SOURCE: Lester, Neal A. “Sounds of Silent Performances: Homoeroticism in Zora Neale Hurston's ‘Story in Harlem Slang: Jelly's Tale’.” Southern Quarterly 36, no. 3 (spring 1998): 10-20.

In the following essay, Lester examines the homoerotic aspects of “Story in Harlem Slang: Jelly's Tale.”

Erotica was never written by gay men. It couldn't have been. We were, by definition, obscene; therefore, anything written about us had to be declared pornography.

—John Preston, Flesh and the Word

… true niggers ain't gay!

—Ice Cube, “Horny Lil' Devil”

Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston was during her day and is even today an enigma. Not only were her contemporaries of the 1920s and 1930s unable to lock her into prescribed social and artistic boundaries, but those who visit her prolific and engaging career as an essayist, author, and playwright quickly realize that Hurston is a writer whose personal life and writings deliberately resist neat categories...