Recovering Queer Black History for Everybody (with George M. Johnson)

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Introduction – 00:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: Welcome to Relationscapes, the podcast where we journey through unfamiliar life-landscapes and somehow end up feeling more at home. I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and our guide in this episode about queer Black history is author George M. Johnson.

CLIP OF GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Most of the history was written by the people who won. And so when the history is being written by the people who won, they're always going to show themselves in the highest light while reducing those who are oppressed, who didn't get to tell a story. Some of these characters in the book I knew about as a kid; I just didn't know they were queer because patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia was still a dominant force.

Even when we got the chance to tell our history, we still wouldn't tell the full history ourselves.

BLAIR HODGES: When George M. Johnson was a kid growing up in New Jersey, they loved Black History Month. They were thrilled to learn about the people who shaped American history for the better. But as they got older, they started noticing things were missing—hidden stories that might have meant the most to a queer kid like they were.

George was especially drawn to one of the most dazzling moments in Black history, the Harlem Renaissance. They went searching for what had been covered up, forgotten, or erased, and resurrected those stories in their book, Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I'd Known. It's a celebration of the Black queer writers, performers, and activists who made their way in 1920s America.

George M. Johnson joins us right now to talk about Black and queer culture—how it impacted the past, how it enlivens our present, and how it can open up new possibilities for the future.

 

Poem: Can You Answer Me This – 02:07

 

BLAIR HODGES: George M. Johnson, welcome to Relationscapes. It's great to have you.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Thank you for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: You included a poem in your book Flamboyants. The poem's called “Can You Answer Me This?” And as we were prepping for the interview, I asked if we could start there because it's a poem about being interviewed. So please take it away.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Sure.

Can You Answer Me This?

Hands sweat with anticipation,
Mic in palm, calm, keep calm
It's just a poem, a song, an interview

Will you let them enter your view?

What will the first question be?
Will I say the truth? Will I tell a lie?
With each question will I live, or die a little more inside

Will I hit the first note?
Will I get stage fright and choke?

Will I forget my lines?
The nerves eating me alive

I breathe in deep. Sip from the glass to my right
As the white host goes "Welcome, so and so to the show"
I smile. Laugh off the jitters, playing the part

Then it starts.

Only time will tell how this goes, parting lips, tongue untied
"My name is so and so and I . . .
I . . .
I . . ."

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for that. I saw myself in this poem twice. The obvious part is the white host saying, "welcome so and so to the show." But I also related to your worries about hitting the right notes and stuff like that. I feel that pressure sometimes as a host. And so it's comforting, I guess, remembering that guests might be feeling nervous, too.

I think it's hard being interviewed!

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yes. I think everybody just assumes it's something that's natural to everybody because it's like, oh no, you're having a conversation. It's like, no. You are having a conversation, but you're having a conversation where you have to think about every word.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I can relate. I've been on the other side of the microphone a few times.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Mm.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm sort of uncomfortable being interviewed. There's different pressures when I'm hosting. I mean, I'm also my own editor, so I can fix stuff in post. But anyway, I related to the nervousness you describe.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yeah. And it's always interesting because I don't realize how nervous some people are to interview me, which is what I've been told.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I mean, we're in it together now, George. [laughs]

 

Telling Past-to-Present Stories – 04:27

 

BLAIR HODGES: I'm gonna take the spotlight off us for a second and throw it over to actress and film producer Viola Davis, because a few years ago at the Oscars, when she received the award for Best Supporting Actress, she gave a powerful acceptance speech. And you quote from that speech at the beginning of your memoir. That memoir is called All Boys Aren’t Blue. It's about gender identity and your experiences growing up as a queer Black person in New Jersey.

So here's Viola Davis.

VIOLA DAVIS: Thank you to the Academy. You know, there's one place that all the people with the greatest potential are gathered. One place, and that's the graveyard. People ask me all the time, what kind of stories do you want to tell, Viola? And I say, exhume those bodies. Exhume those stories. The stories of the people who dreamed big and never saw those dreams to fruition. People who fell in love and lost. I became an artist, and thank God I did, because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so she talked about going to the graveyard. And in your memoir, you said that’s valid. Her point’s valid. But you also challenged it. You said your memoir is proof positive you don't need to go to the graveyard to find us. And now with your new book, Flamboyants, you've taken us to the graveyard. After all, you're going back and finding people from the past. So talk about that decision for you.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yeah. For me, I remember hearing that speech and it was super emotional for me, super powerful for me to hear it. But it made me sit and think about what happens to those who are still here, who we have the opportunity to correct. Are we doing the job of correcting that, or are we continuing to wait until people are gone to give them their flowers?

And so it's a double-edged sword. I had to come to a place where I have to continue the storytelling I'm doing while also not just telling the stories of the past, but doing restoration work for the people from the past whose stories were told incorrectly, or whose stories were told without the full tenacity of who they were as entire beings.

It gets very interesting when it comes to what stories we should be telling. But I also do this type of work because even if I never make movies about these characters I'm detailing in the book, what it does is give space to tell stories of composite characters and tell stories of what it would be like in present day. What does the present-day renaissance look like? Where are we now?

