"In the glad flesh of my fear": Corporeal Inscriptions in Richard Bruce Nugent's Geisha Man.

But his whisper made me think of another man--a man who had struck me in the face with the hard palm and knuckles of his hand. A man who had left the taste of blood on my lips. A man who had never spoken to me since, and whom I had only seen once again. Gale is a beautiful name: that expression had grown to be the remembering of the man. And my mother named me Gale. One couldn't think such thoughts. But my father was American. He left us before I was born. My mother named me after him. Gale is a beautiful name.--Kondo Gale, in Nugent, Geisha Man (1) 99

These silent figures, like materialized vectors in a field of force, are curiously silent in the sense that incest fiction, even written by women, never, as far as I know, establishes the agency of the incestuous act inside the female character.--Spillers 235

Nigerratti Manor is defunct; its ilk lost to drink, tuberculosis, and, for the lucky ones, old age. Now Harlem Renaissance legend, 267 West 136th Street--the artistic haven of Wallace Thurman and Richard Bruce Nugent--was once the site where the two writers plotted out the meander of the journal Fire!!, which, according to Nugent, was "thrown together like European small magazines," in Wally's bedroom (Hutson). Alongside Thurman's subway bathroom scandal, both men's marred marriages, and the hushed-over white lovers, these two artists created their identities in what Nugent called "the beyondness of Harlem." (2)

Beyondness is an apt descriptor for Nugent's literary work. The intent of Fire!! was, in Nugent's words, to "shock the hell out of them" and Nugent's own contribution, the now famous, ground-breaking story "Smoke Lilies and Jade" (1926), with its experimental style and explicit homoeroticism, intentionally moved against the New Negro movement's concern with respectability (Hutson). Growing up in Washington, DC, and then taken as a teen by New York and its men, Nugent was first published in Alain Locke's 1925 New Negro; his story "Sahdji" helped define New Negro aestheticism, albeit with a less "queer" and modernist slant than later work. By 1929, when he traveled to London with Porgy and Bess, Nugent was an emerging literary talent and fixture in the cultural affairs of Harlem. Despite sporadic and sparse publication, Nugent continued throughout his life to write and produce visual work--drawings and paintings of reinterpreted Biblical stories, portraits of friends, and modernist rifts, many now available to a new, purportedly more sexually sophisticated generation of viewers. His renderings, like the ultra-hip, unruffled Harlem sophisticate (Fig. 1), expand the iconography of modernism. His creations were largely ignored until scholar-activists looked to Nugent for recollections of the New Negro Renaissance and as an uncommon voice of black "gayness" in the early 20th century. Joseph Beam in particular sought out Nugent for his testimony to black gay men, In the Life. Nugent's lifelong experiment with identity and aesthetics ended with his death in 1987; increasingly his unpublished works, unfamiliar images, and cultural contributions have begun to find appreciative audiences and worthy critical attention.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Many of Nugent's unpublished writings provide glimpses into more exlicit regions of sexuality. While there seems little in the way of gay desire that is left in artistic projects to shock the contemporary reader, proudly blase, same-sex incest is one of the few topics still likely to generate discomfort's cough, the averted eye. Nugent's unpublished novel Geisha Man, written alongside "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade" and excerpted in Thomas H. Wirth's indispensable Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance, retains a cultural boldness in its uncoded exploration of lust between father and son. The modernist text's exploration of cross-dressing, public sex, and gay desire, including the incest taboo, rescripts Freud and delineates the contours of what might be called a decadent, black, gay aesthetic. Challenging narrow definitions of Harlem Renaissance literature, the novel delights in shifting locales and careless mergings of Asian, Nordic, and Italian bodies and languages. Nugent disrupts simplistic notions of the racialized object through the creation of a biracial, gender ambiguous protagonist, Kondo Gale, the offspring of a secret liaison between Yetsin Matzuika, a married Japanese woman, and Gale Barrows, a white American. Kondo is an intermittent geisha and cosmopolitan artist who fetishizes the white male body; his narrative voice fluctuates between elevated aesthetic revelry and melancholic longing for the absent father.

The odd, and obvious, incest plot in Geisha Man returned me to Hortense J. Spillers's configuration of the daughter/father dynamic in her foundational essay, "'The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight': In the Time of the Daughters and the Fathers" (1988). I speculated on how Nugent's novel might connect to Spillers's theorizing on the incest plot and its relation to slavery's rupture of the familial unit. While not overlooking Spillers's specificity, a critique of Freud's ahistoricism and analysis of two incest fictions by African American writers, I find her articulations of incest's critical functions useful in reading Nugent's psychoanalytic wandering into homo incest. As a psychological text, with the Freudian heavy-handedness of a "gay" "man" being fucked by his father--"only Gale can calm the whirlpool" (94)--Geisha Man takes the incest narrative and its prohibitions to a new literary and ideological space. This essay takes Spillers's interrogation as its guide and applies it to Nugent's Geisha Man, to consider the two texts' compatibility and ruptures.

