Though the two men continued to care deeply for each other, the rift led Essex to announce that he wouldn’t do the planned performance in Brooklyn—wouldn’t even call the theater to tell them so. Wayson placed the call instead, canceling the gig. But it made him feel humiliated and put out. It reminded him of the time he got busted when, at Essex’s request, he tried to score some pot for him in Meridian Hill (now Malcolm X) Park; Essex had never even offered sympathy to Wayson for the scrape he’d gotten him in—which led Wayson to tell Essex that he was “very full of himself” and “an arrogant bastard.” Cancellation of the Brooklyn gig led to “a major falling-out” between the two men that lasted for about a year: “We kind of had a little alienation thing going on there for a while,” is how Wayson later put it—“in fact, we had bookings for the two of us that we couldn’t stand to be around each other enough to fulfill. One of which, I think, was at the Kitchen in New York. So he did those with other people. . . . We were sort of walking on eggshells with each other at that point.”
But the two men did finally have what Essex called “a very positive airing out, a refueling of our focus.” Essex ended up feeling certain that Wayson “is truly a ‘brother’ to me and I only hope to be as much for him.” Reflecting today on their temporary estrangement, Wayson is honorably frank in acknowledging that it hadn’t helped their relationship that as Essex’s reputation as a poet continued to grow over time, “the instrumental music aspect of our collaboration became less significant.” It helped even less when Essex at one point suggested that Wayson tone down the volume of the music so that the poems could be more clearly heard.
The assertive, feisty side of Essex’s personality dated as far back as childhood. On one occasion, after being badly teased by some neighborhood kids, he went to the second floor of the Hemphill house, pulled down his pants, and through the window mooned the boys below, shouting that they could kiss his ass. He got a whipping but felt it was worth it. Essex was especially likely to flare up in anger when he perceived an assault on his dignity or on the integrity of his work. Meticulous and exacting about all aspects of how and where he presented his poetry, he did (as one acquaintance puts it) “butt heads” if details for a presentation were overlooked or sloppily organized.
Far more dangerously—for his own safety—Essex would fiercely react to any suggestion of racism on the part of authority figures. In D.C.’s Union Station, he was once stopped by a police officer while traveling to fulfill a public engagement—stopped simply because he was dressed in jeans, a down jacket, and a Raiders baseball cap—in other words, as Essex put it, “in the standard attire of what we will call the ‘butch queen’ look, the home-boy look, the look of the ghetto.” He boldly, adamantly refused to cooperate with the officer or to allow himself to be searched for drugs or weapons. He told the officer to search the white women and men in the station first, and loudly accused him of harassment. When a white man in a suit handed Essex his business card, suggesting he would testify for him in court, the officer nervously relented and let Essex go. It was a narrow, and highly atypical, escape for a black gay man. “You don’t mess with Essex,” became a byword.
Despite his deserved reputation for feistiness, Essex, as Wayson has put it, “had a very warm, gentle, and nurturing side.” As an example, he offers Essex’s treatment of his younger brother, Warren (called “Dimp”—for his dimples). Though they’d had considerable conflict with each other while growing up, Essex did all he could to encourage Dimp’s ambition to become a singer, and asked Wayson to work with him. Wayson tried but found Dimp’s ambition greater than his talent—and somehow found a diplomatic way of conveying that to both brothers. Wayson was touched at Essex’s effort to help his brother. To him it was emblematic of his friend’s “boyish, sweet side,” the side he felt “that many people probably never saw.”
Their relationship restored, the two men continued to work together for several more years, often joined by Michelle. Probably the most impressive of their collaborative efforts would come in 1987, when Gerry Givnish, head of the prestigious Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, invited the three to present a collage of performed poems and stories, which they called Voicescapes. Together they created their own lighting and stage design, with (in Wayson’s words) a minimalist “postapocalyptic feel” (days were spent painting huge chunks of Styrofoam orange, leading Michelle to swear off the color forever). The piece opened with a slide montage of people telling their own stories in 30-second slide/poems put together by Sharon Farmer, Leigh Mosley, and Ron Simmons. Other poems with different themes followed, many of them performed “in a ripple-style syncopation or in unison as a recitation . . . with music providing an effective poetic transition.” Voicescapes drew considerable praise, the reviewer in High Performance describing the evening as “highly engrossing . . . dramatic performances par excellence and a rhythmic choreography of movement, sight and sound.” In 1989 Voicescapes would be successfully repeated, once again at the Painted Bride.
During this same period, and sparked by poet and playwright Garth Tate, six black male poets formed the group Station to Station. It became a wonderful incubator for Essex and others to try out different styles for reading poetry aloud. Among other efforts, Essex utilized Wayson’s music to add live synthesized sound to some of the poems he performed in public. Yet after a time, a certain amount of friction developed and Essex dropped out of Station to Station. Chris Prince, another member and one of Essex’s friends, ascribes the friction to Essex’s demand that the group recite more gay-themed poetry. Several members weren’t gay and several others weren’t “out.” Chris ascribes Essex’s insistence to his “thick-headed, fierce” side; he could, like his mother, Mantalene, become stubbornly uncompromising when convinced, rightly or wrongly, that some important principle was at stake. As Ron Simmons, another close friend of his, has put it, “sometimes Essex was difficult to get along with.”