Which is why I chose not to make Flamboyants 100% biographical. I chose to make the book a past-to-present story that connected it to the people living today. It's almost like tying the two sayings together. It's being able to bring exactly what she said home because it's valid and necessary, while also talking about the people of today who were affected by those people. Who are the people of today now, and how do we do that work to make sure we don’t have another book come out 100 years from now about me and so many others, when we could have done it in real time while it was happening?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Like, you talk about this—you'll have to help me with the pronunciation—but there's a Ghanaian principle, Sankofa or something like that?

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Sankofa, yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Tell me about that.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: I mean, it's a Ghanaian principle that basically means we have to look to our past for us to move forward, because our past guides us and history repeats itself. But the problem with the past is that most of the history was written by the people who won. And when the history is written by the people who won, they're always going to show themselves in the highest light while reducing those who were oppressed, who didn't get to tell a story.

And that's why looking back at the past has to come with restoring the past that was incorrectly told or erased, while also doing the work to put it back into the world to compare it to today. To give us the roadmap and blueprint of how those people survived the tyranny, how those people thrived in the tyranny, how those people fought the tyranny.

Because if not, it looks like a blip—like a blip in history—rather than a constant fight and a constant struggle happening against the oppressors during those times.

 

Black History Month Omissions – 09:33

 

BLAIR HODGES: Sure. And you talk about how, as a child, you really loved Black History Month because otherwise you felt your heroes were hidden from you. A lot of history, even today in schools, focuses on white people—white, European. Black people are a race; we've got this special month, and you'll even hear some white people say, “We don't have a White History Month.”

And the obvious response is: you have twelve months of the year where white people are centered and highlighted. But you also say that as you've grown up, you've come to see some shortcomings in Black History Month as well. So for all your love for the month, you also see some shortcomings, especially with who tends to be highlighted.

So take us through your thoughts on that—your growth on that.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yeah. It was like these were characters—some of these characters in the book I knew about as a kid. I just didn't know they were queer. And so it was still being presented absent their full history, because patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia were still dominant forces. Even when we got the chance to tell our history, we still wouldn't tell the full history ourselves.

And that's when you become a writer and start to realize part of your job is to do that work even within your own community when you have the opportunity to highlight certain figures. And so why wasn't Marsha P. Johnson ever talked about? Why was Miss Major never really talked about during Black History Month? There are so many others who have done so many things, but we only talk about certain people through their accomplishments or achievements—if they're the first person to do this, or if they invented something.

We always talk about their contribution to American society without talking about who they were as individuals. Who were they as people? It's like—you know, we could talk about it, right? You know about Josephine Baker, you know about Martin Luther King. But you don't really, when you're growing up and you have History Month, learn who they were beyond the headlines.

Like, I grew up knowing Martin Luther King, but we weren't taught who Coretta Scott King really was outside of being his wife. She won her own Medal of Freedom—not one on his behalf. She got her own Medal of Freedom for the work she did as an activist. And I think that's part of what gets overshadowed: you become almost like the sidekick in the movie, the best friend in the movie. But what they forget to highlight is that you were actually an individual who did a whole lot of things, too.

If the person you were attached to did so much more, it's easy to overlook the achievements of the people who were right there with them along the way. And Bayard Rustin—right? It took a long time for people to start acknowledging him in history books.

BLAIR HODGES: Dr. King’s right-hand guy, who was gay.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Who was queer, and was the architect, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: And then Alain Locke, who I talk about in Flamboyants. They always brought up W.E.B. Du Bois, but they rarely brought up Alain. Alain was talked about with the same level of great philosophy by Martin Luther King—he mentioned both of their names. But there was a reason only one was heralded. And so it's about doing that type of work when it comes to history.

 

A Kid's Right to Know Queer History – 13:17

 

BLAIR HODGES: It was especially hard for you because as early as five years old, you knew you were kind of different from what people thought you were supposed to be. You felt pressure about who you were. You talk about flamboyant mannerisms, and you had different points of view on how boys could talk or dress or act, and you had questions about that.

You're being pushed into a male gender role, and it wasn’t fitting you. And you're also not seeing representation in your heroes. You're not learning you're not alone in this—you’re feeling alone in this.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yeah. Honestly, that's why I say kids know. Like, I knew. I was like, I don't know what this difference is, but I don't feel like the rest of y’all at times. And the things I'm gravitating to—the people I'm watching, the people who look like me, the boys who look like me—weren't gravitating toward the same things I was.

I wasn't gravitating to football, and I wasn't gravitating to certain things. And it wasn’t because I didn’t play sports—I played baseball as a kid, and I liked baseball. But when I stopped playing baseball, it was truly because it was fun, I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t for me. It was for my cousins. They wanted to be baseball stars. I didn’t.

I wanted to be what I wanted to be, even if I didn’t fully know what that was or if there was a place for me to be who I wanted to be. But you feel it early on, and I felt it early on. And it was tough growing up because I wasn’t sure what my happy place was.

Track and field really did become a happy place. I actually enjoyed track and field. But even then, my favorite runners were Gail Devers and Flo Jo. I wasn’t gravitating toward Maurice Greene or Michael Johnson. I did like Michael Johnson, but probably because we had the same initials, and I thought that was cool—like, “Oh, Michael Johnson,” and people called me Matthew Johnson. That was kind of cool.

But the real people I gravitated toward were still the women who ran track.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: And so even then, I was still trying to find a happy balance within.

