Adulthood

Hughes worked at various odd jobs before gaining a white-collar job in 1925 as a personal assistant to the historian Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. As the work demands limited his time for writing, Hughes quit the position to work as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel.Some academics and biographers today believe that Hughes was homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems, Hughes's story "Blessed Assurance" deals with a father's anger over his son's effeminacy and "queerness". However, Rampersad denies Hughes's homosexuality in his biography, Rampersad concludes that Hughes was probably asexual and passive in his sexual relationships.Other scholars argue for Hughes's homosexuality: his love of black men is evidenced in a number of reported unpublished poems to an alleged black male lover.