Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  But though small, Essex was a handsome boy, with a symmetrical face marked by intense, searching eyes and an engulfing smile when he chose to bestow it. His soft, caressing voice could also, especially when speaking on serious matters, ring with passionate conviction. He began writing poetry at age fourteen, while still in high school: “After dinner I would wind up going back to my room and writing in my notebook. I didn’t realize I was writing poetry. I was just writing about the events and thoughts of my day.” But poetry was from the beginning his most congenial medium, though he would later try his hand at a novel, and some of his adult essays would profoundly influence his generation of black writers.

  I was fortunate enough when researching this book to discover a batch of some fifty of Essex’s unpublished early poems (mostly from 1974– 75, during his seventeenth and eighteenth years), which he bundled together under the rubric “Talking with a Friend . . .” The disarmingly casual title was aptly chosen, for though these first efforts have autobiographical value, Essex made scant claim for their literary merit and never included any of them in the chapbooks he began to publish in 1982 at age twenty-five. He even entitled the first poem in the batch “Act I”:

  like a baby realizing it has legs to walk with

  like a bird realizing its need to spread its wings and fly

  so in act I I have filled a need

  which in the beginning was only the need to

  let thoughts, ideas, and my feelings

  come forth, and speak

  the language of 17 years of living

  In another poem in the series, he spelled out why he’d felt the need this early to turn to verse:

  The essence of these poems

  is the me

  locked inside of me

  trying to express

  the turmoil

  sometimes felt within

  sometimes hard to express

  but always holding

  meaning

  In one of these poems, dated May 25, 1974, Essex begins to convey the “differentness” he felt from most other young men, and the value he placed on it:

  I cry sometimes

  knowing it won’t take nothing away from my blossoming

  manhood

  You cry don’t you

  or

  are you just another

  one of those

  uptight and totally in control

  of my emotions type of people

  who wouldn’t be able to cope

  with themselves

  if any emotion was shown . . .

  and sometimes

  I cry

  for you, too . . .

  As a teenager, Essex continued to make other cherished self-discoveries:

  Walk alone

  little boy

  never move with

  the maddening crowds

  Never forget

  where you came from

  because no one else

  ever will . . .

  Walk alone little boy

  tomorrow

  you’ll be a man

  In some of the later poems in the series, the maturing Essex reflects back with tender regret on certain aspects of his childhood:

  when I was a child, I walked in the woods

  on hot July afternoons,

  that were cool and dark,

  holding secrets,

  which sent slight chills up my spine,

  when I knew that I would never know

  of them completely.

  taking mother nature’s children,

  like the birds that never sang for me,

  and the turtles that always stayed in their shells,

  and frogs that croaked in disgust at my probing

  fingers,

  . . . and soft brown baby rabbits I had found

  died,

  because my hands and my love was not gentle enough.

  . . . crying I ran home to my mother

  whose hands were gentle enough love warm

  enough to calm my broken heart.

  I didn’t know they needed more then I could

  give them so that they could live.

  In a piece Essex entitled “A Woman Our Mother We Love You . . .” he expressed the lifelong devotion he felt for his mother, the family peacemaker, in lines amply, if awkwardly, expressive:

  And you know that whenever we’ve found the

  heat in the kitchen too hot, to handle

  we’ve come back into the living room

  where you are, so that you could help us

  sort out, the experience, feeling, or whatever

  it was that we confronted on life’s battlefield

  and with all of that,

  you also give us the encouragement to go back

  and try again

  Yet Essex’s deeply religious mother, Mantalene, would hardly have been pleased with the January 12, 1975, poem he wrote about church-going:

  and the preacher asks the smartly dressed

  HOLY ladies

  to pass the basket

  and give/pleas [sic] give

  if only a dime/but a dollar

  let your SOUL be cleansed

  for a dime????????????????

  Its for the church

  he takes ¾ of what they give

  and puts it in a saving account, in his name

  the name of the Lord

  who likes those who give

  so that others may receive . . .

  The hurt and disappointment that Essex experienced at the hands of his father is the likely subject of the poignant poem he dated February 23, 1974:

  You built my hopes up high

  knowing that you wouldn’t

  be at the bottom to catch them

  when they fell

  You promised you would be there

  whenever I needed you

  but you never came

  You promised me I wouldn’t be hurt by you

  but the pain is still here

  because

  you and your promises are gone

  The simmering anger that Essex felt for anyone—perhaps including his father—who dared to mock his dreams comes out strongly in the poem he entitled “Revenge,” dated January 21, 1975:

  Step on my dreams, and I’ll break your legs

  and feet into pieces which will never, ever

  fit together again,

  You will be crippled.

  call me names, and I will still your mind,

  Busting it in half with a brick,

  which has your name signed on it,

  it is there that the names were thought . . .

