Gentleman Jigger: A Novel of the Harlem Renaissance

Written between 1928 and 1933, this forthright roman à clef of the Harlem Renaissance is a more daring counterpart to Wallace Thurman’s 1932 satire Infants in the Spring, in which Nugent appears as the dilettantish bisexual painter Paul Arbian. His alter-ego here is the equally outré Stuartt—yes, with two t’s—an outspoken firebrand whose decadent Wildean aesthetic flies in the face of the dominant socially motivated ethos of “the New Negro.” A rebel’s rebel, Stuartt is equally unapologetic about passing as white and identifying as queer. Lengthy polemic dialogues, no doubt lifted from real life, vividly capture the cultural ferment and strife of the time. In the loose, melodramatic second half, Stuartt moves downtown to Greenwich Village, hustling rough trade and sleeping his way up through the ranks of gangsters until he lands in Chicago, the dual plaything of a mafia don and a lady socialite named Wayne. All but forgotten, the book was finally assembled from drafts and published in 2008, thanks to the efforts of Thomas Wirth, who provides an insightful introduction and afterword.