"If only I had been born a woman!": destabilizing gender

Initially, Spillers's exploration of father/daughter incest might seem ill-suited for Nugent's novel as the daughter in this case is a son, and the African American context which Spillers explores is largely absent in Geisha Man, as Kondo is Japanese and white. Despite these incongruities, in essence Kondo's "transgendered" existence positions him to "play" daughter, while race, as we shall see, including "absent" blackness, shapes identities in critical ways in Nugent's text. In many respects, like the disrupted and reconfigured relationships of enslaved blacks, Kondo, as the outcome of a secret transcultural, interracial affair, is defined by paternal absence, and forced to reconstitute notions of family and community, and, most visibly, desire. If, as Spillers argues, incest fictions render the unspeakable, and, more so, the unthinkable, then Nugent's tale of incest is doubly prohibitive, speaking plainly about gay desire enacted in the family, between father and son.

The daughter here is performative, fantastical drag that includes "a gown of silver poppies" and "silver slippers with very high heels." Kondo professes, "If only I had been born a woman! To dress in flowing silks and silver and colors always, with a modish mannish look and gestures ... maybe Gale would have loved me then" (GM 100). His life as a geisha conjured by silk, cross-dressing for Kondo becomes a glorified state that "normalizes" his desire for Gale through a semblance of heterosexuality, a re-gendered identity that promises the father's returned passion. Kondo's desire to emulate a "modish mannish look" suggests a gender ambiguity linked with modern style and progressive, relaxed attitudes about gender roles and sexual fluidity. What does it mean that the son consciously becomes the daughter, and what does this transference/translation/transformation do to Spillers's reading of the daughter in incest fictions as surrogate for the missing mother, a role that renders the wife unnecessary? There is radicalism to an incest tale rendered from the perspective of the transgender daughter, a subjectivity that destabilizes the very category of "woman." This symbolic "daughter" does indeed take the place of the mother, as evidenced by Kondo's short-lived attempt to live as Gale's wife. (3) Quickly, however, the couple prove unable to embrace heterosexual domesticity, and Gale withdraws.

Spillers rightly asks whether a psychoanalytical model, framed by the economic and social codes of paternity, will "suffice for occupied or captive persons and communities in which the rites and rights of gender function have been exploded, historically, into sexual neutralities" (232). Sharing her skepticism of Freudian constructs like the Electra myth that presume a heterosexual and two-parent dynamic, Nugent's plot freely messes with Freud. Geisha Man, quite literally, rescripts the Freudian incest plot on to the transgendered and biracial body, queering it through an act that potentially unhinges gender, sexuality, and race from their oppressive historical contexts. Primal scenes are translated onto a decidedly queer and perversely nonnormative family. However, Nugent's use of the figure of the "white" father (with its historic resonance as an "open-secret" during institutional slavery) within this incest fiction also challenges Spillers's notion of sexual neutrality. The father role, still marked by absence, is removed from a neutralized gender position and, I would argue, "charged" through racial fetish and cross-race desire. Nugent's text urges us to go farther in theorizing slavery's imprint on familial configurations to consider the ways that gender, in modernity, is shaped by, and largely inseparable from, sexual and racial difference. Freud's contained categories of father and daughter become even more problematic in such a text because the family structures are more ruptured and the desires expressed within them are more polymorphous and unfixed.

"For I am in love with my mother's lover": incest and agency

There is little in Nugent's biography to explain an interest in the incest plot. He says of his parents: "they were what would be called bohemian within the limitations of a closed society," yet people who cared about family name, skin shade, and hair textures (Wirth, Interview). His father, who died when Nugent was 13, was a Pullman porter whose dark skin was an issue for Nugent's "color struck" maternal side of the family. Interestingly, the father's whiteness in Geisha Man is repeatedly fetishized. Because he lost his father at age 13, perhaps writing an incest narrative provided Nugent with a way to address the resonant lost father. Alternatively, the taboo offers a prohibited space in which to explore anxieties about his own homosexuality, in which case, the imagined reunion with the father coincides with a symbolic acceptance of same-sex desire. In actuality, Nugent's writing and visual art often focused on decadent retoolings of classical tales, like Salome and Narcissus, and Freud's case studies may have offered another canon to rewrite subversively. Incest provided Nugent with a useful scenario for exploring the equally prohibitive terrains he knew intimately--same-sex desire and fetishized whiteness.