  By age twenty, encouraged by the prominent African American children’s writer Sharon Bell Mathis, Essex would start trying to get some of his poems published. Though little literary merit can be claimed for most of them, an occasional fragment provides some foretaste of the powerful poet he’d later become:

  The radio plays syncopated rhythms

  To soothe and relax

  Black bodies in the quiet of night

  that have met

  and come/together/apart

  from one another

  saying something to each other

  that words weren’t made for

  and these same

  syncopated rhythms

  raise the hand

  that will slap a face

  and crack, what could’ve been

  but now isn’t

  while she walks the streets

  syncopated rhythmically

  to do her thing

  with whoever is willing to/for a couple of sheets

  of green stuff

  moving her body to a beat

  that will feed the baby

  and pay the rent

  for an apartment

  which creaks too/to

  syncopated/sad rhythms

  and a baby breathes

  to the rhythms

  and cries syncope tears

  of want/inqui
et

  during a very Black night . . .

  If Essex began writing seriously at seventeen, his sexual explorations had begun some years earlier. By age fourteen, he’d had his first sexual encounter that went beyond the usual “messing around” among neighborhood youngsters. At a convenience store near his home, a white male clerk in his midforties named George had been whispering in his ear for weeks about how much he wanted to suck his dick, how good he was at it, how many others in the neighborhood had let him, and so on. Essex later recalled that he knew from the start that his answer would be yes, and finally he said it. Then the sucking led to fucking and soon Essex would regularly mount George early in the morning before the store opened or at George’s house after it closed—George’s mongrel dog watching the action nonchalantly. The sex between them went on for nearly two years, with Essex finally ending it out of fear that it was only a matter of time before they’d be caught.9

  In D.C., Essex attended Ballou Senior High School, just a few blocks from his home, and had a part-time job downtown as a file clerk. He was by then well aware of his sexual attraction to men but realized, “as a way of protecting myself from being identified as a faggot around the school,” that he needed always to have a girlfriend. “It would be my luck,” he’d later write, “to date girls who were ‘good,’ girls who were not going to experiment with sex beyond kissing and fondling, and even that was often only tolerated at a minimum if tolerated at all.”

  During his senior year in Ballou High School in 1975, a more resonant encounter took place when his journalism instructor assigned him to interview the local Episcopal minister of a church known for providing daily meals for the down-and-out. Essex called the church for an appointment, but the man who answered the phone told him that the minister was out. He then chatted pleasantly with Essex, asking him why he wanted to see the minister. Essex found the man’s voice, a cadenced, leathery baritone, enticing, and when he boldly suggested that Essex “come on up here and meet me,” a startled—and turned-on—Essex required little coaxing.10

  The voice on the phone turned out to be attached to a tall, broad-shouldered man in his late forties with salt-and-pepper hair. He’d once been a promising professional boxer, but an automobile accident had cut short his career. His jacket, Essex later wrote, “constrained obvious arm muscles and an expansive chest,” and “his hands were thick and strong.” The man, as it turned out, was a volunteer at the church in one of its community programs, and he gave Essex a courtly, unhurried tour.

  Perhaps too unhurried; like most seventeen-year-old boys, Essex had (in his words), “raging hormones and an embarrassing erection.” When the older man finally closed and locked a heavy wooden door in one of the unoccupied rooms and suddenly said, “Take down your pants . . . I want to suck your dick,” Essex eagerly complied. “Orgasm and high-spirited ecstasy” followed, and the two continued to see each other for nearly two years. Essex would borrow his mother’s royal blue Dodge sedan “to study at the library” and the two would rendezvous. And more than sex was involved, though that continued to be passionate.

  The older man turned out to be “the most well-read adult black male” Essex had known, other than for some of his teachers, and he had a “beautiful, stimulating” mind. In adulthood Essex credited his older friend’s counsel with diverting him from making some “foolish choices”—he would never, for example, feel the need “to strike cool poses on the corner and father numerous children to prove my manhood.” His older friend pointed him toward the only acceptance that matters: “acceptance of myself.” It was an uncommonly lucky coming-out for any day and age, but especially for that one.

  Following high school, Essex in 1975 enrolled at the University of Maryland. He was assigned to room with another black gay man, Wayson Jones—probably a deliberate racial slight since they were the only blacks on the entire floor of the dormitory and the room was designed for one person. Wayson came from a military family and, having grown up in a more integrated environment than Essex, recalls no noticeable friction with white students in the dorm—one of his good friends was in fact “a real hippie type.” In any case, Essex decided to leave the University of Maryland after one year—not because of endemic racism or because he was in any sort of academic trouble, but rather, as Wayson has put it, because he “needed to ‘reinvent’ himself.” Essex spent some time in Los Angeles in 1976 and then returned to D.C. and completed his degree at the University of the District of Columbia.

  During the year that they roomed together, Essex and Wayson “clicked,” bonding particularly around music—and smoking pot. Essex favored female jazz vocalists but was also into progressive jazz performers like Bennie Maupin and George Duke. Wayson leaned more toward rock—they both loved the groupies—and more dissonant jazz like that of John Coltrane. In general they (in Wayson’s words) had “a great time” together as roommates. Essex had a hot plate and after getting the munchies from smoking pot, they’d devour batch after batch of pancakes. They also shared a small TV set, their special favorites being Monty Python and Saturday Night Live. Essex showed Wayson some of his early writing, and though not a fan of poetry, Wayson to this day remembers the telling image in one of Essex’s poems: returning home in the evening to “count the brown pennies of this day.” Wayson, in turn, invited Essex to hear him play saxophone in a jam session and took to heart his opinion that Wayson held back too much when improvising. They were, as Wayson puts it, “very much in tune emotionally and spiritually.”

