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Amos Lassen wrote on 02/20/2011:

“Looking for Langston”
Poetry on Film
Amos Lassen
“Looking for Langston” is a black and white fantasy. It recreates the men of Harlem during the Renaissance using archival photographs and footage which undercut a story. While a wake is going on, the mourners gather around a coffin. Downstairs is a bar which is quite elegant where men, dressed in tuxedoes, talk and dance. One of the men is dreaming and in his mind he meets Beauty who rejects him. He finds that when he awakes, Beauty is there beside him. It is his story and his visits to clubs that make up the film. As we watch him, we hear voices reading the poetry and essays of Langston Hughes. What is unique about “Looking for Langston” is that we see the freedom of Black men in Harlem in the 1920’s. (The se of the word “Black” is intentional as it represents the period of the movie).
This is an exploration of Langston Hughes’s sexuality. Issac Julien, the director, creates a space of queer liberation around a literary icon. He forces the viewer to think about the period and he gives us a profoundly beautiful and intellectual film. Here is a beautiful film to watch that will also make you think. It parades images of gay Black men across the screen and shows us the world that they created—so much like and so much unlike our world.

Infant of the Spring wrote on 03/08/2006:

Granted, this film does not follow any line of tradtional storytelling. But, this is okay. What makes this movie so unique from its counterparts of the past is that LOOKING FOR LANGSTON was the first movie to show black men actually loving one another, a scenario still lacking in much of the gay cinema of today where only now are black gay film writers and directors beginning to tell their stories and reclaim the images of themselves. Beyond praising the somewhat exploitative images of black men by Mapplethorpe, the images of the legendary Cotton Club in Harlem which actually prohibited black patronage, you have Juilen making an effort to reclaim black gay history from a segment of the black community who wants to ignore and deny the contributions of black gay men. Hughes is used as a kind of metaphor in the film for black gay identity. Julien is showing that one black gay man is able to love and desire another black gay man hence the importance of Langston Hughes who preferred both sexually and emotionally other black men like himself. Scholars have already noted that Hughes employed veiled coded references in many of his poems similar in manner to Walt Whitman to express same gender desire. Unlike the openly gay Richard Bruce Nugent whose poetry is used in the film, quite ironically since Nugent's expressed desire was for white men in his life and work (shown vividly in the Rodney Evans film, BROTHER TO BROTHER), Hughes was forced to pass as straight or risk being alienated from the black community he loved so much and devoted so much of his life and work towards in the gain for civil rights. Nugent was a rare exception in being an open black gay men until James Baldwin came along years later after the Harlem Renaissance. LOOKING FOR LANGSTON also pays a minor homage to Nugent and Baldwin.

Hughes was foremost a "race man" , black and proud who sometimes put himself in danger to help his people. Langston Hughes was also a black gay man who contrary to images of many black gay men in the mainstream gay media today, chose to want, desire, and love other black gay men. On this latter fact alone rest the importance of LOOKING FOR LANGSTON being ahead of its time for challenging the false assumption that black gay men cannot express love toward one another. This film is of important historical significance to the black gay community and the gay community in genral.