While Spillers's readings of works by Ralph Ellison and Alice Walker focus on symbolic incest (in characters' dreams or imagined acts), considering the ambiguities between the symbolic and the actual, the incest in Geisha Man appears to be quite literal. Incest fictions, as fictions, may safely imagine the unimaginable, but Nugent leaves little to the imagination--the same-sex desire and sexual acts between Kondo and Gale are unambiguously depicted. This interplay between symbolic and actual incest, however, can be seen in a poem included in the novel. The collaged text includes, in addition to an e. e. cummings's poem, other short poems, whispers in verse, and songs. Here the speaker-child of the poem shuttles between first and third person; the shifting pronouns indicate the slippery familial roles. The ambiguity of the incest narrative and family origins is condensed:

   I have seen the tense length of my
      mother's lover
   White with strain near the body of her
      child;
   Damp with passion beside ivory softness;
   Hot with desire to be cooled by soft
      coolings:
   Have felt hot breath breathe short on
      the soft lips of me;
   Felt taut muscles flinch at the feel of
      cool softness;
   Sensed damp, curly hair brush with
      tremors my forehead;
   Felt dry lips that fumbled in the pained
      passion searching;
   Felt hard whiteness damp with thin-
      lipped desire
   For the soft satiation of the smooth
      cool ivory
   Of the body of the child of my mother
      and her lover. (103)

The poem, a rendering of familial affection indebted to the language of dimestore porn, is useful in that it economically encapsulates many of the characterizations and symbols connected to the "Daddy figure" used throughout the novel, its variations appearing in Don, Adam, and Gale. Lips, hair, and skin are obsessively remarked as objects of lust. The references to "thin-lipped desire," "ivory softness," and "hard whiteness damp" compose a fetishized white body. The speaker views the phallus--"tense length" (the phrase itself phonetically elongated)--of the apparently naked father; the desire of the father is explicitly named within an imagined primal scene of childhood. The fatherly kiss becomes sexual, without obliquity; the exchange is not benign paternal affection, but an act of "tremors," "pained passion," and "a flinch." Read beyond the act of a kiss, the reference to the "soft lips of me" alternatively suggests a child sexualized; the entire child body is sullied, imagined as labial. Objectified, the speaker is the voice of the submissive recipient, aided by the repeated line start of "Felt." The poem focuses on the child body and its responses. The variations of "soft" and "cool" scattered throughout the verse evokes the tactile; the child, in contrast to the father's heat, is a cooling source. One imagines a body calmed, post erotic release.

Interestingly, the poem's scenario--the fatherly kiss with hairs tickling the child's forehead--reappears, shed of any sexual ambiguity, in a later scene where Kondo reunites and has sex with Gale. In the inverted scenario, Kondo, the child, is bending down to kiss the sleeping father, his lover: "I had but to reach out a hand a few inches to touch the nerve of his neck! Had but to incline my head just ever so slightly to kiss the soft, damp curl from his forehead!" (106). No longer scripted as the innocent objectified child, Kondo becomes the agent of the oral/sex act, the trained geisha practicing her Auparishtaka.

Nugent subverts the incest narrative of the child innocent, preyed upon by an unchecked masculinity. Here, it is the child in fully conscious pursuit of the father and the phallus, often and appropriately coded as legs. For example, Kondo's account of his first encounter with Gale in an Osaka brothel--"he placed a firm leg over mine"--is echoed in their reunion near the novel's end where we are told Gale "placed a cool, hard-muscled leg over mine and drew me in" (Geisha Man ms 106). (4) Importantly, their reunion is the first time that Kondo dresses in the silks of the geisha since "her" Osaka days; her sexual encounters with Gale, the father repeatedly invoked and longed for throughout the text, require heterosexual approximation, with Kondo as a sort of liminal woman. While earlier I argued that the novel's gender fluidity, on one level, destabilizes the rigid familial/gender roles within a psychoanalytic reading of incest, the subjectivity created by Nugent is still quite masculinist, focused on the white phallus. The penis, oddly absent in the sex scenes, is sublimated in the images of tense, muscled legs that appear with fetishistic frequency throughout the text. Appropriately, the white thigh becomes the surrogate image, a symbol of the engorged "third leg." The transgender dimensions of the story might challenge or redirect the phallocentrism that Spillers notes as common in incest fictions, but Kondo's and Gale's practices exist in tension, codifying heterosexuality, as much as destabilizing it. Kondo's sexuality, while "queer," relies on a heterosexual trope, a configuration of genders arguably less radical than the novel's other representations of same-sex desire.

