“I suppose some of us erotic lads…were placed here just to eat our hearts out with longing for unattainable things, especially for that friendship beyond understanding.” – Countee Cullen to Alain LeRoy Locke, 1923. Picture: Countee Cullen (May 30, 1903 – January 9, 1946), 1941. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Countee Cullen, who died seventy-one years ago today, was an American poet, scholar, and author who some describe as the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance. A gifted student, Cullen graduated from New York University already a published poet and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1925, as he entered a master's program at Harvard, Cullen’s first collection of poems, “Color,” was published; it included many of his best-known poems, such as “Heritage” (“What is Africa to me: copper sun or scarlet sea…”), “Incident” (“Now I was eight and very small / And he was no whit bigger, / And so I smiled, but he poked out / His tongue, and called me, ‘Nigger.’”), and “Yet Do I Marvel” (“I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind…Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing!”). “Color” proved vital to the foundation of the Harlem Renaissance as a movement. Cullen, who was married twice—including to Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois—was homosexual, and he maintained a long-term relationship with Harold Jackman, a school teacher well-known among Harlem’s gay elite. Cullen also had close relationships—some platonic, some romantic, some sexual—with gay artists and intellectuals like Langston Hughes, Carl Van Vechten, Alain Locke, and others. By 1930, Cullen’s reputation as a writer had diminished; he spent his final years teaching and writing, albeit unsuccessfully, for the stage. Countee Cullen died from high blood pressure and uremic poisoning on January 9, 1946; he was forty-two. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #CounteeCullen