Absorbed though they were in honing their artistic abilities, Essex and his friends did manage to spare time and energy for political work. The D.C. Coalition of Black Gays and Lesbians had transformed itself into the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, and according to Renee McCoy, herself active in the Coalition, Essex “provided significant support and guidance when we were building” the group. Though he wasn’t temperamentally well suited to the give-and-take of organizational work, he and Michelle as early as 1983 did show up for an ad hoc meeting to plan for a black arts component to D.C.’s annual gay pride celebration. On that occasion, a variety of artists and writers each performed a kind of “audition,” and Jim Marks (who thinks he “may have been covering the meeting for the Blade”), remembers listening “to the first few poets thinking that their work consisted primarily of hackneyed ‘he done me wrong’ self-involved efforts.” Then it was Essex’s turn. He began by reading a brief obituary from the Washington Blade for a murdered street transvestite/prostitute, and then performed the dramatic monologue he’d written in her voice. Recalling the event, Jim says, “it still raises the hair on my neck.” Michelle read as well, and Jim felt that the two “were clearly head and shoulders above the other poets there.” Unfortunately, there was no follow-up meeting—and apparently no arts component to the gay pride march.
In regard to both the National Coalition of Black Gays and Lesbians and the meeting about the gay pride celebration, Michelle has made the important point that “there wasn’t so much of that social separation, that hard-core, entrenched kind of division between lesbians and gay men” in D.C.’s black community as was found among white gay activists during this period. Additionally, during the 1980s there was a kind of cooperative New York–D.C. connection among artists, performers, and writers. Isaac Jackson, for instance, the New York City experimental videographer—who was also managing editor of the Blackheart collective that included writers David Frechette, Assotto Saint, and Colin Robinson—helped Michelle out with the research for her film Stormé (about Stormé DeLarverie, the on
ly female member of Harlem’s legendary drag “Jewel Box Review”). “Not that women didn’t have their own spaces and the brothers didn’t have theirs,” Michelle says, “but we were more or less together.” Occasionally, allied white people also became involved—like Mary Farmer, who ran Lammas Books, or Deacon Maccubbin, who would offer his Lambda Rising bookstore as a place to have book signings.
Michelle sums up the mounting fervor and excitement in black gay circles: “We were beginning to put flesh on the bones of our gay identities . . . our black gay identities . . . and seeing those as primary voices from which we wrote, spoke, and were politicized.”
2
Reading the Signs
Having made some friends and begun psychotherapy, and in general feeling far more settled in New York than earlier, Mike decided to take the initiative and try to set things right with his parents. He wrote them at length and with the kind of blind candor that he characteristically admired in others and aimed for in his own close relationships: “My primary purpose is to communicate. To clean up our relationship.” He made it clear at the top that he had no intention of “trying to prove worthy” of their love. He already had his mother’s—that much he knew—and it was to his father that he mostly addressed his complaints. Clifford, his son felt, was by nature a loner, reluctant to express affection. Mike wanted more from him. He wanted his father to talk openly—“talk to me about your joys; your terrors; your plans for a happy future” (Clifford was in the throes of thinking about retirement). Above all, he wanted a more extended dialogue with both his parents about the pivotal fact of his being gay.1
Mike did his best to approach the subject with a straightforward sharing of his own feelings. He’d been hurt, he made clear, that when his parents recently visited him in New York and Mike had tried to broach the topic, his father had pointedly said that he did not want to discuss it, nor—when Mike suggested a book or two on the subject—did he wish to read about it. But Mike, ever persistent, wanted to share with his parents the exhilarating joy he’d felt during the National Gay March on Washington, the sense that change was happening “at a mind-boggling pace. The eighties,” Mike presciently predicted, “would be the out decade”—it would, but for reasons Mike could never have imagined.
He wanted his parents to know, too, that he was about to quit his job at Bradford “and risk all to try to make a go of it as a singer.” He’d saved up enough money to buy a piano and some sound equipment for his new apartment on Jones Street in the West Village, had made a few tapes that had impressed people, and had already hooked up with a musical director who believed in him.
In response, Clifford made an effort to meet Mike’s entreaty that he be more expressive and honest about his feelings. He admitted flat out that he’d felt “anxiety, anger, hurt, and disappointment” when Mike revealed his “choice of lifestyle.” And Clifford used the word “choice” deliberately: “You consciously and freely chose your lifestyle with the full realization and knowledge that the relationship of family and most friends would be adversely affected” and, moreover, that “conventional religious practices” would be “precluded” and “any service toward your nation would be severely limited.”
