(Because I am attending my 30th reunion at Yale this weekend, I’ve not had time to finish the piece I planned to post for the blog. Therefore I hope you will indulge me as I revive an article I wrote about Carl Van Vechten whose papers are in the Beinecke Library in New Haven.

Van Vechten was an American Renaissance Man who epitomized the witty and rambunctious cultural scene of the Roaring Twenties. Sadly, today, he is less celebrated than he deserves, and his clever novels of sophisticates and bohemians, as well as his critical essays, are rarely mentioned. Yet he was a profound influence on his and future generations of artists, writers and photographers. The following is an article I wrote in 1994 for the Village Voice about the secret scrapbooks of Carl Van Vechten that I had the pleasure of reading through at the Yale Beinecke Library. At the time, such revelatory books as Gay New York and The Gay Metropolis had not yet appeared, and the eye-opening insights into the early homosexual underground in New York provided by Van Vechten’s private scrapbooks were a total surprise and a source of endless fascination. Recently a new book, The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten, came out, which delves into the “Public Face; Private Thoughts” of this overlooked genius. As far as I know no new full-scale biography of this wonderful writer exists and perhaps it is time that his contributions to the world of arts and letters be more fully recognized.

Carl Van Vechten’s Secret Life

“Come on in, Sucker!” “Recall the Gay Old Days!”

Thus begin Carl Van Vechten’s 18 volumes of homoerotic scrapbooks that were locked away for 25 years after his death, following his strict orders, in the bowels of the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Filled with elaborate collages assembled from newspaper clippings, arty male nudes, racy letters, sketches and gay erotica from the ’20s, ’30s ’40s and ’50s, these secret diaries provide a rare and insightful glimpse into New York’s early “subterranean set.”

Opened in 1989 with little fanfare, Van Vechten’s scrapbooks are a treasure trove of historical documentation. An incorrigible packrat, Van Vechten kept every scrap of paper from the most ridiculous to the least sublime. Nothing escaped his eye: coat check stubs, movie tickets, matchbooks, even an extra-large condom, as well as engraved invitations to a party on the Ile de France hosted by “Herr Ibiter Tittoff and General Kutscha Kokoft.” Only someone with Van Vechten’s mischievous sense of fun (Dorothy Parker, who didn’t care for him, put it best when she said he always had “his tongue in somebody else’s cheek”) could have compiled these monuments to bad taste. Cataloging was his trademark. Like Jean Cocteau, he considered art to be the rehabilitation of the commonplace. These scrapbooks, while scurrilous and at times downright sophomoric, attest to that lifelong creed.

Whether these tomes were meant to be a time bomb or simply a time capsule isn’t clear. Until the boxes containing them were unwrapped, no one had a clue they existed, not even Van Vechten’s close friends. “For years, we had all been sitting around taking bets on what would be in them when we opened them,” says Bruce Kellner, Van Vechten’s biographer. “We had all planned to have a big party and an unveiling and break out the champagne. But Donald Gallup, who was Carl’s literary trustee, said, ‘No, I will open these myself and see if a party is justified.’” When the seals were broken, the gift proved to be “a surprise and a disappointment,” says Kellner. Instead of written material (Kellner had hoped for some additions to Van Vechten’s daybooks), what Van Vechten had enveloped in so much suspense appears to be a practical joke. Or was it?

Originally from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Carl Van Vechten first made a name for himself as a music critic at The New York Times, where he helped popularize Stravinsky, Strauss, and jazz. Moving on to dance criticism (he introduced New York to Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky) Van Vechten later contributed to Vanity Fair and H. L. Mencken’s Smart Set. As a literary critic, he almost single-handedly rekindled interest in the work of Herman Melville and championed Gertrude Stein.

Van Vechten also found time to write seven stylish novels, including The Tattooed Countess, Spider Boy and Parties, as well as essays. In the 30s, he abandoned fiction to pursue photography. His celebrity models included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tallulah Bankhead, George Gershwin and Leontyne Price.

An early champion of black culture (his own novel about Harlem, Nigger Heaven, was a controversial bestseller), Van Vechten set up the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale University. The many nude photographs of young black men in the scrapbooks suggest that Van Vechten’s interest in African-Americans went beyond mere sociology. Next to one photograph of a nude black boy, Van Vechten pasted a caption from a butcher’s ad: “When Identifying Meat, Color is Our Best Guide.”

Though he married twice and spent time in jail for failing to pay his first wife’s alimony, Van Vechten’s homosexuality was a well-known secret. One collage proclaims: “I’ve been leading a double life and I don’t intend to stop.” Van Vechten spent much of that double life in Harlem, where sexual liberation was an intrinsic part of the jazz revolution. In one essay, gay historian Eric Garber relates Van Vechten’s frequent visits to “Niggerati Manor,” a center of New Negro creativity where leaders of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman rented rooms. Occasionally the manor’s guests would engage in what one observer called “tuft hunting and the diversions of the cities of the plains.” The scrapbooks provide compelling evidence that similar escapades frequently occurred south of 125th Street. The scrapbooks give a glimpse of a world in which races overlapped, providing a rich resource for historians and scholars of racial studies.

A Freudian could have a field day with these scrapbooks, too. Throughout them, Van Vechten displays a morbid obsession with penis size and an overwhelming castration anxiety, clipping hundreds of headlines that exclaim such comments as “Well of all the meatless wonders!”, “IND Queens Lines Cut Off!”, “Big Ones Don’t Get Away From Carl.” Occasionally, the juxtaposition of images alone is amusing, as when Van Vechten places a snapshot of a man performing auto-fellatio next to a clipping from Ripley’s Believe It Or Not of an actor playing Popeye, who could put the tip of his nose in his mouth. Other inscriptions are uncannily prescient, such as the pre-AIDS admonition to “Play Safe!” or the picture of a “black god” with the appended title: “Long Dong Silver.” And this was several decades before the Anita Hill scandal.