BLAIR HODGES: There’s this sentence in the book that really stuck out to me. You say, “As a Black queer child, I had the right to know that Black queer people existed before me.” Talk about that as a right. It's a really powerful statement—the right to know.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yeah. It's so interesting. Again, when you put it all together, it's like, well, who determines who gets to know their history? How is that decision made? Because if you feel every white kid gets to know their history, and then we, at least with Black History Month, feel that every Black kid gets to know their history—and now since then, we've had Hispanic Heritage Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, months that highlight different people's histories—then why don’t I get to know about this particular group of people?

What's the determination on that? And is it truly—well, I mean, we can now say that it is—tied to the fact that you didn’t even feel that I, as a queer kid, deserved the right to be a queer kid?

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: And so because you, as a queer kid, don’t think you deserve rights, or need to be converted into the heteronorm, then how could I ever think you would believe I had the right to know people existed before me? Because you don’t believe I should exist now. And I think that’s really what that statement is trying to get at, which is: your existence back then doesn’t matter because your existence now doesn’t matter.

But as a kid, you don’t know that. And again, as a Black queer kid, I can tie it easily to how some people feel we shouldn’t have to learn about slavery or about Black history. But then on the queer side, there’s even less of a right people feel should be given to us—to know about queer people before us.

 

What Are They Afraid Of? – 17:19

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, there's still a lot of people in the United States who believe being queer or trans, or basically not heteronormative, is deviant—if not sinful or evil or threatening or dangerous, or something that needs to be controlled or suppressed. And so I think highlighting stories of powerful or interesting or exemplary queer figures is threatening to people who reject queerness in general. I think there's a lot of fear there.

Some people want to dismiss homophobia and transphobia as words because they’ll claim they’re used too often. But it is a fear. It seems to me there's a lot of fear there.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: It's funny because I kind of go back and forth about what fear means. What does fear actually mean? Primarily because—what is the fear built in? If I'm scared of monsters or I'm scared of witches, it's because of how the representation of them shows up in television or in film or in books—as bad guys, as evil, as this or that.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: So when people say they fear gay people or they fear trans people, you have to actually get to the root of that. Sometimes I feel the fear isn’t that I’m going to harm you. That can’t be the fear, because what evidence would there be of that? What would the harm be?

So then the harm becomes imaginary. This is an imagined fear, because it's a fear that has not happened. There isn’t something that was done to you. What you’ll often hear is a person say, “Oh yeah, because trans people… trans people… trans people…” And then you ask, “Have you ever met one?”

“Well, no.”

Okay. So what is the fear actually built in? The fear is built in something imagined—an imaginary fear.

And so I try to parse that out a lot better because you have real fears in life and then you have, like I said, imaginative fears. People have fears of heights for whatever reason—that’s a real fear. Something actually happens to you. But when you say you fear gay people, it's like…okay, but if you're on the bus, you don't know who is. So the fear is not actualized. It's imagined.

BLAIR HODGES: Nor are queer people any greater of a threat than anybody else. But do you think the fear—because to me, the fear could be rooted in personal insecurity. Gender roles and expectations are so heavily policed, right?

You could go to India and see men walking down the street holding hands, and they’re just friends. You could see gay men doing that or straight men doing that. But here in the United States, we don’t have that. That stuff is beaten out of boys early. We don’t hug our buddies, we don’t hold hands.

So I think the fear is rooted in self-policing—like, “Oh no, what does this mean for me?” It can feel destabilizing for someone who’s worked so hard to fit gender roles, to feel like the script is changing, and maybe feel betrayed or scared by that.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yeah. And I mean, it’s all really tied to organized religion. That’s why there’s such a push to put the Ten Commandments back in classrooms. The biggest force destabilizing that ideology is that people are leaving the church—leaving all churches.

There’s an exodus happening that’s not just Baptists, not just Methodists, not just Mormons. It’s every single church. I don’t know how you’d even estimate it—maybe through a census—but I’d bet those numbers are shifting dramatically toward people identifying as spiritual rather than religious, or having no religious affiliation at all.

That used to be the fear-mongering tool: “If you do this, God will do this to you.” But that fear has eroded over time. The more harm people experience from other people, the harder it is to fear something imagined—something you can’t see.

Now the fear or attack is coming from conservatives, or from people in your own community. When fear becomes man-based, it’s much harder to use fear of God as a tool. And I actually think that’s the biggest fear: losing the ability to control people through God.

It’s ironic because the people who destroyed that power are the same men who now praise a false idol. They don’t even realize what they’re doing. There’s no swinging this back to a religious base. No matter how many Bibles you put in schools, the pendulum has gone too far to swing back.

BLAIR HODGES: I definitely see that. We’re talking with George M. Johnson about the book Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I’d Known.

 

The Harlem Renaissance – 23:11

 

BLAIR HODGES: George, you decided to zoom in on the Harlem Renaissance because you call it one of the queerest historical periods—when Black folks in New York took big risks in art, literature, and music, and there was so much creativity and imagination. Why focus on the Harlem Renaissance for this book?

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Honestly, I probably need to have them go back and add the words “one of” the queerest recorded periods.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, sure.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Because that’s what it really is. It’s not that it was the queerest period—it’s one of the ones we actually got to learn about. And that’s why it’s so important who writes history.

This was a period where Black folks were able to write our own history. Because if we hadn’t, we wouldn’t know about it. White people didn’t write the Harlem Renaissance the way we did. The art, the culture, the writing, the essays, the traveling—that was all done by us.