  Wayson was already “out” as a gay man, both sexually and politically, had already told his parents—and told Essex, too, the very first time they met. According to Wayson, Essex wasn’t at that point really open yet about being gay; he still dated girls and rarely talked about his private life. (Essex’s first public declaration of his homosexuality would come during a poetry reading at the library of Howard University in 1980.) Though Essex and Wayson tended to have separate friends, they did some occasional gay socializing together. Wayson took him to Pier 9, D.C.’s first “superdisco,” and at another time to a party—at which Essex was “visibly uncomfortable”—at the home of his former high school band director, Doug Hinkle, who’d been really helpful to Wayson when he was coming out during senior year in high school, and who went on to become a photographer for D.C.’s gay paper, the Washington Blade. Wayson belonged to the Maryland chapter of the Gay Student Alliance, and unlike Essex at that point was already “very much a gay activist,” even giving talks and holding Q and A sessions in front of university classes—a rare act of bravery at this relatively early stage of the gay rights movement. When Essex left the University of Maryland after his freshman year, he and Wayson stayed in touch and within a few years, after Essex’s return to D.C., reconnected as part of the city’s black artistic circle.

  By then Essex was fully out of the closet and eager to explore black gay life. The District’s gay history went back at least to the nineteenth-century annual drag balls and up to the ongoing cruising area in Lafayette Square across from the White House. But it wasn’t until the cultural revolution of the 1960s that segregated gay life slowly began to give way to interracial contact—a process still far from complete. Even when white gays and their bars didn’t adopt exclusionary policies—and many did—their frequent condescension, or worse, made black gays uncomfortable and angry.

  By the mid-1970s, an independent parallel movement by and for black gays was starting to form and coalesce in D.C. Concerned about the fact that “black gays were not getting a fair share of the political, social and economic advances of the gay community,” in the fall of 1976 a group called the Association of Black Gays formed and for a brief time published the newsletter Rafiki. Then, in 1978, the D.C. Coalition of Black Gays emerged—one of the first black gay organizations in the country—which subsequently became the still-active D.C. Coalition. It was determined to take legal action against bars that “carded”—the polite euphemism for denying admission to blacks—and it also i
ntended to expose the racism that characterized white-dominated gay organizations.

  The feminist movement in D.C. had also done little to encourage the participation of women of color, heterosexual or homosexual. As a result—expecting neither white women nor black men to address their specific issues—a Washington, D.C., chapter of the National Black Feminist Organization came into being at Howard University in 1974. That same year, Salsa Soul Sisters emerged, and then in 1980 a group of black lesbians formed Sapphire Sapphos; their primary sympathies lay not with the feminist movement but with their black gay brothers and with the struggle in general for black liberation. Some D.C. black lesbians may have read the white feminist journal Quest (founded in 1974 and including Charlotte Bunch and Rita Mae Brown among its guiding spirits) for its strong positions against oppression of any kind, and of apartheid in particular. As well, many African American lesbians embraced feminist issues of reproductive rights, day care, ERA, and equal opportunities in the workplace, while rejecting male definitions of what it meant to be a woman. Nonetheless, many black lesbians also believed—as did many black gay men—that racial solidarity took clear and necessary priority over gender oppression.

  Essex would later frame the issue this way: “I always tell people I can be gay in only a few cities in this country, but I’m Black everywhere I go. . . . That’s going to always be the case, at least within my lifetime. I don’t see any major changes happening in the consciousness of this country around issues of race.” In saying this, Essex wasn’t prescribing for others; it was up to each individual, he felt, to establish his or her priorities among the multiple strands that make up one’s “identity.” Even for himself, he acknowledged that varied strands made up his personhood—“it’s all hand-in-hand, it comes as one package. I can’t just be Black and then just be gay. I’m all of these things.” Further, he acknowledged that it would take him “a very long time to arrive at a love of myself that allows the integration to work. Each thing plays off of the other. Each part of me empowers me. So I can’t say, well my left hand is gay and my right hand is Black.”11

  Washington, D.C., in 1973 became the first large U.S. city officially to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation in housing, employment, and public accommodations. The catch, of course, was that black and Latino/a gay men and lesbians still remained subject to the prevailing racist mind-set among whites—and the prevailing homophobia among heterosexual people of color. It’s possible to argue—though the argument is far from conclusive—that within gay circles discrimination against blacks and Latinos was less pronounced in D.C. than within straight ones. During a three-day conference at the University of Houston to plan for the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, for example, the organizers set aside 25 percent of all leadership and policy positions for Third World delegates, and the black D.C. Coalition, led by Billy Jones, actively participated. The day before the march, the conference agenda included three panels on racial issues, and both Marion Barry and the well-known writer Audre Lorde spoke at the event itself. Judging by numbers alone—estimates vary but are generally upwards of 150,000 attendees—the march was counted a great success.