Yet Nugent's novel offers a queer version of what Spillers has not seen in incest fictions, namely the establishment of agency on the part of the daughter and the telling of the incest tale from the woman's perspective. Spillers's observation, as cited at the start of this essay, contrasts with Kondo's erotic remembrance of the absent father, and succinctly illustrates the departure that Nugent's text makes: no longer silent, the symbolic "daughter" speaks; no longer innocent, the child consciously pursues her desires. The incestuous urge is explicitly voiced: "For I am in love with my mother's lover. And Gale is a beautiful name" (ms. 6). In its frequency, "Gale is a beautiful name" becomes the text's mantra; the utterance is linked, and thereby charged, with eroticism through its repetition. Kondo confesses, "I love Gale and there is only a dream on a cool pillow and masturbation between two cool dampish feeling sheets" (ms. 89). And later, his confirmation, "It had happened" (107), is immediately followed by the invocation of the patronymic, "Gale is a beautiful name." Nomenclature plays a crucial role in the text. Kondo is refused the biological father's last name, obscured by the adulterous act. His mother covertly gives him Gale as a middle name. He learns the name of his father, Gale Barrows, through a card left during their initial sexual encounter when Kondo is working as a geisha. Gale doesn't know Kondo's name until later when he hears a man at the costume ball call her the saccharine "Kandy." Their shared name constructs the ambiguity of incestuous desire where identities collapse and converge, where lust for the father overlaps with auto-eroticism. Nugent offers readers no definitive conclusion as to whether Gale knowingly fucks his son. One is left wondering who, if anyone, is the innocent in this narrative.

"I am a city": the aesthetics of roaming

As Spillers points out, the settings for acts of incest are necessarily marginal, eliciting a sense of the other-worldly. Reflecting modernism's attraction to urbanity and its often dislocating tendencies, the characters in Geisha Man are located primarily in night's less-regulated locales--the unpopulated street, the costume ball, or the all-male party. Joseph Allen Boone's description of Nugent's use of modernist techniques in "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade" can be equally applied to Geisha Man: the collaged text, mapping interiority, "resembles a vast thoroughfare, a space crossed by a myriad, conflicting impressions, sensations, and desires" (Boone 224). Similarly, Kondo pines, "My thoughts are those of a city. Steel and store. Height and depth. Dark narrow, twisting lanes. Light broad avenues. Rumble. Subterranean. Elevated. I am a city" (ms. 90). Conflating the corporeal with the urban, Kondo is the literal embodiment of the urban nightscape-- a city grid that mirrors the psyche's intersecting desires. The modernist fragmentation of Kondo's narration, fractured by ellipses, deftly conveys the ambivalence of modernity, a perspective that fluctuates between possibility and limitation. He is a figure both enamored with life (as evidenced in his sexual encounters with a variety of men, a curiosity for drugs, a delight in the aesthetics of travel) but also deeply discontent, longing for a security and desire that seems largely unobtainable.

Kondo's interiority relies on the formal qualities of Geisha Man: strikingly excessive details, disorienting synesthesia, a jumbled collage of texts, and, at times, histrionic mediations of an elevated register. The form that this modernist aesthete testimony takes is suitable for refiguring both the incest narrative and the non-paternal (and perhaps non-patriarchal) subjectivity from which it is told. By necessity, Nugent's project of articulating gay desire, including Kondo and Gale's act of incest, could not be wholly contained within a realist novel. The nonlinear experimentation, sensorial collage, and dreamscapes help blur the gender and race distinctions that the text eagerly muddles. Nugent invests in a lexicon of symbols that mix classical traditions with modernity--Japanese shintos, the moon and the street, urban phalli of steel and stone, centaurs. While forward looking, the work also simultaneously invokes the tradition of the 1890's Decadents with a clear homage to the excessive cataloguing of Huysmans's A' Rebours: the fussy listing of the aesthete's accoutrement, authors who provide decadent models of purple prose, and lapses of aesthetic revelry. For Nugent, erotic desire is inseparable from aestheticism; art and sex repeatedly merge in the text. Kondo's tryst with Don, "a beautiful forgotten note about to be sung" (91), is rendered in painterly codes: "He allowed his hand to caress its way from my lips over my chin to my throat. His touch painted greens with my emotions. Piercing greens. And blues--burning blues. And seas of vermilion" (92). The sexualized body becomes artifice. The prohibitions that mark Geisha Man as a decadent text are appropriately framed as an aesthetic experiment.