That’s how it becomes known as one of the queerest periods. And the truth is, we don’t know—maybe 1875 was a huge queer period that never got written down.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: And so I chose that period because that's the best starting point for me to then do some more of the groundwork to go back to wherever we can go back to. And it's hard. We oftentimes know queer people existed during slavery—we know that because we didn't just pop up at the Harlem… you know. But it's what gets recorded that we know.

And so you then have to sometimes go into the imaginative and connect dots and do a lot of groundwork to even figure out, well, who was the queer period before then? What was the queer period during these other revolutions and these other things?

And I always say, we know Greeks were very queer, Romans were very queer. But I'm also like, Europeans were very queer. You don't make laws against something that doesn't exist. And they were making laws against sodomy and laws against this and that. So they're making laws against something that clearly exists.

And then they rob, they pillage, they create America. But they're the same people who were making the laws in Europe about this same thing, coming over here to do the exact same thing. So we know it existed. It's just about how we do that work to even figure out what that existence looked like for them.

BLAIR HODGES: And you talk about how the story a lot of people hear about Black history kind of starts with slavery in the United States and then goes to the civil rights movement and then maybe up to the present. And as you point out, that skips so much Black history and queer history between that. The Harlem Renaissance was between slavery and the civil rights movement. We just skip right past it.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Oftentimes, every now and then growing up they would talk about it, but it wasn’t a huge thing. It was just, “Oh, this was this one period where a lot of creativity and a lot of things changed culturally and shifted and moved, and blues and jazz were born.” They kind of talk about it from that standpoint. But realistically, they do skip huge swaths of what Black life was like in America between those periods.

And we don’t often talk about what happened—like you said—between 1935 and 1950. What else was happening then? And that’s when I started to do my own research. Like the Works Progress Administration, when they did the recordings of the last enslaved people who were still alive. They did this whole project to record them. And that’s the only recordings we have. The federal government sent people around to actually record them.

But that was in the ’40s. And I didn’t learn about that in school. I had to learn about that doing my own research for a different project. And things like that were just like… whoa. It seems like we skipped a lot of things. Not “we,” but you know—it was a choice made. An active choice to skip a lot of those things and say, “Oh yeah, Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.”

And then they don’t try to make the connection of the dots, especially with kids in this country. Like, well, why was a civil rights movement needed if they were free? They don’t explain that part. And they make it sound like a South thing—“Well, this is a Southern issue, and we were trying to…” But no, it also was a Northern issue and a Western issue. This was an issue for the entire country. It wasn’t just the South.

And it’s always been painted that way—the North versus the South. And it’s like, no, slaves were everywhere. They were in the North too. They just don’t get talked about because then it would make the North look like hypocrites. And it would change the narrative of, “Oh no, people in the North rejected slavery.” It’s like, well, no, they didn’t.

And so that’s part of the work I do, to try to connect those dots and weave it all in so people understand. Which is why I talk about McCarthyism in Flamboyants. Because there was an actual law—a huge push—to eliminate queer people in the country. Not everybody just says Stonewall. But the whole period before Stonewall is what led up to Stonewall.

It wasn’t just that this particular group in New York City in this bar was tired that night. No, this was a whole active thing, and it affected people from the Harlem Renaissance with their queerness, who had to go back into hiding, who moved to the West. And that’s why I talked about it in the book that way, so people could really connect those dots.

BLAIR HODGES: And you say it was one of the queerest periods in Black history as far as the records go. But you also point out that doesn’t mean queerness was accepted. And another statement here is that Blackness itself is inherently queer. And I wanted you to unpack that as well, because within Black communities, sometimes there's homophobia to reckon with and transphobia to reckon with as well.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Absolutely. When I say Blackness is inherently queer, it comes from several different standpoints. Black people are looked at as the oddity. I feel the world runs on anti-Blackness. And I always remind people: Black people are the only people that, no matter where we go in the world, if a person feels offended by you, they're gonna call you the N-word.

That is the one slur that every single person in the world knows you can call a Black person, whether those Black people have experienced that N-word or not—because that was a word realistically used throughout the United States in chattel slavery. So that's how you know we are seen as an oddity in the world.

You always see these videos of when Black people go overseas—tourists will take pictures of them, like, “I'm actually here too, on vacation.” You see these things happen and everybody's like, “Why does this happen?” It's because we are actually seen as queer to the world. Not based on sexuality or identity, but based on our skin.

BLAIR HODGES: It's not normative to people. You're not—

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: It's not normative to some people. You're not seen as that. You are seen as an oddity. You are seen as a queer. And so I always say: to be Black is inherently queer from that standpoint.

But I also have to say, if I believe that Black people were the first people in this world, then queer people existed within that. It didn’t come from some other culture and get adopted by us. It was us that showcased it to others. We had it within our culture from the beginning as well.

BLAIR HODGES: And how does it manifest within that culture? What does it mean to be gay in a particular culture? It's not the same across the board. Your book highlights that so well. And again, it's called Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I'd Known.

 

Let America Be America Again – 31:33

 

BLAIR HODGES: You chose Langston Hughes as the first person to profile in the book. Throughout the book, we get to meet these individuals. You give us a little bio of each person, and there's this beautiful art—this original, beautiful new art—that accompanies each piece.

