~~ recommended by emil karpo ~~
A son of the South, whose father was an evangelist, Levi Sandy (L.S.) Alexander Gumby (1885–1961) was born in Maryland. Once celebrated as much for his intellectual activities as for his amorous exploits, he earned the appellations “the Count,” “Mr. Scrapbook,” and “the Great God Gumby.” Known now as a major exponent of the “Negro Renaissance,” Gumby is among the most forgotten Blacks ever to have lived in Harlem. Mostly, this obscurity is because he was gay.
No matter who you are, today’s attack on DEI is an attack on daring to be different from what’s thought of as the norm: white and heterosexual. In the past, not conforming to this societal expectation risked danger, difficulties, and stigma. Without ever declaring it publicly, in Gumby’s day, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Huey Newton, James Baldwin, and many others might have lived their truth and been LGBTQ+ folks, but only on the “DL.” “No one who was queer then was out,” said photographer Marvin Smith, who met Gumby.
Celebrities like Little Naz X, Billy Porter, and Queen Latifah have shown that however difficult it is, it’s certainly easier to be queer and well known nowadays, but what was it like to be same-gender-loving, to be different, in a time when if you were queer, you had to deny it?
Attending Dover State College in Delaware to please his grandmother, Gumby discovered early in life that he was not cut out to be a lawyer. At the same time, he learned he was what was sometimes described at the start of the last century as “intellectual.”
Then, as now, if one deviated from heterosexuality and lived in a smaller town, moving to a big city, where it was easier to find others who were also like you, was a good idea.
Designed by Cleverdon and Putzel, the row house at 2144 Fifth Avenue was the location of the Gumby Book Studio. In a second level loft replacing the parlor floor, this was where Gumby lived, created his scrapbooks and, for 5 years, from 1925-1931, mesmerized the city’s most advanced intellectuals. Young and old, Black and white or straight and queer, everyone, including Arturo Schomburg, Zora Neal Hurston, and Alain Leroy Locke, came for good times. (Michael Henry Adams photo)Gumby came to New York around 1904. A devotee of theater, music, and art, no less than for the “Sportin’ Life” character in the musical “Porgy and Bess,” it was the allure of “the fast life of the bohemian,” said his friend Richard Bruce Nugent, that drew him here. Spending nearly the next 50 years in Harlem and Morningside Heights, like many before and after, be it as a bus boy, a waiter, a postal worker, or a servant, Gumby did whatever was required to become a “New Yorker” original.
Why does he matter? Over the course of his life, besides always being on the lookout for people to hook up with, Gumby gained renown for compiling more than 300 scrapbooks. Organized by category, each is stuffed with clippings and other ephemera documenting African-American attainment and history. “The Gumby collection is an invaluable resource. Any scholar writing about Black Americans in the 20th century must consult it!” said David Levering Lewis, who first used the scrapbooks while researching his book “When Harlem Was in Vogue.”
The first repository of Gumby’s collection was on the second-level parlor floor of a Victorian rowhouse-turned-rooming house at 2144 Fifth Avenue. Reconfigured into a loft, the space was divided into living quarters, a workspace for producing his albums, and the front “salon” with a fireplace and a ribbon of west-facing windows overlooking the street. Here, displaying the volumes he made along with artwork, rare books, and other “Negrophilia,” he established the Gumby Book Studio that, between 1925 and 1931, became a famous rendezvous in artistic circles.
What made it so special was that it was a safe place and bastion of diversity. Today, anyone probably has an LGBTQ+ friend or co-worker, and at least one who is Black or white as well. Back then, for most people, even in progressive New York, this was not so. Throughout the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, be they college kids or kings, everyone wanted to venture to Harlem for illegal alcohol, reefer, jazz music, and sex. For a season, innumerable whites came uptown to go “slumming,” as local clergymen complained, “to give their morals a vacation.” But however long they spent gawking voyeuristically, few ever came to know or befriend Blacks here. Nor were they likely to discuss African masks, Florence Mills’s singing, or the merits of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.
AmNews Archives
From the Feb. 26, 1930 issue of the AmNews.