Many of the nude photographs are typical of Van Vechten’s signature style — the subject is posed against a sensual, exotically textured background, perhaps cellophane or tiger skin, and lit severely among shadows. In Volume 17, there are nude shots of Dame Judith Anderson (you can tell by the famous mole on her chin) and dancer Hugh Laing, who recreates many of Nijinsky’s notorious poses. Not all the pictures are by Van Vechten. Many are simply period porn, which is of historical interest in itself. The most erotically charged nudes, set against a Venetian backdrop, were done by Van Vechten’s close friend Max Ewing, author of Going Somewhere. A provocative ass shot was submitted with “best wishes” by Man Ray. Baron von Gloeden’s kitschy nudes grace many a page, as do beefcake stills of Marlon Brando and Joe Dallesandro.

Whole volumes are dedicated to erotic drawings — many of them vividly X-rated — by Van Vechten’s pen pals George George (a sculptor and soldier he met at the Stage Door Canteen), Dick Sharpe, Thomas Handforth and Roi. A Tchelitchew sketch of Charles Henri Ford appears in the collection in 1940. Many of the most appealing images remind one of Cocteau. They might even be by Cocteau — it’s hard to tell — since few are signed. Later entries could be by Andy Warhol. The sheer number of the drawings is staggering. Van Vechten himself gave up trying to sort them all out. The last volume, which is not bound, contains dozens more slipcased in envelopes.

There are also play programs, including one from May (sic) West’s Pleasure Man, on September 24, 1928; and ads for Blair Niles’s pioneering 1931 gay novel, Strange Brother. Strewn across the pages are rare copies of Weimar Republic gay magazines, schedules of “For Bachelors Only” cruises to Europe, and souvenirs from early queer bars such as Finocchio’s in San Francisco. Van Vechten pasted in promotional material for a 30s flick called Chained, a “forceful picture of the Third Sex,” shown at the Acme Theatre on Union Square. The producers warned parents to protect their “children against the vicious morals of the world’s worst influence… the super curse of civilization.” Drag figures prominently, too. Van Vechten documents a Carnegie Hall recital by Francis Renault, “the Last of the Red Hot Papas,” performances by Julian Eltinge in The Fascinating Widow, and a revue by Karyl Norman, “the Creole Fashion Plate,” at the Pansy Club at 48th and Broadway.

A 20s article in Rosener’s Pan proves an invaluable source for the lingo of the times, listing terms like “she-rake” for lesbian, “he-hussy” for drag queen. The editors warned would be partiers not to join in the fey festivities: “We pray you, do not listen to this insidious propaganda, but hie you to the nearest Greek restaurant, see there what a nation has come to because allowed such shenanigans.”

Van Vechten also assembled dozens of articles about early transsexuals such as Christine Jorgensen and John Breckenridge, the inspiration for Gore Vidal’s satire Myra Breckinridge. Van Vechten’s scrapbooks reveal the homophobia rampant in pre-Stonewall New York. While the gay world made inroads in society, the straight media openly mocked them. A tabloid called Brevities published an article in 1932 entitled: “Fag Balls Exposed: The Third Sex is Flooding America.” That same year, the New York Amsterdam News decried the popularity of the Hamilton Lodge drag parties at Rockland Palace in which 7,000 cross-dressers jammed the ballroom. Things deteriorated into a “revolting revel” when the “impersonators started making promiscuous passes at the spectators.” By the ’50s the media’s tone had turned even harsher. A clipping in 1953 stated that along the “Bird Circuit,” a strip on the East 50s, “it’s Old Homo Week all year long.” A similar diatribe by Robert Sylvester in the Daily News two years later had this to say about gay bashing: “Let us agree, for the sake of argument, that a homosexual silly enough to pick up a stranger deserves his lumps… it probably isn’t important if a homosexual is roughed up by a hoodlum. But… when there are no available homosexuals any unprotected citizen makes a satisfactory substitute.”

As the scrapbooks continue, their tone becomes more pointed. Perhaps Van Vechten beame more politically aware. Or perhaps a desire for thoroughness compelled him to document the rise in gay-related crimes. The garish headlines say as much as any memoir can about the era’s double standards, a time when blackmail and murder were a constant threat and suicide seemed the only dignified way out: “Man Found Hanging in Girl’s Lingerie,” “Male Model Admits Killing Art Salesman,” “Theatrical Set Designer Murdered, Bound to Couch Flaming as Pyre,” “Chorus Boy’s Pal’s Death in Bathtub Ends Queer Romance.” But even amid the litany of horrors, Van Vechten never lost his sense of humor. On one particularly gruesome clipping, “Architect beaten on head with a statuette he was making of his roommate,” Van Vechten scribbled: “Art Criticism?”

Van Vechten’s last laugh appears in the front of the final scrapbook, where he announces: “This book could cause a lot of trouble… But it’s worth it!” Then he appends a cartoon of a ghost sporting the caption: “A Warning to the Curious,” as if Van Vechten, like some pharaoh of yore, were putting a curse on his buried treasure. Labeling his scrapbooks “One of the most significant contributions to American reference work we have had in English,” Van Vechten poked fun at his own efforts. Yet despite the bawdy jokes and glib tomfoolery that’s evident throughout, Van Vechten had the foresight to realize that 25 years after his death, scholars would have evolved far enough along to accept, and perhaps even cherish, his erotic obsessions.