“Alain Locke was best known for his espousal and fathering of the ‘New Negro Movement,’” as Eugene C. Holmes puts it in his tribute to the famous Howard professor. Since not only Holmes but also other prominent historians of the era perpetuate the image of Locke as a parental figure, his relation to the Negro Renaissance encourages an examination that focuses on gender and sexuality in his rhetoric. A strong tendency to conceptualize the patronage politics of the movement as a procreative filial relationship and more particularly midwifery is pointed out by Ross, who claims that “a crucial figure of blood filiation emerges in the debate over who ‘midwifed’ the renaissance, with Carl Van Vechten, Alain Locke, Charles S. Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Jessie Fauset (the lone female) vying for this honor in the scholarship.” Although Ross admits that it is Locke who rhetorically manages to assume the midwife position most successfully, his analysis focuses mostly on the pathological relation between “the black male as midwife and the white woman as godmother of black renaissance talent.” My reading of Locke's self-fashioning also explores his procreative tropes, and it unreservedly supports Ross's claim about the significance of sexual politics and non-normative sexualities in the rhetoric of the New Negro Renaissance. Yet, since my main focus is Locke's textual representations of his relations with black artists rather than with white patrons, my conclusions are less pessimistic than Ross's claim that the respectable filial images of white patronage suppress its emasculating effect on black beneficiaries and the anxiety that it is “an intensely eroticized affair” which prostitutes black talent.