From the Dec. 8, 1934 issue of the AmNews.
From the April 30, 1930, issue of the AmNews.
From the Sept. 17, 1930 issue of the AmNews.
From the Nov. 25, 1931 issue of the AmNews.- From the Feb. 26, 1930 issue of the AmNews.
- From the Dec. 8, 1934 issue of the AmNews.
At the Gumby Book Studio, guests did all those things and far more.
Gumby liked to boast of his studio soirées — that they were “the first unpremeditated interracial movement in Harlem.”
Author Maxwell Bodenheim confirmed the spirit of equality and inclusion he experienced from his first Gumby Studio visit: “When you mix Black and white, the result is gray — the color of unassuming meditation.” Between intense games of “Truth or Dare,” presided over by journalist H.L. Mencken or impresario Carl Van Vechten; at lunches for Countee Cullen, teas for Harlem’s demure Debutantes Club or art exhibits for Richmond Barthe, the city’s most discerning artists and intellectuals mixed and mingled at Gumby’s studio with ease.
Then, a few years after 1929’s stock market crash, everything came falling down, almost without a trace at first.
Propping up the Gumby Book Studio was the bibliophile butterfly’s sometime boyfriend, a stockbroker named Charles W. Newman. Once Newman lost a fortune and his studio closed, Gumby was promptly hospitalized, suffering from exhaustion and tuberculosis. With his many friends hosting at least two “go fund me” benefits, the Amsterdam News gave a running account of his progress as Gumby lay abed for the next four years.
Finally released, he received another shock. A friend with whom he entrusted his scrapbooks had stored them in a cellar that flooded. Another, whom he had given rare books and papers to keep safe for him, sold some as the Great Depression worsened.
In an odd way, it was racism that enabled Gumby to reproduce his lost scrapbooks and form a new library. “[B]ook dealers, [dismissing as insignificant ] all such Negro items, threw [them] aside when they bought out private collections …,” he wrote. “There was simply no market.”
Living in an SRO apartment, working as a waiter in the Columbia University faculty dining room, even with quite meager wages, Gumby was able to capitalize on such boorish attitudes. Moreover, well into his 60s, despite his age and lowly status, as he confessed while corresponding with Nugent, he was able to have trysts with Columbia students, mostly out of doors, in parks.
Via his work, Gumby became acquainted with a Columbia professor who induced him to give his scrapbooks to the university, to be preserved in Butler Library’s rare book room. Employed for nearly a year to organize them, Gumby added new volumes to his original gift every year until his death from tuberculosis in 1961.
Of late, even in the Black community, there’s been a widespread homophobic backlash that scorns queers of every variety. It’s the very tiniest group, the one that does the most to express their identity — trans people, who have been targeted most. “That’s sooo gay,” kids will say as a taunt; meanwhile, Candice Owens expresses disgust that queer people are so omnipresent, rubbing the public’s nose in “their mess.” Even some queers, “normal gay” people, with kids and country houses, insist, “There are only two genders!” And “the backlash against us only began when we started to focus on trans rights.”
In Gumby’s era, someone might have explained the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder as corresponding to coming out and becoming more visible, which only happened as we came to feel that it might affirm our identities without risking violence or death. Its growing demonization has, of necessity, increased advocacy. Castigating or vilifying those we consider more outré outcasts will not help. Trying to pass will not keep us safe when neither wealth, nobility, high military honors, nor conversion to Christianity saved Jews from Hitler’s death camps. Nor has wealth, education, and high social status fully insulated Blacks from racism and rancor.
A decade after Alexander Gumby died, in 1970, Huey P. Newton wrote, addressing the Black Panthers, what Gumby already knew about common cause and allyship :
“Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women (and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion … We must gain security in ourselves and therefore have respect and feelings for all oppressed people. We must not use the racist attitude that the white racists use against our people … I’m now injecting some of my prejudice by saying that ‘even a homosexual can be a revolutionary.’ Quite the contrary, maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary.”
In a quiet way, at least in book-lined rooms, defying the limitations an unjust society imposed on him at birth, Gumby was a fierce gay revolutionary.
No comments:
Post a Comment