So with Langston Hughes, he was the famous writer who wrote a poem called “Let America Be America Again.” This was in 1936. And I think a lot of people have heard this poem. I remember reading it back in high school—it was assigned to us. But I thought it would be great to hear you actually read Langston Hughes’s poem for us, and then we can talk about it a little bit.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Sure.

“Let America Be America Again,” by Langston Hughes.

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where everyman is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

 

Langston Hughes – 36:43

 

BLAIR HODGES: You say, as you've read the work of Langston Hughes, that his work felt both poignant and secretive to you. Talk about that—the secretive element of it especially.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yeah. Langston was able to write in a way where he used a lot of coded language, especially around queerness. There's the essay I talk about in Flamboyants, “Spectacles in Color,” which I feel is one of the earliest descriptions of ballroom and ballroom community—something we now see today on shows like Pose or in documentaries like Paris Is Burning.

But that essay chronicles this event, this spectacle he’s watching, that he calls so colorful. He’s viewing it as a celebration where the community is coming together to celebrate queerness and celebrate the colors that make up our community. And that’s part of the beauty within his writing.

I think that, of course, when you read “America,” the poem I just read—or “Let America Be America Again,” excuse me—it’s very plain. It's very in your face. It’s very “punch you in the mouth.” But there are also certain things in there where he's using language that some people may not pick up on as quickly. Some people may not understand exactly what he’s talking about and how he’s addressing the Indigenous who were also here, and how he’s describing how the immigrant who is white is different from the immigrant who is nonwhite.

He does this juxtaposition when he’s talking about Poland, talking about certain other countries. A lot of people may not get it and may just look at it as, “Oh, he wants this to be ‘This land is your land, this land is my land,’ and we all live together.” And it’s like, no. There’s a great juxtaposition happening about who gets to be the poor white, who gets to be the poor Negro, who gets to be… what.

If you just read it surface level, you think, “Oh yeah, I understand what this means.” But if you go into it—really into the words—you realize the story he is weaving is much bigger than America. And that’s really what he’s getting at. This is a much bigger problem than just the dream you have sold—that this country was supposed to be something—because it never was. It never manifested. And did you really want that? Is that actually what you meant when you said that?

BLAIR HODGES: See, and that’s a hard thing to do in a country that loves to celebrate the Fourth of July and talk about how great the country is, our freedoms, and how we’re all… you know, it's this great thing. But Langston Hughes is criticizing the country. And that’s going to get blowback. People are going to push back against that.

And you talk about how people who speak up about the truth in the face of criticism are often the ones whose books get banned. You say, “Truth-telling has never been safe for us, but it’s always been necessary.”

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yeah. That’s the only—at the end of the day, all you’ve got is the truth. You’ve got to have your truth. But it’s never been something safe for us to tell. And when I think about book banning, I think about the slave journals, where many had to write using pseudonyms, and had to change the names of plantations and certain people because there was a fear—and it actually did happen with several of the slave narratives—that enslavers were able to figure out the coded language. They were talking about certain things and landmarks, and they were able to figure out which enslaved person actually wrote it.

So again, it’s just never been a safe thing for us to tell the truth about a situation. Because how could my memoir, which is just the truth about my life, create such a conviction in you that you want to ban it? “I don’t feel it’s appropriate.” Appropriate for who? It’s my true story. If something happened to me at ten years old, I have every right to say it in a book. And if a teenager is reading it—well, a teen may be going through it, because it happened to me at ten.

So it becomes a safety issue when you decide you’re going to write texts that go against the ideology that America is this great place. Even with what we’re dealing with right now—“Make America Great Again.” And it’s like, well, what time period are you referring to? Because you’re not referring to a policy period. And we know you're not referring to a policy period because the person who started it doesn’t understand policy.

BLAIR HODGES: He has concepts of a plan.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: But again—yeah. And so it goes far beyond just ideology. The worshiping of the false idol and all this. This is not about policy anymore. It never was about policy. For those of us who know, we knew this was never about policy. This was about taking us back to a time period where one group of people had the most rights in this country, and it was white men.

And that is what we are watching. This is an attempt to reduce the rights of every single person—unless you are a white man—while also keeping in place, as Langston Hughes said, that the system can only work if there are also poor white men who believe, “I have more rights, so eventually I will never be a poor white man.”

And it’s like, no. Because you have no power. And the people in power will say, “Yeah, you have all the rights, so you can do this too.” But that’s the con. You can’t—because the design is that you cannot. And that’s really what it gets down to.

 

Countee Cullen – 43:05

 

BLAIR HODGES: And there's additional tragedy here, too, because as you point out, Langston Hughes never lived openly or fully as a queer person publicly. And there's other figures that live the same way. Countee Cullen is another Black writer. He was born in 1903. He would go on to become a teacher for one of America’s greatest essayists in James Baldwin. And his work was part of this Negritude movement.

And he was in the closet, though he ended up—he married W.E.B. Du Bois’s daughter. So tell us a little bit about Countee and what he was facing in terms of having to hide his queerness while also trying to speak truth to America’s racism.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yeah, he's one of my favorite people that I profile because he just got caught in a really tough situation. Du Bois’s whole idea of the talented tenth movement, and that’s like the best—

BLAIR HODGES: Black people will lift the rest of the race up, white people will find them acceptable, and then we can lift everybody. Yeah.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: And, you know, so he saw Countee as, you know, this is the perfect type of person who should—because this is like the rock star now in the literary world. And this is exactly… he should be marrying my daughter.