In this topography, subjectivity is foggy. Much of Kondo's narration lies in the liminal space, a realm arguably hospitable to the libidinal. Indeed it is often in these murky borders between lucidity and sleep, consciousness and not, that the erotic desire is voiced and enacted. The novel contains an extended dream sequence: a disturbing, fearfilled surrealistic narrative that contains racial signifiers, violent erotic acts (viz., groping, dismemberment, and smothering), and sated urges. The dream begins with four headless men, "beautifully modeled," of varying colors, in a barn that contains a cart wheel and thousands of headless rats erupting from a rat with batik-like for. The headless men, merely bodies, are viewed as threatening, libidinal corporeality, absent of the regulating psyche. The blue man, we come to learn, represents Gale and the prohibited body of the father. From the blue man's severed head flows "a drape of silver cloth with crystal pendants." The pendants suggest flamboyance and military affiliation, and perhaps explain Gale Barrows's presence in Japan, where he met Kondo's mother. As the dream progresses, Kondo finds himself at the center of a group rape:

   then I jumped ... back to the four
   hands ... and I floated down ... black
   hands and yellow ... and red ... and
   white.... they grasped me and flung
   me to the far corner and followed me.
   ... My body was much misused ... by
   first the white ... then the red ... then
   the yellow ... and I was forced to a
   kneeling position before the black man
   ... and all this time the wheel grew
   colors ... and then I exploded....
   (Geisha Man ms. 40-41, original
   ellipses)

Then later, the "misused body" is restored through the father:

   I could see a head being formed on the
   beautiful lacquer blue man ... his head
   became matter and ... with a beautiful
   moment he threw the pitchfork into
   the wheel ... and it was shattered into
   a myriad bits of color and the men ...
   the red yellow black white men
   exploded into brilliant fragments of
   live color ... and the barn and everything
   vanished ... and there was nothing
   ... only the blue man ... the blue
   man and I and the blue flame that was
   the sky.... I was a step or two lower
   than he and I must reach his level ...
   merge ... merge ... merge.... (Geisha
   Man ms. 42-43, original ellipses)

Upon waking, Kondo understands the dream as symbolic; the otherworldly unconsciousness and its surreal symbols create a terrain where desire for the father can be named. With the destruction of the four "colored" men, and their accompanying racial signification, the father, an extra-racialized blue, is restored. The dream enacts a rescue fantasy with the father as savior. Its conclusion dissolves race, masculinity, and space until only Kondo and the blue man/father remain, a merging that suggests physical union and psychological resolution.

In many respects, Kondo's gender, like the landscape, is liminal; the body's clues barely readable, leaving the reader sometimes uncertain as to Kondo's public gender performance. His role in sex acts is equally murky. Like Nugent's "geisha" sketches (Fig. 2), Kondo's identity is not easily read. While the full breasts of the veiled and vaguely Asiatic figures suggest women, their obscured genitalia hint at a larger gender ambiguity. Their futuristic heels and geisha stylization merge into images of "exotic" locales and signifiers, a space of liminal gender and desire. In fact, when talking of his work as a geisha, Kondo repeatedly notes the threat of unpredictable violence that might result, were his maleness to be discovered. Similarly, the figures in the sketches invite and divert viewing; they both mark gender and veil it.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

One of the most imagistic sections, near the end of the novel, typifies what I define as the "aesthetics of roaming," a sensorial wandering in urban places that conjures the otherworldly qualities that Spillers argues are characteristic of many incest fictions. Here Kondo has fled Gale, and the symbolic father's house, to roam the city streets. He juxtaposes urban signposts and character tableaus within a sensory-filled catalogue that highlights class, sexuality, gender and race: storefronts, laborers, effeminate triangulations, a beautifully set table, drunken men, mansions, buses, police officers, and dandies. Throughout the collage, police are spotted along the way, highlighting the way that desire was increasingly policed in urban spaces across the 1920s. This more public pronouncement of modern gender, race, and sexual identities existed in tension with the era's increasing cultural prohibitions in legal and medical institutions. Like the incest taboo, which Spillers argues functions to police male sexuality through delineated family roles that are deeply gendered, the modern preoccupation with controlling sexual excess often belied the anxiety of impotent, diminished heterosexuality beneath it.

