Climbing Kilimanjaro
langston hughes and roy
The photograph above is of Langston Hughes with “close companion/friend" and secretary Roy Blackburn, California, 1930s. (1) It has forever fascinated me.
During this time, Hughes was a writer in residence on the Carmel beach house estate Ennesfree owned by patron Noel Sullivan, an older, wealthy, white man who was single and a “confirmed bachelor.” Sullivan often opened his home to Afro African American personalities who faced difficulties finding a place to stay because of segregated California hotels. Hughes and Sullivan were never romantically involved.
An attractive man of 22 years, Blackburn claims to have come to Hughes uninvited and seeking employment. Having no sort of secretarial skills of any kind, except speed and reliability as typist, the often impecunious Hughes hired him on the spot offering no salary but free room, board and twenty percent of royalties on the sale on stories, articles, and poems written in the following six month their stay. Both men would share the same bungalow on the estate. [There exist a photo showing Hughes, Blackburn, Sullivan and Sullivan's supposed lover(?) all together horseback ridding.]
Blackburn intermittently served as West Coast secretary to Hughes for the next three decades. Later in life, he married.
Could Blackburn have been on the overhyped down low? It is quite possible. When talking about a number of Afro American gay men in the far distant past, a forever unknown percentage did enter into marriage. (And, many Caucasian men did the same!) One can only imagine the number grandfathers, great grandfathers and so on who were "in the life."
Harlem friends Richard Bruce Nugent and Wallace Thurman married women.
Did you know about Langston Hughes’ 1931 Caribbean traveling companion Zell Ingram? Though Hughes portrayed Ingram as straight in his autobiography the Big Sea, Ingram was gay Afro American man. A visual artist, he later in life married but soon divorced. His wife destroyed much of his work in a fit of rage.
langston hughes and roy
The photograph above is of Langston Hughes with “close companion/friend" and secretary Roy Blackburn, California, 1930s. (1) It has forever fascinated me.
During this time, Hughes was a writer in residence on the Carmel beach house estate Ennesfree owned by patron Noel Sullivan, an older, wealthy, white man who was single and a “confirmed bachelor.” Sullivan often opened his home to Afro African American personalities who faced difficulties finding a place to stay because of segregated California hotels. Hughes and Sullivan were never romantically involved.
An attractive man of 22 years, Blackburn claims to have come to Hughes uninvited and seeking employment. Having no sort of secretarial skills of any kind, except speed and reliability as typist, the often impecunious Hughes hired him on the spot offering no salary but free room, board and twenty percent of royalties on the sale on stories, articles, and poems written in the following six month their stay. Both men would share the same bungalow on the estate. [There exist a photo showing Hughes, Blackburn, Sullivan and Sullivan's supposed lover(?) all together horseback ridding.]
Blackburn intermittently served as West Coast secretary to Hughes for the next three decades. Later in life, he married.
Could Blackburn have been on the overhyped down low? It is quite possible. When talking about a number of Afro American gay men in the far distant past, a forever unknown percentage did enter into marriage. (And, many Caucasian men did the same!) One can only imagine the number grandfathers, great grandfathers and so on who were "in the life."
Harlem friends Richard Bruce Nugent and Wallace Thurman married women.
Did you know about Langston Hughes’ 1931 Caribbean traveling companion Zell Ingram? Though Hughes portrayed Ingram as straight in his autobiography the Big Sea, Ingram was gay Afro American man. A visual artist, he later in life married but soon divorced. His wife destroyed much of his work in a fit of rage.