And I wouldn't even say that Countee was closeted as much as I would say discreet. Like, I think there's two different things. Because it wasn’t that—clearly Langston Hughes knew, and they knew. You know? It wasn’t like they didn’t know. And he may not have been fully public about it, but I think it was known. I think it was like two things could be true: I'm not public about it, but it also is known. And I think that’s actually what was happening.

But it put many of them at this interesting juxtaposition because the creativity was queer, right? It was coming from the lens of queer people because they viewed the world in a different way. But you wanted to have the greatness of the person absent the lens that made them the great person that they were. And that’s a hard fight. You know? And it’s hard to live at that… I don’t know what you would say, but it’s hard to live that intersection. Thank you for the word finally coming. It’s hard to live at that intersection.

And there are many times where I—before I fully accepted myself—I wouldn’t wear heels or I wouldn’t wear certain clothes or certain outfits because even though people knew, I was afraid of what being “too queer” would mean for certain folks, and was denying my own happiness. Because it was like, well, if I'm this particular type of gay, it gives you a crossover audience, than if you're this particular type of gay versus being this particular type of queer versus exhibiting this type of queerness.

And so all of that is a very hard juxtaposition for any of us who are just trying to survive. Right? Like trying to make a living and survive.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. This is respectability politics, right? The difference between maybe some gay people, for example, who would think, “Okay, we’ve got to fit in. We’ve got to wear the suit and tie and cut our hair in this way, and we’ve got to speak in a certain way and carry our bodies in a certain way,” versus other people who are like, “I'm going to wear the high heels. My voice is going to sound different. I'm going to walk different.”

And then there are fights between marginalized people. They're saying, “Hey, you're selling out and you're making it harder for the rest of the queer people.” And then others saying, “Hey, hey, you are being weird and we don’t like what you're doing because it’s going to make all the normal people, quote-unquote, not like any gay people.” So there’s sort of this infighting that happens with respectability politics.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yeah. And that’s why I've always publicly said you could be LGBT and also—you could be LGBT and not queer. Because there’s a difference. There’s a difference. Like, there’s a difference when you're just being LGBT but accepting the notions of all the roles and everything else that heterosexual people do. Well, that doesn’t advance you. That doesn’t even keep you safe.

And I get it. I get why people do—because they feel like it’s a… they feel like—I’m not gonna say I do—they do, but I think a lot of people feel like it's a reduction of harm. It’s a harm reduction tool. It’s a safety thing. And I respect it. But you also have to understand: if you can’t live in the totality of your experience, then… then what? Then what kind of living is that?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. That’s the lesson that you take from Countee Cullen. As you say, his brilliance and talent couldn’t protect him from a society that was unwilling to accept his full self. So you told him you wish he would have just accepted his full self instead of waiting for that or hiding from that.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: It was kind of sad. To me it was one of the sadder stories because he went through so much that he eventually left the movement. And I understand that story because I’ve seen it happen with so many people in my community.

But the universe works how it works—he ends up becoming James Baldwin’s mentor and English teacher. And then James Baldwin takes the baton. The baton was passed. That’s the greatest thing Countee did. He was like, “Look, I couldn’t be my fullest, but you have a chance to take it to the next level. And when you get there, pass it to the next one.”

Without Countee, there’s no James. Without James’s Notes of a Native Son, there’s no All Boys Aren’t Blue. The baton keeps moving. And I hope someone after me takes my baton and pushes even further than I was able to with All Boys Aren’t Blue, Flamboyants, and whatever else I write. I hope they move the needle farther than I could.

BLAIR HODGES: And your book is so good at this because it doesn’t demonize or lionize these figures. You explore their complexities—drawbacks, limitations, tragedies, strengths, triumphs. You’re wrestling with their humanity. You're not turning them into statuesque heroes or villains or pitiable figures we just cry over. The complexity is the strength of these stories.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yeah. And I think that’s what the book boiled down to for me—or what I hope my work does: the totality of storytelling. I am a villain in somebody’s story, and it’s my job to talk about that—to talk about when I was the bad guy. In All Boys Aren’t Blue I talk about times I messed up, things I shouldn’t have said, ways I shouldn’t have acted.

Good writing is when you can be that introspective. Because it helps other people be reflective too. That’s why I love villain origin stories—they usually come from some deeply human place.

BLAIR HODGES: Humanize them.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Exactly. It humanizes them. And that’s why I love the antihero—not hero or villain, but those complex characters who exist for complex reasons. So it felt like my duty to write about these figures in their totality, without villainizing or demonizing them for their missteps. I make missteps too.

 

Josephine Baker – 50:54

 

BLAIR HODGES: I think Josephine Baker—another person you write about—is really exemplary of this. Born into poverty, she became a famous singer and entertainer. She’s celebrated today by people like Beyoncé as inspirational. But you don’t shy away from the hard stuff. She was bisexual but also pretty homophobic. I see you wrestling with her in the book. Tell me about that—this one seemed personal for you, like maybe you had a little beef with her. What was that about?