"A pale green, oval face punctuated with slant, gray eyes": the queer mulatto

Like gender and sexuality, race is also interrogated and reconstituted in Geisha Man. As e. e. cummings's reference to "glad flesh"--which provides the title of this essay and is found woven into the collage of Geisha Man--suggests, Nugent's work does not shy away from the centrality of the body and the troubling immediacy of flesh; however, in his experimental novel of Kondo's sensual interludes with various strangers, the body is more often linked to sexual desire than racial codes, one might say more "queered" than "raced." The visibility of sexuality on the body is emphasized over race. Nugent grafts gender and race performativity onto an aesthetic project filled with surrealistic images and modernist fragments. His protagonist, shuttling between man and woman, and homo/heterosexuality, has embarked on the most modern of experiments: "unmarking" the body of its gender and race markers while simultaneously projecting a hypermasculinity and a visible, named whiteness on the men he meets.

Race identity is slippery in Geisha Man. In the manuscript, Kondo is referred to by Bob, one of his pick-ups, as a "colored boy" (ms. 69), and later Kondo declares, "I was the first Negro ever to have written a ballet" (109). Whether these incongruities are intentional or careless (or autobiographical seepages), Kondo's race identity, like his gender, is not assuredly fixed, but fluid and destabilized. However, race and its markers are not entirely absent; Kondo's body is racialized in surrealist tones: "a pale green apparition in a dazzling white dress. A pale green, oval face punctuated with slant, gray eyes and mauve lips" (103). Here the body becomes wholly aestheticized, an object marked by "artificial" codes of gender and race. In highlighting Kondo's surreal greenness, Nugent forces the reader out of conditioned responses to racial codes; conventional assumptions about whiteness and blackness are little help here. As his creation of Kondo suggests, Nugent was interested in the image and idea of the mulatto as an embodiment of cross-race desire. "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade," the poem "Bastard Song," and the "Drawings for Mulattoes" series (which appeared in the Charles J. Johnson-edited Ebony and Topaz) are all varied imaginings of biracial subjectivity and its liminal nature. (5)

The trade and tricks of Geisha Man are inevitably racialized, a reorienting of the sexualized gaze. Adam, "[b]ig and white and blond," is suitably a Viking at the costume ball, a scene dotted with the "exotic": "Turks," "pirates," "hulas girls," and "Indian temple dancers" (100-01). Nugent's recurring exotic tourism, his professed Latin fetish and representations of Asian identity and sexuality--including racial signifiers often reliant on stereotype--are promising areas for further critical attention.

Same-sex desire is queerly absent in Spillers's reading of incest fictions, despite her assertion that "it is the corporeal, carnal body that incest brings brazenly into relief precisely because it is prohibited" (249). In Geisha Man it is the queerly gendered, raced, and sexed body that becomes visible. The novel is pieced together by Kondo's sexual encounters with a series of men, from the English lad to the man with "very dark olive skin" to the boy he takes home on his last night in Paris only to find "synthetic enjoyment." The plot centers on the active body--roaming, dancing, fucking. While Kondo delights in the pleasures of these men, the reader comes to view these episodes as brief bodily distractions from his mental turmoil, a consuming desire for Gale.

The sexualized "Daddy," of course, has become a recognized figure in contemporary "gay" cultures. While its resonance to the 21st-century reader, Plath's reader included, cannot be adequately sketched out here, the phallic dominance of the father is implicitly invoked in the sexual responsibilities of the "Daddy" role in gay sex. We understand Kondo's quiet submission, both physical and psychological, under daddy's hand, as a penultimate "boy toy" move, a manifesto of willing submission. The whiteness of Gale's body, the tense whiteness of his penis, emerges again and again. The "white father," emblematic of secret paternity (in both Kondo's history and in the sexual politics of slavery), is a figure of ambiguity in the text, both visible and absent. Kondo's lust for white masculinity could be dismissed on one level as part of a larger cultural idealization of whiteness; however, on another level, it represents his attempt to claim paternal lineage, an act that breaks the prohibition on cross-race desire. Making them further transgressive, the interracial, erotic exchanges between Kondo and Gale are marked by violent bites and blows. According to Kondo, Gale's "tense body beauty had beaten beaten beaten my memory" (102), flesh pressed on "until it hurts" (108). These scenes, like later post-Stonewall s/m vignettes, recreate incest as fetish and render the role-playing of father/son as sexually liberatory, not pathological. Kondo's masochism, an interest in the sexual markings of the carnal body, can be read in relation to symbolic castration. Rather than fearing the loss of the penis, Kondo wishes for its erasure; his interest in eunuchs and transgendered identity push against popular Freudian narratives of sexual anxiety by imagining a willed castration.

