negrophilic

— These photographs, in social and historical conjunction with the black celebrity photos, as well as with much of the literature Van Vechten himself wrote prior to 1932, exemplify an attempt to satisfy and to resolve a conflicted need to legitimate his negrophilic sympathies publicly and to satisfy his homoerotic desires privately, while laying claim to an "enlightened" engagement in contemporary notions of the primitive and, therefore, in the modern.