Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists (always with two exclamation points) was a short-lived “little magazine” hoping to jolt the editorial landscape of Harlem life by featuring and targeting a younger generation of Black artists. Birthed in the writer and editor Wallace Thurman’s Harlem apartment while he hosted the writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, artist Aaron Douglas, and artist and writer Richard Bruce Nugent, Fire!! was an emphatic interruption of editorial content being published at the time. (So emphatic that it was banned in Boston!) As defined in the opening foreword, “Fire … flaming, burning, searing, and penetrating far beyond the superficial items of the flesh … a cry of conquest in the night.”

The format of Fire!! was an extension of The New Negro anthology edited by Alain Locke, but with a mission to publish an edgier perspective not seen in other publications, like the academic journal Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. Fire!! sought to create a publication whose narratives would counter overly optimistic political idealism and clear space for new voices. Thurman describes wanting to create a publication unlike “old propagandistic journals” that was “ready to emotionally serve a new day and a new generation.” The new voices represented by Fire!! would take the form of essays, short stories, plays, poems, and illustrations written and illustrated by the younger, decidedly non-assimilationist crew that called themselves the Niggerati — a portmanteau of “nigger” and “literati” (i.e., a well-educated nigga who can read) that was too irresistible and shocking not to be used by Hughes, Hurston, Thurman, Nugent, Countee Cullen, and a few other creative friends. Covering topics that were taboo, including sex work and homosexuality, the first (and only) issue of Fire!! opened with a short essay by Wallace Thurman about a woman named Cordelia, who had the “physicality of a prostitute.” Additional pieces included a short story about interracial marriage in Paris by Gwendolyn Bennett and Color Struck, a play in four scenes tackling colorism, as well as a short story about a washerwoman with an unemployed husband, both by Zora Neale Hurston. These were stories about regular people, not the Talented Tenth, not the bourgeoisie. Fire!! shared stories of a different kind of liberation and Blackness.

Thurman and his friends wanted to create an editorial object that instigated conversation and truly depicted a new landscape of Black thought and vocabulary. To that end, Thurman rejected “society negros” and often called out establishment and institutional figureheads who prevented the advancement of a younger, more radical, and inclusive agenda.

As a graphic designer in 21st-century New York City, I am always searching for ways that my identity as a queer Black man has shown up visually in history. Looking, I would ask myself: Where are the images of Black gay folks being tender? Or intimate? What were some of the earliest illustrations of Black gay love? It was in Fire!! magazine that Aaron Douglas and Richard Bruce Nugent pushed visual representations of Blackness and queerness almost a century ago.

For me, the first time I saw Fire!!’s cover, I couldn’t fully process what I was seeing. Is this a face? Was this a man or woman on the cover? Who was this person?

This person was me.

Aaron Douglas’s distinct imagery was one of the principal visual definers of the Harlem Renaissance. His graphic style blended influences — he was inspired by African masks and dances as well as the modernism of Art Deco and Art Nouveau. Born in Topeka, Kan., on May 26, 1899, Douglas knew at an early age he wanted to be an artist. He graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1922 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and went on to teach high school art in Kansas City before moving to New York in 1925.

In Harlem, Douglas became the most sought-after illustrator for Black writers of his time after his covers for Opportunity and The Crisis were published, a style dubbed “Afro-Cubanism” by art critic Richard Powell. Among his other notable covers and illustrations were his designs for Paul Morand’s Black Magic (1929) and James Weldon Johnson’s epic poem Gods’ Trombones (1927).

Starting in the late 1930s, Douglas taught at Fisk University for nearly 30 years and remained an active artist until the end of his life. In 1963, he was invited by President John F. Kennedy to attend a celebration of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, held at the White House. Douglas died at the age of 79 on Feb. 2, 1979, in Nashville, Tenn.

In my opinion, one of his most distinctive works was the cover for Fire!! The red background of the cover glows like embers. The title, “FIRE!” — in all capital, bold red letters with two exclamation marks — sits top and center against black. Below, the audience is called out in an Art Deco–like font: “Devoted to Younger Negro Artists.” I love the extended S’s stretched to fill the line length. The tagline sits at the brow line of the portrait. The profile juts in and out, revealing the eyes, nose, and mouth. A mythical creature, some sort of lion/sphynx hybrid, sits at the base of the head, silhouetted in red and reminding the viewer of our ancient African roots. Above it hangs a typographic J and O, forming an ear and earring. The image portrays the strength, sensitivity, and heritage of Blackness — a new face of Harlem. There’s an interesting play on positive and negative space in the portrait, too, and the face is not immediately decipherable. The portrait is almost bigger than the page and can barely contain the figure. The Niggerati crew were painting new portraits of Harlem with new stories — some of them queer.

