How Queer is Too Queer: The Homoerotic Subtext in Nella Larsen’s Passing as Situated in the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract

This essay examines Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) as a text layered with homoerotic subtext, arguing that Larsen deliberately embedded queerness—both racial and sexual—within the novel’s narrative structure. Written during the Harlem Renaissance, a period that encouraged Black artistic expression, Passing uses the motif of “passing” not only as a commentary on race but as a subtle exploration of same-sex desire. The essay contends that Larsen’s repeated use of the word “queer,” understood in the 1920s as odd or different, functions as a linguistic flag for the sexual deviance that circulates beneath the novel's surface. Drawing on Cheryl D. Hicks’s historical analysis of Black identities and expression, women’s sexuality in particular, and Alain Locke’s framing of Harlem as a site of self-determination, the essay situates Irene and Brian Redfield’s lavender marriage within the era’s contradictory impulses: creative freedom on one hand, social surveillance on the other. This marriage is read not as a companionate partnership but as a performative shield against the judgment inflicted upon openly queer individuals. While early twentieth-century literature rarely depicted explicit homosexuality, Passing achieves its queer critique through indirection: symbolism, silence, and narrative restraint. The novel thus explores the Harlem Renaissance’s “New Negro” as depicted by Locke by revealing that, for figures like Irene and Brian, genuine self-expression remained inaccessible. The act of passing, in Larsen’s hands, becomes dual—racial and sexual—and the novel itself becomes a complex artifact that insists upon the inseparability of racial authenticity and sexual truth. Passing does not merely include queer subtext; it is structured by it, and Larsen’s deliberate ambiguity is not evasion but critique.