived it. He hardly ever explicitly addressed queerness in his work, so clues there are few and flimsy. The posthumously published short story “Blessed Assurance” is a rare instance of him tackling the issue; vague, masked references in a handful of his poems are others. That’s one reason the previously unpublished “Seven People Dancing,” in the current issue of the New Yorker, is a big deal. Experts speculate that Hughes wrote the story, whose central character Marcel is a middle-aged, gay black Harlemite, in the early ‘60s.
Right from the start, “Seven” unpeels Marcel’s origin myth, dropping the reader in the middle of his process of self-creation, with humor and bite.
It was Marcel’s apartment, and he was a fairy. Nobody else was unusual in that regard. But Marcel was a fairy and he had inserted a “de la” in his name—Marcel de la Smith was how he had been known for a long time on his cards. He had once called himself Marcel de la Smythe, but his friends had been so tickled at this addition of a “y” and an “e” (“Aw, you still ain’t nothing but old Smith!”) that Marcel had dropped the Smythe affectation, keeping merely the “de la” as an indication of French Creole origin, although he had never been near New Orleans. He was from McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and although he had a good nature, he did not really relish being made fun of on certain scores.
Langston Hughes
Hughes illustrates what is revealed about us (our desires, self-image, fears) from the fictions we adopt as our realities. An aging queen with readjusted life goals and some lingering, ultimately impotent lusts, Marcel is a solitary figure in his own home, in a room full of people. In the story, Hughes uses his life as a gateway to observations about race, gender, sexuality and power. Read the rest of the story here.
