This Harlem Renaissance writer seemed to live an ordinary life — but her diaries revealed years of passionate lesbian affairs
Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s inner life was a rich portrait of black female queerness
“Love and beautiful love has been mine from many men, but the great passion of four or five transcended that of other women — and what more can any woman want?” So wrote Alice Dunbar-Nelson in her diary in 1931. It wasn’t the first time the Harlem Renaissance poet and journalist had put pen to paper about love affairs with women. Her marriages to men — three in total — were genuine love affairs, but nonetheless she wanted to explore romantic connections with women. Loving men was what was expected of a woman in the early 1900s. Loving women was as natural to her as breathing. Living her truth out loud was an impossibility of the times, but in the pages of her diary, all parts of herself could exist.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson (born Alice Ruth Moore) was 46 when she started keeping a diary. She filled pages mulling over career rejections and the financial burdens of being a woman whose work was undervalued. “I lay in bed this morning thinking, forty-six years old and nowhere yet,” Dunbar-Nelson wrote on her birthday in 1921. “It is a pretty sure guess if you haven’t gotten anywhere by the time you’re forty-six you’re not going to get very far.” But by the time she’d written her first entry, the writer, journalist, poet, and teacher already had almost 30 years of professional writing to her name.
Black women’s studies professor Akasha Gloria Hull compiled a decade’s worth of Dunbar-Nelson’s diaries in Give Us Each Day (1986). She recounted things as small as marital quarrels, and as remarkable as cooking breakfast with famed intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois. Her witty prose ranged from musings on inspiration for a poem after bumping into an old lover to her fondness for hats. Her revelations about female lovers are written as casually as the details of other quotidian happenings. “Narka [Narka Lee-Rayford, of the National Federation of Colored Women] comes to the house for comfort. We want to make whoopee … Life is glorious. Good homemade white grape wine. We really make whoopee,” she wrote on August 1, 1928.
“Dunbar-Nelson’s current intimate relationships were a potpourri of mismatches and marriages,” Hull wrote in Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1987).
Dunbar-Nelson married her first husband, the famed writer Paul Laurence Dunbar, in 1898. By 1902, Dunbar’s alcoholism and depression were sending him into violent rages, one of which was nearly fatal for his wife. By 1902, she had left him and fled to Delaware, though the pair never officially divorced. In 1906, Dunbar-Nelson learned from newspaper reports that her estranged husband had died.
In Delaware, she began an intimate relationship with Edwina B. Kruse, the principal at the school where she taught, who was 27 years her senior. While Dunbar-Nelson was taking classes at Cornell, Kruse wrote her letters in rapid succession in October of 1907. “I want you to know dear, every thought of my life is for you, every throb of my heart is yours and yours alone. I just can not ever let any one else have you.”
Dunbar-Nelson had written about platonic friendships with famous businesswomen and activists like Mary McLeod Bethune and Nannie Burroughs. But the letters between her and Kruse suggested a romantic component that colored outside the lines of sisterhood.
Yet in her public image, Dunbar-Nelson played the part of a straight woman. In 1910, she married another man, Henry Arthur Callis, a teacher 12 years her junior, but the union quickly dissolved. She married her last husband, journalist Robert J. Nelson, in 1916, and the couple stayed married until her death, in 1935.
But behind closed doors, Dunbar-Nelson’s affairs with women continued. Nelson didn’t like it but ultimately seems to have accepted it. The couple eschewed traditional gender roles. “Bobbo and I had a fearsome quarrel yesterday morning,” Dunbar-Nelson wrote in 1921, “about the car, of course, and I burst out that I am tired of being the man.”
Other women of the Harlem Renaissance era, such as playwright Angelina Weld Grimké, also lived closeted queer lives. In historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s 1993 essay “The Black Man’s Burden,” he wrote that the Harlem Renaissance “was surely as gay as it was black.” He was likely referring to black gay men, as black women were too suffocated by the restraints of patriarchy to explore the openly gay camaraderie their counterparts found in ballrooms and safe spaces like the lavish parties of A’Lelia Walker (daughter of entrepreneur and activist Madam C. J. Walker). The complexities of black women’s sexuality and identity were confined to their bedrooms and writings. Black female sexuality was still taboo even as new black queer artists like Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde, Barbara Jordan, Alice Walker, Pat Parker, Angela Davis, and Barbara Smith arrived on the scene in the 1960s.
“They were always mindful of their need to be living refutations of the sexual slurs to which black women were subjected and, at the same time, as much as white women, were also tyrannized by the still-prevalent Victorian cult of true womanhood,” Hull wrote.
If biracial Dunbar-Nelson kept her female lovers hidden, one can imagine what it was like for her darker and poorer contemporaries.
Dunbar-Nelson was born to a formerly enslaved seamstress mother and a sailor father in 1875 in New Orleans. Her fair skin allowed her to pass for white, which she occasionally did to attend segregated events. By 20, she had graduated college and published her first collection of poems and short stories, Violets and Other Tales. She taught school in New Orleans and in Brooklyn, where she helped found the White Rose Mission, a settlement house for black women who’d arrived to the city from the south. Later, in Wilmington, Delaware, she wrote more books (The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence), published articles and poems, edited the A.M.E. Church Review paper and Wilmington’s Advocate paper, served on the State Republican Committee, wrote columns for the Pittsburgh Courier, and traveled for speaking engagements. Her interests were pro-black. She left the GOP for the Democratic Party when the former failed to vote in favor of anti-lynching policies. But her diverse achievements were often overshadowed by her deceased first husband. In some circles, she would always be best known as Dunbar’s widow, which she despised, but she kept his last name for the access it granted.
In all of her writings, there is no declaration naming her sexual identity as one thing or the other. It just was. Her long-term relationship with Kruse, her extramarital affairs with journalist Fay Jackson Robinson and the artist Helene London, can only be examined from her cryptic diary details. “If you’re trying to understand why a woman would have a locked diary and why she wouldn’t want its contents revealed, you have the answer in the diaries of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Ida B. Wells,” English professor Mary Helen Washington told The New Yorker. Historian Lillian Faderman notes that Dunbar-Nelson’s journal writing “reveals the existence of an active black bisexual network among prominent ‘club women’ who had husbands but managed to enjoy lesbian liaisons as well as a camaraderie with one another over their shared secrets.”
Whether Dunbar-Nelson ever intended for her private diaries to become public is unknown. If reports of her burning her “lesbian poems” before death are an indication, one can assume she’d planned to take her secrets to the grave. Her intention may not have been anything but to live freely and make sense of her own duality in the privacy of her diary. But because she so beautifully expressed this radicalness, black queer artists after her, the ones searching for stories like their own, could feel less alone.
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