"Yet we were motivated by this strange phenomena": subverting the renaissance

Spillers argues that incestuous desire articulates the family's "losses, confusions, and above all else, its imposed abeyance of order and degree" (249). Nugent's own life certainly saw the fragmentation of family--his father's death, the family's move to a boardinghouse in New York, the shuttling between New York and his grandmother's home in Washington, DC during adolescence. Kondo's paternity is also marked by confusion. The father, longed for in his absence, becomes aligned with eros; family found within a community of men. The "traditional" family has broken down, but Nugent's suggestion in Geisha Man is that this breakdown may not be a complete travesty. Spillers sees incest fictions as grappling with identity stasis, however, Nugent's incest plot is marked by motion: sexual cruising in Osaka, Paris, and New York; shifting gender and sexual identities; fluid family structures that cohere, then collapse. While the incest subplot might be seen as suitable form for representing the anxious position of race and sexual identities on the social margins in the 1920s, Kondo can hardly be read as ambivalent. He embodies a space of erotic autonomy. The novel's conclusion--a meditation on life and its contradictory sentiments--obsesses on death but avoids morbidity: "So what matter if the death I feel one minute be so painful and ... felt. A million deaths pass with a laugh. A caress. A whisper. Or a tear. A sob. An ache. I dance" (111). Nugent avoids a fatalistic ending, refusing to invest in Freudian neuroses or to create a fixed subjectivity. He dances, a choice that embraces mental and corporeal mobility despite policing and marginalization.

For some, Nugent's rendering of incest may be culturally worrisome, as his invocation of decadent writers makes clear; he not only unhinges a once-policed male sexuality, but celebrates it. Within this unsettled space, man becomes woman, sex is promiscuous rather than procreative, and father becomes lover. Nugent wants all desires, even those labeled deviant, to be un-policed, a conclusion that is likely unsettling for many readers along the sexual continuum. Here the incest taboo fails to police male sexuality, but is used as an erotic scenario that venerates homo sex. In Geisha Man, a variety of queer desires are delightfully unrestricted within the marginal spaces of the city's night world. Asserting a philosophy of personal sexual freedom (coupled with, for Nugent, public discretion), Nugent's identity project chooses the incest taboo as an ideal metaphor to disrupt.

But how do we situate Nugent's reformulations of incest fictions, his bold articulations of homosexual desire, race fetishization, and gender fluidity, within the larger African American literary tradition? If incest remains largely symbolic in African American literature, a meditation on absence informed by the violent rupture of family in slavery (an implicit challenge to Freud's construction of parent/child relations), can Nugent's depiction of literal incest, the white father and Eurasian son together, be interpreted and admired as a move beyond cultural absence, an assertion of an African American literary project that does not take blackness as its center? The anxiety of the crumbling, or negated, family is refigured in Geisha Man into a celebrated constellation of men, non-nuclear arrangements where desire, including interracial sex, is unfettered by taboo. Incest plots, then, are not only useful for the late 19th-century African American writers whom Spillers cites for their articulations of the ruptured family; these narratives also serve modernist writers like Nugent in their attempts to evoke urbanity's fragmentation, chaos, and reconfigured familial ties.

Both Spillers's essay and Nugent's novel demonstrate that Freud's paradigm need not be adhered to, that artists necessarily create counter-versions of modern sexual identity. Spillers's consideration of bodies in flight, their origins disrupted by enslavement, is refigured in Nugent as the roaming body, contently uprooted and undifferentiated. Both are projects that bring into view not only bodies but also the desires, prohibitions, and economics coded onto them. In part, Nugent is revising the idea of community, showing transient, sexually progressive people unconnected to familial origins. Rooted in the modernist writing of the 1920s, the text places the reader within the deviant and decadent scenes of the urban night, amongst smpressionistic snapshots of masculinity, family, and community that are in flUX.

As race and sex, and their particular merging in interracial desire, became less rigidly defined in the early twentieth century, Nugent and other African American writers ventured to be more expansive and more transgressive in their subject matter and representations of race, gender, and sexual identities. Despite the fact that interracial relationships were becoming increasingly common and accepted in this era, explicit interrogations of cross-race, same-sex desire are absent in many of the early studies of the Harlem Renaissance. Tellingly, in many profiles of Nugent, his literary subjects--gay sex, public sex, prostitution, drug curiosities, mulatto subjectivity--are rarely discussed. (6) Fortunately, critics have recently begun to consider the sexual politics foregrounded in Nugent's writing and visual art.