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: I don’t have a beef with her, but I was shocked. I had never known that story. It’s not widely known or talked about. She adopted a lot of children she called the Rainbow—

BLAIR HODGES: Rainbow Tribe.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Tribe, yeah. Which already on the surface was like, okay… And then she would allow people to basically pay to see the kids all interact together.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah—kids from all these different countries.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Because every kid was from a different country, ethnicity, and background. And she was doing it under a philosophy—I'm forgetting the word—but basically showing how the whole world could be in the same room, loving each other as siblings, modeling acceptance.

But one of her adopted kids was queer, and she kicked him out of the chateau—she had a huge mansion where all the kids lived. She made him go live with his father because she found out he was queer. She was unapologetically unaccepting of it.

In researching, I learned something I hadn’t known—and most people haven’t known. I put the son’s name in the book because during COVID there was a celebration of Josephine Baker’s life, and he’s still alive. There’s a YouTube video—maybe the article is still up—of him speaking at the event honoring his mother, forgiving her. He said he’d lived enough life to understand the constraints around how far her love could have gone.

BLAIR HODGES: Could have gone. Yeah. She was bisexual too—she was dealing with—

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Dealing with her own identity, and him being a mirror for that. Her story was complicated and jarring because she was so beloved. She’s also one of the few Renaissance figures whose sexuality has been openly discussed for a long time. People have long known Josephine Baker was bisexual. So it was even more interesting to see her struggle with accepting it in her own home.

And that’s something we still witness. There are definitely people who love me and adore me, but the moment queerness shows up in their own household, it becomes a totally different issue. I've seen that in real time with certain—let’s say former family friends.

BLAIR HODGES: Like a “not my child” kind of thing.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: A very “not my child, wow” situation, where my grandmother had to step in. It was hard to witness, and hard to read about Josephine’s story because I have my own. I haven’t written about it yet, but I will. My grandmother went to the wedding of a friend of mine—a trans man—and stood in place of his parents, who wouldn’t go. And these parents were people we grew up with in church. We’d all known each other for over 30 years. They were very supportive of me early in my career, knowing I was queer. So it was very hard to watch how things unfolded. And with that former family friend, there’s still beef—we just recently talked about it.

 

Family Support – 55:38

 

BLAIR HODGES: Well, at least, I mean, these stories are tragic, but there’s some solidarity, some commiseration. Seeing you’re not alone, seeing it happen in other families—it gives points of connection and fellow feeling with people going through similar things. It’s a silver lining to a terrible situation, but at least you have that.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yeah. I try to live my life as an example of what family can look like. A lot of people look at my family as a possibility model, and my family is okay with that. There are times when my mother and my aunts went viral after attending a school board meeting and defending my book. I posted the video.

BLAIR HODGES: I actually have the audio right here. Do you mind if I play it?

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Absolutely.

BLAIR HODGES: Here it is. She’s reading from a statement you wrote because you couldn’t be present—you were on the road. And the video picks up as she’s reading that statement.

KAYE JOHNSON: My book is not for kids. It is for young adults, ages 14–18, grades 10–12. Lie number two: my book is not pornography. If anytime sex is discussed we consider it pornography, the only show left on TV would probably be Sesame Street. My book details my first sexual experiences. Teens need to know about agency, consent, and that they have a right to say no and wait until they are ready.

People wonder why the rate of sexual assault and abuse is so high in college and beyond. Look no further than the fact that you removed all texts teaching young adults about it. And before you tell another lie, I talk with teens all year. They’re not being taught about it at home either.

The final lie is that my book is introducing hard topics to teenagers and exposing them too soon. Any parent trying to ban this has likely never talked to their teen about what actually goes on in their daily lives.

I was 13 nearly 25 years ago. Do you remember the hottest topic that year? It involved a president and a woman named Monica Lewinsky. Every child, preteen, teenager, and adult in the country was introduced to sex in that moment. That’s the hard truth. Our books are not introducing teens to hard topics. They’re the resources teens need to understand the hard topics they’re already living.

Finally, as a Black queer person, I know what it’s like to read books that don’t tell my story. In this hunt to protect teens, does it ever cross your mind that removing or restricting this life-saving story for LGBTQ students harms them? Or how removing this life-saving story for Black teens harms them?

Or do you not care? Because that’s what this fight is really about—removing LGBTQ stories and Black stories. If you don’t want your child to read it, that’s fine. You have every right to say no. But you don’t get to trample on the rights of parents like my mother and my aunts who raised me. [applause]

BLAIR HODGES: That's amazing. And the school board there in New Jersey, from what I understand, voted to keep the book on the shelves at the time. What was the public reaction? You posted the video and it went viral.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yeah. What got everybody the most were the quote tweets and comments. A lot of LGBT adults my age were saying, “I’ve never seen people this fiercely devoted to a queer child,” or “It’s so beautiful to see parents of queer kids go this hard, especially in the Black community.” People were like, “Damn, this is what parenting is—your mother fighting for her child’s life story and defending it without backing down.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. We need more people who refuse to back down. That’s George M. Johnson, author of the book Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I'd Known. George is an award-winning Black, queer, nonbinary author and activist. They’ve written about race, gender, sexuality, and culture in places like Essence, The Advocate, Teen Vogue, and dozens of other publications. Their debut memoir, All Boys Aren’t Blue, is a New York Times bestseller. Flamboyants has been named a New York Public Library Best Book of the Year, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, selected for the Rainbow Book List, and received rave reviews—including from me, because I think the book’s outstanding, George.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Thank you.

