Encoded Desires: Langston Hughes' Gay Poetics as Social Subversion in the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract

This study examines Langston Hughes's gay narratives as deliberate acts of social subversion against the Harlem Renaissance's cultural politics of racial uplift and respectability in four selected poems: "Poem" (1925), "Port Town" (1926), "Desire" (1927), and "Boy" (1928). Grounded in Stephen Greenblatt's New Historicist concept of social energy circulation integrated with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory; this study situates Hughes' queer poetics within the institutional circuits and gatekeeping structures that shaped Harlem Renaissance cultural production. Through systematic close textual analysis and rigorous historicist contextualization, the study demonstrates how Hughes circumvents the restrictive ideological apparatus of the Harlem Renaissance by crafting representations of gayness through sophisticated metaphorical encoding that subtly critiques marginalization while preserving transgressive meanings for perceptive readers. The problems this study addresses are threefold. Scholarship on Hughes often relies on biographical speculation rather than rigorous textual analysis, which leaves the relationship between his poetic techniques and subversive intentions undertheorized. In addition, studies of queer presence in the Harlem Renaissance have not sufficiently connected textual strategies to the specific institutional conditions that shaped them, treating encoding as a general phenomenon instead of a historically situated practice. Finally, the theoretical frameworks applied to Hughes’ work remain fragmented, failing to synthesize macrolevel institutional constraints with the microlevel cognitive mechanisms through which his metaphors enact their subversive power. The study contributes to Harlem Renaissance scholarship, African American literary criticism, and Black queer studies by revealing how marginalized voices operated within and against dominant cultural formations through strategic literary practices.