Nugent, of course, used his art to meditate on and expose the New Negro movement's discomfort with (homo)sexuality. By way of illustration, midway through the Geisha Man, Kondo arrives in Harlem and becomes part of the artistic movement underway--"I became a 'New Negro.'" As a foreigner, he is bemused by America's obsession with race. Working as an art critic, he notes, that "it amused me to hear critiques claim that a slightly veiled phallic symbol embodied all the struggles of a suppressed race. A phallic symbol and I half Japanese and half white. Henry understood and we both laughed at the furor this 'Negro Renaissance' was causing among both white and black. Yet we were motivated by this strange phenomena" (ms. 66-67). More than likely these observations mirror Nugent's own location within the Harlem Renaissance: constrained by the movement's narrow attention to race, yet inspired by the invigorated cultural climate to produce art of his own. His visual art and writing depart from the conventional techniques and subject matter seen in the work of more established Harlem Renaissance artists. Geisha Man, importantly, challenges restrictive definitions of the black writer, one expected to explore only "black themes." Centered on a Japanese narrator who longs for the American white father (a "mulatto perspective" outside the black/white binary), the novel constructs whiteness from a point of view that is neither oppositional nor laudatory. Foremost, Nugent's project is an exploration of the sexual self, viewed alongside race, but intended to challenge the New Negro Renaissance's prohibitions against writing about sexual identities and acts. While I am reluctant to contribute to Nugent's canonization, along with Thurman's, as a token "gay voice" of the Harlem Renaissance, I think Nugent's explicit naming and rendering of gay life and its racial dimensions remains an essential literary project, a most important contribution to American letters. The corporeal inscriptions found in Geisha Man destabilize categories of race, gender, and sexuality, and anticipate the neomodernist works of African American authors, including Gwendolyn Brooks and Ann Petry, who refuse to represent identity in one-dimensional terms.

Works Cited

Beam, Joseph. In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology. Boston: Alyson, 1986.

Boone, Joseph Allen. Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books/Harper Collins, 1994.

Glick, Elisa F. "Harlem's Queer Dandy: African-American Modernism and the Artifice of Blackness." Modern Fiction Studies 49.3 (2003): 414-42.

Hutson, Jean Blackwell. Interview with Richard Bruce Nugent. Oral History interview with Bruce Nugent. Video. 14 April 1982. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Nugent, Richard Bruce. Geisha Man [excerpt]. Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent. Ed. Thomas H. Wirth. Duke UP, 2002.90-112.

--. Geisha Man. Unpublished manuscript. Collection of Thomas H. Wirth. [1920s?]

Spillers, Hortense J. "'The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight': In the Time of the Daughters and the Fathers." Black White and in Color. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. 230-50.

Wirth, Thomas H. Interview with Richard Bruce Nugent. Tape recording. 27 June 1983. Collection of Thomas H. Wirth.

--. "Introduction." Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 1-61.

Notes

(1.) Hereafter GM.

(2.) See Chauncey for an account of Thurman's tearoom liaison. Interracial desire is explored in Thurman's Infants of the Spring and Wirth's introduction to Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance. Also see Wirth for details of Nugent's marriage to Grace Marr Nugent.

(3.) A humorous episode early in their marriage experiment: Gale turns to Kondo "bewildered and asked what one did to secure fitting clothes for one's wife. So I explained that he should simply buy a plain dress, size sixteen, a chemise, step-ins, and shoes and stockings to match the dress" (GM 109). Thus Nugent suggests that becoming a wife is simply a quick costume change.

(4.) Geisha Man, unpublished manuscript [1920s?] 3. Collection of Thomas H. Wirth. In-text citations of Nugent's manuscript will be accompanied by ms. All other citations of Geisha Man refer to the published excerpt in Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance.

(5.) See Glick for a particularly insightful reading of the merging of primitive and modern iconography in the mulatto series.

(6.) In Nugent's life and writing, the omissions and silences are telling. For example, in interviews with historian David Levering Lewis and Jean Blackwell Hutson, former curator and chief librarian at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Nugent is "straightened," by the writer himself and by interviewers, for the public through allusions and careful phrasing, stepping around issues of sexual (and textual) difference.

Tyler T. Schmidt is a PhD candidate in the English Program at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, specializing in 20th-century American literature, Africana Studies, and Lesbian and Gay/Queer Studies. His research interests include 20th-century American poetics, interracial cultural studies, and African American novelists of the 1930s and 40s. Mr. Schmidt would like to thank Robert Reid-Pharr for his spot-on advice and encouragement with this essay. He is most thankful to Thomas Wirth for generously supplying him with the complete manuscript and insights into Nugent's work.