 

Today's Black Renaissance – 01:00:17

 

BLAIR HODGES: You say in the book that you feel like we’re in a new renaissance right now—Black people continuing to shift culture and being credited for that shift in ways they haven’t before, maybe even in ways they weren’t credited during the Harlem Renaissance. Talk about today’s Black Renaissance.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yeah. I mean, we’re just so expansive now. Whether you look at shows like Pose, or Beyoncé’s Renaissance project and how it shared the origins of house music—how it let people learn who Larry Levan was, the architect of house in the late ’70s and early ’80s, alongside Frankie Knuckles. They went to Chicago and really created Chicago house. And you have Larry doing this…

But I'm watching today’s culture too—the Lil Nas Xs of the world. Having a gay Black pop star with a number-one hit, with kids actually seeing that? That’s really cool.

BLAIR HODGES: And there’s still some hate, but it wouldn’t have been possible before—not in this way.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yeah. As a kid who loves—loves—’70s and ’80s music, I feel like that’s Sylvester. Sylvester should have been as big as Lil Nas X. Sylvester was big, but he should’ve had number-one hits and been singing in the biggest stadiums with that voice.

And it’s beautiful to see people like Jeremy Pope in the acting space—a Black gay actor nominated for Tony Awards and Emmys. You had Billy Porter on Pose. You had M.J. Rodriguez on Pose. You have it in every space.

And then you look at publishing—Leah Johnson, Aiden Thomas, and myself. We’re queer people really moving up in publishing. And in fashion—LaQuan Smith. It’s everywhere. Every facet you can think of, you’re seeing this movement touch all the touchpoints.

The beautiful thing is you see us together. There are pictures of us together. We don’t have to live siloed lives. You can actually see the different beautiful spaces within our coalition of LGBTQ people in the same rooms, working together, collaborating, bridging gaps—not just staying in the queer space. We’ve crossed over. And it’s nice doing it with people beside you—not chasing people ahead, not leaving people behind. All of us saying, “We’re creating things we all can see ourselves in. We can touch each other, grab each other, grow together.”

And that’s the beautiful part. It reminds me of the Negritude movement. It reminds me of Alain Locke putting The New Negro together—our collective working to move culture forward. And I feel like we’re there.

BLAIR HODGES: And it’s not just about struggle and difficulty and hardship and oppression—it’s also about creativity and joy and beauty and fun. I think it’s about all of it. Expression.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: I think it’s about all of it. And I always say, even when we have collective moments of Blackness—like when Beyoncé’s *Homecoming* came on TV during a rough time, I think during COVID or right before—it gave us this collective moment of joy when we were stuck inside.

Even in the harshest times, the hardest times, we still find joy. And that’s my whole thing: you’ve got to find joy.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it came out right before COVID, and then it just took off because we were all like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: You’ve got to find joy.

BLAIR HODGES: That's George M. Johnson, author of Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I'd Known.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:04:37

 

BLAIR HODGES: Before we go, George, can you speak to Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises? We always end by asking authors what they would change about the book now that it’s out, or what the hardest thing about writing it was, or something that surprised them as they were working on it. You can pick one to speak to.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Yeah. I think what I’ll talk about is what Zora Neale Hurston talks about—and I mention it a little at the end. As a writer, you wish you had all the information. You wish you knew everything, all the words, all the facts. You wish you had every single thing in your mind.

You write the book, and then when it comes out someone says, “Oh, well, this is this,” or “this is that,” and you wish you could go back and fix it. But as a writer you have to learn—and really know—that if I knew everything, would I have ever written the book? Part of writing is that I don’t know all the things. Part of writing is the discovery process.

So I don’t have regrets about what I’ve written because each book challenges me to do something more—to write something next. What I’ve learned is that if I changed anything in my past, it would alter my future. There might not be an All Boys Aren’t Blue if I’d done one thing differently—gone to a different college, made a different decision about pledging. One change and maybe that book never exists.

So I don’t regret anything, because it would change everything I have to do moving forward.

BLAIR HODGES: Speaking of regrets—I would’ve regretted it if we failed to mention the artwork in Flamboyants. There are original pieces created for each person covered in the book, and the artist’s name—

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Charlie Palmer.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes. The visuals in the book are beautiful, from artist Charlie Palmer.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: A dear friend and brother now. Charlie is amazing.

BLAIR HODGES: Check out Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I’d Known. And George also just published a novel co-written with Leah Johnson called There’s Always Next Year. It’s a young adult holiday romance that came out in December 2025, so folks can check that out—maybe when the holidays roll around again.

George, thanks so much for joining us on Relationscapes.

GEORGE M. JOHNSON: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

 

Outro – 02:07

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to another episode of Relationscapes. If this is your first time joining me, welcome to the journey—it's great to have you along. If this episode resonated with you, I’ll recommend a few Fellow Traveler episodes that work well for Black History Month—or any month, really.

Try “Black and Beyond the Binary,” with KB Brookins, or “Celebrating Black Womanhood,” with Catherine Joy White. Both incredible guests who wrote amazing books.

If you're enjoying the podcast, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts. You can also rate it in Spotify.

Mates of State provides our theme song. I'm your host, Blair Hodges, an independent journalist in Salt Lake City, and I’ll see you again soon.

 

[NOTE: Transcripts have been edited for readability.]