I have always felt an intense spiritual kinship with Langston Hughes (1901 – 1967). For me, he is not only an icon of Black America and of America itself, but an icon into my own soul. In its original and authentic sense, an icon is a portal into the spiritual dimension—an image that empowers one to engage one’s destiny.
As an Italian American, I found much to recognize in the life and work of Langston Hughes.
Like Langston, I grew up deeply drawn to poetry and to jazz and blues. In college, I performed my poetry accompanied by the improvised jazz and blues of my classmates. Like Langston, it was impossible to express my sexuality—or other essential aspects of myself—within the cultural restrictions of the social context in which I was raised. Like Langston, I discovered that the identities offered to me by society, church, culture and family had little to do with who I actually was.
I felt spiritually homeless in a world that demanded rigid either/or choices—choices that neither reflected my experience nor honored my complexity, and that pushed me toward false and ultimately destructive identities.
The word queer always appealed to me precisely because it means: I do not fit into your categories.
So when my friend and artistic colleague Cecilie Keenan suggested that we write a play about Langston Hughes, I plunged into a vast sea of emotion and spiritual challenge—without a lifejacket, and with the grand (perhaps arrogant) hope that another telling of Hughes’s story might contribute, however modestly, to the spiritual health and maturity of our nation.
In researching and writing this play, I learned—and relearned—essential lessons from Langston’s life and work.
One lesson stands out above all:
Do not be afraid of silence. Know when to speak—and know what must be said.
Langston Hughes never publicly identified his sexuality. His poems, especially “Desire.” “Young Sailor,” and “Café,” show his knowledge of Black Gay subculture, of homoerotic codes, and of the hazards, criminal and social, of being openly Gay. As a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston wanted to be the poet of Black America, not a poet within a subculture. He wanted to avoid anything that could be used to delegitimize his racial politics, narrow his audience, expose him to state repression (especially during the Red Scare).
Langston’s silence is discipline and Queer strategy that Michel Foucault has taught us to understand.
Langston lived in a time when being openly gay—especially as a Black public intellectual—could nullify one’s artistic, moral and political mission. Silence, for him, was not cowardice; it was a form of survival and a means of protecting the work itself.
This refusal of false choices extended into his politics. When Langston traveled to the Soviet Union to work on a screenplay addressing racial injustice in the United States, he quickly realized that Soviet officials were interested not in truth, but in propaganda. When figures such as Ted Posten and Arthur Koestler pressed him to denounce the Soviet system wholesale, Hughes chose a far more difficult path.
He refused to continue work on the film—yet also refused to issue blanket condemnations without first traveling through Central Asia to see for himself how societies in transition were grappling with modernization and justice. Though acutely aware of the tyrannical nature of Communist dictatorship, Hughes was nonetheless struck by the real gains being made by women and people of color in those regions—genuine advances in education, emancipation, and social power.
Once again, Langston Hughes rejected either/or thinking in favor of a more complex and uncomfortable truth—one he ultimately spoke through poetry. In “Goodbye Christ” (1932), he wrote, “Joe Stalin wasn’t the first white man to lie to a Black man.”
During this Black History Month of 2026, I hope we remember not only the brilliance of Langston Hughes’s work, but the deeper moral mission it served—and the unfinished promise of our nation itself.
Langston sings America as his hero Walt Whitman did, in 1935’s “Let America be America Again,” where he wrote in part:
“The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.”
© 2026 Nick Patricca nicholas.patricca@gmail.com
Nick Patricca is Professor Emeritus at Loyola University Chicago, an active member of the Dramatists Guild of America, and a member of PEN International, San Miguel de Allende Center.