And that was for starters. Clifford felt that no conflict need arise when the family gathered, since he felt it “unlikely we will spend large blocks of time together.” When they did see each other, furthermore, he didn’t feel that it was “asking for the moon” to expect Mike to “play it straight.” If Mike felt the effort would be too “draining,” then the solution Clifford suggested was to “minimize contact. . . . I shall continue to try to prove ‘worthy’ of your love; if you do not wish to reciprocate, then do not.” He ended with his version of an upbeat note: he thought Mike talented and intelligent but he, Clifford, wasn’t “comfortable with the public, physical expression of love.”
Mike responded with a generosity bordering on sainthood. “I was overcome with emotion,” he wrote back. He felt that his father had given him exactly what he’d asked for: “honesty and directness”—two qualities that Mike held most dear. “For the first time,” he went on, you “articulated your feelings for me.” That, Mike felt, was grounds for hope about their future relationship. However—Mike was about to demonstrate just as much steel as Clifford—there could be no question about trying to act “straight.” To do so would be to deny who he was and, further, to corroborate the common view that there was something wrong with being gay—“as if there is something to admit—something hidden and dark and secretive and dirty.”
He asked his father to imagine “a society where [his own] love was viewed as a ‘strange and unnatural act,’ or a ‘crime against nature.’ . . . Since you don’t know what ‘caused’ your sexual direction, I suggest you stop flailing about trying to figure out what ‘caused’ mine. . . . Quite frankly, I just like to think I was lucky. . . . gay people are clued in at an early age to the duplicity in all things . . . [and] have a unique perspective that make us particularly adept at art.” Mike wasn’t merely defending his gayness as normal, he was suggesting that it might well be superior—politically, intuitively, and aesthetically. Overstatement was a common ingredient in the early rhetoric of gay liberation, a trope Mike indulged in with glee, viewing it as necessary compensation for the disparagement of gay lives that had long been common currency. After the extended reign and deep internalization of homophobic self-hatred, affirmation for Mike and others surfaced in the form of strenuous counterclaims. Hyperbole was a strategy for liberation, not itself liberation.
Joe Sonnabend wasn’t the only doctor in the early 1980s puzzling over some of his patients’ unusual symptoms. Alvin Friedman-Kien, a virologist at New York University Medical Center, was so surprised when the biopsies from two of his gay male patients’ “bruises” came back from the lab with the diagnosis of Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) that he asked some of his colleagues if they’d seen anything comparable. Within a few weeks he learned of twenty such cases. A call to a San Francisco colleague, Marcus Conant, brought the total to twenty-six. In Los Angeles several doctors reported a slew of puzzling symptoms: diarrhea and “wasting,” chronic fevers, thrush, swollen lymph nodes, and a decline in CD4 cells. Something was clearly in the wind, something awful. But not everyone was alarmed. One member of the gay doctors’ organization Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights asserted that peculiar symptomatologies appeared more often than people realized—and just as quickly disappeared. Jim Curran of the CDC also sounded an optimistic note, and New York City’s most widely read gay newspaper, New York Native, initially published a piece largely dismissive of the earlier alarmist Morbidity and Mortality reports.2
One San Francisco physician suspected the culprit was cytomegalovirus (CMV), a herpes virus that can produce disease in those with impaired immune function. Joe Sonnabend, on his own, had also suspected CMV and theorized that those of his patients—like Mike—with a repetitive history of STDs had overloaded and compromised their immune systems, thereby allowing the virus to take hold. Sonnabend saw a certain consistency in the personal histories of all his patients who came in with symptoms of anal gonorrhea, herpes, CMV, fissures, and warts—all were self-described “bottoms” (their primary sexual pleasure was getting fucked), and all showed signs of immune deficiency. One out of three gay men were shedding CMV in their sperm and urine—as opposed to one out of twenty heterosexual men—and CMV was known to be immunosuppressive. So said not merely Sonnabend, but in the early years of the epidemic, the most respected scientific journals, including the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Sonnabend felt certain that it was going to take years to sort out the complex symptomologies and causative factors. He also felt early on that some people might have a certain degree of genetic protection against immunological assaults. One early finding that suggested genetic variables was that those gay men with tissue type HLA-DR3 were more prone to get Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), and those wit
h tissue type HLA-DR5 were more likely to develop KS. Given all the variables, it seemed to follow that there would never be one formula, one explanation, for charting the progression of the mysterious new disease. Sonnabend also insisted early on—and this gave Mike a great deal of hope—that a decline in the immune system’s T4 cells was not tantamount to an inexorable death sentence (though it would be a number of years before the importance of a high level of T8 suppressor cells would be recognized as essential to warding off infections).
One day when Mike was in Sonnabend’s office, legs in the stirrups so Joe could check for anal warts, his assistant came in to tell him that he had a call from a scientist in Japan. Mike was impressed and dutifully waited for Joe to come back. And waited. He was used to Joe’s delays but not when his legs were up in the air. Finally pulling on his pants, Mike started to wander around the office. When he bent over the typewriter, he saw the final page of an article in progress that Joe had been working on—a “multifactorial model” to explain the bizarre and mounting number of gay men who were falling ill. At least two other infectious disease researchers were tentatively suggesting that a bombardment of sexually transmitted infections might be responsible for the drastic weakening of the body’s immunodefensive capabilities.3
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