“Blessed Assurance” was first published and collected in Something in Common and Other Stories (1963). It is currently most readily available in Collected Works of Langston Hughes, vol. 15, The Short Stories (University of Missouri Press).

Black kids of my generation who showed even the slightest literary inclinations were very likely to be handed a collection of Langston Hughes's work. Because I was identified early on as one of those kids, I was familiar with Hughes's more frequently anthologized works, including “The Negro Speaks to Rivers” and “I, Too,” by the time I was seven years old. Two more decades would pass, though, before I found my way to Hughes's brilliant short story “Blessed Assurance.” When I encountered this funny, sad, and strange story as a young adult, I instantly fell in love with it.

Published in 1963, “Blessed Assurance” addresses race and the relationship of black Americans to white American society, like many of Hughes's poems and short stories. But “Blessed Assurance” is also the most directly and undeniably gay work Hughes published during his lifetime. From the point of view of John, a distraught father, Hughes candidly observes masculinity within the black community, within the black church, and within one particular family.

From that opening sentence, it is clear that Hughes is setting “Blessed Assurance” apart from his other work and from other stories of its time period that dealt with homosexuality. Hughes is not dropping hints or leaving it to the reader to guess the cause of John's distress. He dives right in.

John is a man struggling with the unwelcome realization that his son is gay. He personalizes his son's sexuality to the extent that he suspects that God Himself must surely be involved in the conspiracy to make John's life miserable. Later in the first paragraph, Hughes lets it be known, as he does repeatedly throughout the story, that there is far more to John than bitterness and homophobia. John refers to his son as “queer” in an era long before that term had lost its power to off end. Still he can't help but show the pride he takes in his son, referring to the boy as a “brilliant queer” and acknowledging that he has done extraordinarily well in school.