Reading Will Make You Queer: Gender Inversion and Racial Leadership in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem

In her neo-slavery novel72 Hour Hold, the popular and best-selling writer Bebe Moore Campbell included a subplot about a character PJ, a brainy, reclusive middle-class African American teenager who reads constantly and excels at word games.¹ Other characters worry that PJ is harboring a dark secret. Eventually, PJ “comes out” and announces to his family that he is gay! What grabbed my attention about this subplot is absence—Campbell’s novel contains neither a scene in which the teenager has sex with another male nor one in which she reveals the character’s homosexual desire through dreams or furtive crushes on other boys. I am intrigued by the fact that Campbell used a preoccupation with reading to signal to her readers that this character was harboring a secret that would cause turmoil within his family.

Campbell’s strategy that “reading” is related to or a sign of being queer is what I address in this essay. Reading in African American literature and culture can make you queer. My use of queer follows definitions such as Michael Warner’s in the introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet where he positions queer in relation to regimes of heteronormativity that have the benefit “of pointing out a wide field of normalization” as a site of conformity and oppression that includes, yet goes beyond gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender inquiries.² Anne Herrman reaches a similar conclusion in Queering the Moderns when she comments that “[q]ueerness is less about object choice than about the recognition on the part of others that one is not like others, a subject out of order, not in sequence, not working.”³ Queerness indicates a wide range of nonconforming and nonnormative behaviors in which sexuality, gender, and race intersect.

Blacked Out, a study about racial identity and academic success among high school students in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, provides a useful example of the belief among African Americans that reading can make you queer. In Blacked Out, Signithia Fordham revealed that it was fairly typical among high school boys to fear being labeled a “brainiac,” the guy more comfortable with books and studies than with his fellow peers. One student who admitted to being a brainiac felt a strong need to delineate the difference between those like himself and so-called “pervert brainiacs,” whom he defined as homosexuals. Fordham explains that in the adolescent perspective of the African American students at Capital High, the homosexual is the figure for the queer because homosexuality is perceived as a “loss of gender integrity.”⁴ Student’s careful delineation of “brainiacs” and “pervert brainiacs” reveals, Fordham continues, that “one of the central reasons why the male students at Capital [High School] are fearful of the pursuit of academic excellence . . . [is] they fear being labeled gay,” an identity beyond the boundaries of acceptable African American masculinity.⁵ For the male students at Capital High, being gay means a complete loss of racial and gender identity, or to rephrase Anne Herrman, one is a black male lacking the racial and gender components that make up an identity as an African American man.

A focus of my research has been to find a language for talking about male queerness in black and African American texts. This essay continues that discussion of theorizing about queer masculinity in literary texts by paying attention to sex theories of the early twentieth century and considering how African American writers used them. This essay explores, more specifically, gender inversion in Home to Harlem (1928) by Claude McKay. Gender inversion was the precursor to modern homosexuality; medical science of the time explained that same-sex desire was the result of an individual having the psyche or soul of the opposite gender.⁶ In this essay I explore how McKay used gender inversion as a marker for becoming a man of culture and a race leader. In McKay’s Home to Harlem, the Haitian student Ray spends his time reading books, elicits erotic desire from the...