Whereas the first part of the book explored the writings of Alain Locke, a mentor of young black artists, the second focuses on a representative of the mentored generation: Wallace Thurman. It examines his embrace of diverse gender and sexuality constructions and their interrelatedness with race and class representations. Thurman's portrayal of the Harlem community and black arts strikingly differs from Locke's vision of the Renaissance. Instead of brave avant-garde, noble mentors, and spiritual comrades, this part will explore much more outrageous figures such as dandies, sweetbacks, and gangsters.

Analogous to Locke, Thurman was recognized as a key participant of the New Negro Renaissance by its participants at the time as well as the literary histories of the movement. Since constructions of gender and sexuality are the main focus of this study, what also makes the juxtaposition of Thurman and Locke interesting is that both made efforts to express non-normative desire in their writings. As Granville Ganter argues, “Thurman's sexual conduct was…queer in the sense that he didn't operate by the norms of strictly homosexual or heterosexual culture. Whether Thurman was hetero or homosexual is difficult to say. He was, however, indisputably bisexual.” Thurman did not belong to Locke's circle of male friends and did not participate in their homoerotic idiolect. As Ganter convincingly claims, Thurman's constructions and accounts of sexuality cannot be neatly categorized within present-day discourses of homosexuality, which is one of the reasons why he has not attracted much critical attention from contemporary scholars of gay studies in their rewritings of literary history.