The first time I read Bruce Nugent’s piece “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” I tried to imagine my mirror self in 1926. The story he wrote of an explicitly Black queer romance made me feel “seen” even now, nearly 100 years later. My most innate desires, shameful to all but me, written in printed form. How liberating! How scary? How affirming. To be in the 1920s as Black queer people seeing themselves possibly for the first — maybe even only — time on the page was emboldening. Nugent, as one of the few out and proud figures during the Harlem Renaissance, created images and texts that personified desires perhaps never before written or published. Although married to a woman for a short time, Nugent was well known for his illustration stylings and lyric writing that almost always focused on narratives of Black life with queer interpretations.

Richard Bruce Nugent was born on July 2, 1906, in Washington, D.C. His mother, Pauline Minerva Bruce Nugent, came from a family known as the “light-skinned Washington Bruces,” who had been free since the 18th century. He attended Dunbar High School, famous for being the first public high school for Black students in America. After his father’s death in 1919, Nugent moved to New York City at age 13 with his brother and mother. Here he discovered the magic of Harlem during the Jazz Age.

When Nugent decided he wanted to be a writer, his mother shipped him back to Washington to live “in exile” with his paternal grandmother. Home again, he frequented Saturday salons hosted by the poet and playwright Georgia Douglas Johnson, where he met Alain Locke and Langston Hughes. Being in an environment surrounded by other intellectuals and luminaries influenced his career and the relationships he would have for years to come.

Nugent was truly a multidisciplinary artist. His work spanned illustrations, portraits, poetry, prose, and dance. Across mediums he would explore the expression and condition of the bodies and lives of Black folks. He returned to New York in 1925, publishing his first works as a writer, notably the poem “Shadows” and the short story “Sahdji.”

In Fire!!, Nugent’s illustrations feature simplified Art Deco–inspired frames with silhouetted Black figures, not distinguishably male or female, leisurely basking and posing for the reader with articulated natural hairstyles crowning their heads. The shamelessness of the nude figures implies that these characters are emboldened and confident, unwilling to hide their desires or apologize for their self-love. The characters in these images are reinterpreted into Nugent’s stream-of-consciousness writing where, in this excerpt, we learn about Alex, who is in love with his white co-worker’s male physique:

Alex turned in his doorway … up the stairs and the stranger waited for him to light the room … no need for words … they had always known each other ……… as they undressed by the blue dawn … Alex knew he had never seen a more perfect being … his body was all symmetry and music … and Alex called him Beauty … long they lay … blowing smoke and exchanging thoughts … and Alex swallowed with difficulty … he felt a glow of tremor … and they talked and … slept …

The tale is based on Nugent falling in love with Juan José Vianna, a kitchen employee at the Martha Washington Hotel, where Nugent worked as a bellhop. Contemporaries describe “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” as “the scandal of the Harlem Renaissance, an impressionistic celebration of androgyny, homosexuality, and drugs.” Locke dismissed the work because of the “effeminate” portrayal of the central Black protagonist. His critique was expected. More drastic was the banning of Fire!! in Boston. (People were so scandalized and afraid! History certainly repeats itself, as seen in the conservative book bans across America today.) But Fire!! was speaking to a younger generation of Black artists — and creating a document that would preserve the past and speak to generations to come.

The bold queerness of Nugent’s story and illustrations is a remarkable display of authenticity and self-awareness that can be seen only as an act of protest. His work in Fire!!, alongside these other queer artists, anticipated counterculture zine narratives decades in advance.

Richard Bruce Nugent died on May 27, 1987, in Hoboken, N.J. His legacy as an openly gay rebel and multidisciplinary artist during this period is remarkable in history for his bravery and truth.

From Black, Queer, and Untold: A New Archive of Designers, Artists and Trailblazers by Jon Key. Copyright © 2024 by Jon Key. Available from Levine Querido Nov. 19, 2024.