Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  Homosexuality was often accepted within the confines of a black family, or even within the black community as a whole (“everyone knew that the choir master at church was queer”)—but what was not widely accepted was for the individual in question to “go public.” It would have been highly atypical in the heterosexual black world to have urged a son or daughter to become active in openly fighting for the acceptance of gay people. The black gay essayist and poet Craig G. Harris, who died of AIDS in 1992 at age thirty-three, put it this way: “The strong tradition of the extended family holds a highly esteemed position for the bachelor uncle or spinster aunt. These are often the family members who, because they have lesser financial responsibilities, can assist in the rearing of their siblings’ offspring. Afro-American families relate well to homosexuality—as long as they can turn their backs on the issue. But often when the homosexual family member decides to be political, or obvious in other ways, the family becomes confused, frightened, or disgusted by the display.”6

  In his Essence article, Essex withheld any specific details about his private life and instead spoke generally of not having “found loving a man easy,” (while also saying that he didn’t feel loving a woman would be any easier). His Essence piece was also noteworthy for the sharpness of its attack on the gay rights movement as “racist and sexist.” It was a view common among black gays and lesbians. As Craig Harris put it: “The feelings of violation experienced by many gay white men when encountering heterosexist discrimination are largely due to an innate belief that, as white men, their civil liberties are a guaranteed birthright. This unconscious illusion of supremacy promotes racism and misogyny, rather than eliciting empathy for victims of discrimination based on race or sex.” This sense of exclusion from the white gay inner sanctum had led to a number of separate black political formations, ranging from the consciousness-raising groups sponsored by the Committee of Black Gay Men to Salsa Soul Sisters/Third World Women, to the 1985 National Coalition of Black Gays (NCBG), whose letterhead slogan read: “As proud of our gayness as we are of our Blackness.”

  Among those who served on NCBG’s board were Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Michelle Parkerson, and the Reverend Renee McCoy. Like most gay organizations at the time, NCBG was understaffed and underfunded. Yet it managed to convene a national gathering in St. Louis late in 1985. Both Joe Beam and Essex attended, though the convention was so hectic, they saw little of each other there. But both of them found the conference a pivotal experience. During the workshop on organizing, Joe was especially taken with Betty Powell’s view that black lesbians and gays “are the current, forward-moving crest of the Black liberation struggle.” He felt “more and more committed to that struggle each day,” and he recognized that it would be a long one; but “if Nelson Mandela can spend a quarter of a century in prison then certainly I can learn to work when I am weary, but free to move as I please.” For his part, Essex started negotiations with a D.C. club, the Brass Rail, to do a benefit performance for NCBG—and that wasn’t the sole extent of his involvement. As Renee McCoy has put it, “he provided significant support and guidance when we were building the Coalition.”

  The essential accuracy of the indictment of the white gay movement as indifferently sexist and racist is, in broad outline, inarguable. Yet Essex’s severe characterization of it “as an insincere human rights struggle” can be contested partially. In the 1970s and early 1980s the organized LGBT movement was small, fragmented, and largely middle-class and white. As someone involved in forming the National Gay Task Force and the Gay Academic Union of those years, I know that serious efforts were made to include women and people of color. These efforts were somewhat successful in regard to women but largely ineffective in regard to people of color. Obviously more, much more, outreach was needed before blacks and Hispanics could comfortably feel ownership in those organizations. Yet some effort is different from none.

  Essex’s indictment of the white gay movement and community was encompassing. “When I first came to the life,” he wrote, “I would go to these gay clubs here [D.C.], like the Lost & Found, and those white sissies would give me fever for not having thousands of pieces of I.D. before they’d let me in. I watched white queens sail through the door with barely a nod, and they weren’t asked for I.D. but I had to fish around in my pockets for numerous pieces. . . . Now, none of those white sissies sailing through the door would ever stop on my behalf or on the behalf of any other brother being hassled at the door and ask, ‘Why are you demanding I.D. of him, but not of me?’ Your only chance of avoiding those ugly scenes was to show up at the door with a white boy on your arm or in a racially mixed group. . . . I was humiliated constantly.” Yet he found that at the baths, “undressed and in my towel, white boys would chase me around and around the place, wanting to suck my dick, wanting me to fuck them, and basically being goddamn nuisances.”

  Essex was speaking for many black gay men (and women, for that matter), and his indictment was unquestionably on the mark, if perhaps too totalizing, too sweeping to acknowledge the effort, both pre-Stonewall and in the mid-1980s, of some white gays—though certainly nothing close to a majority—to confront their own racism and that of the organizations to which they belonged. The pioneering (and tiny) D.C. Mattachine had attempted to recruit members at Nob Hill, the popular African American gay bar, and even devoted one of its evening discussions to “How Can We Bring the Negro into the Homophile Movement?” Such efforts were undoubtedly minor, and the inability to enlist more than a very few blacks may well have been due to a lack of understanding that sexual orientation can often be concealed, but skin color only rarely—which made the black struggle, not the gay one, of necessity the primary emergency for most blacks.

  The most prominent gay organization in the immediate aftermath of the 1969 Stonewall riots had been the radical Gay Liberation Front (GLF). Its agenda was broader than gay rights; it wanted to fight against all forms of oppression and made overtures to both the Black Panthers and the Puerto Rican Young Lords. But the macho orientation of both groups militated against any combination of forces with “faggots”; only Huey Newton (so far as is known) responded sympathetically to the GLF initiative. One could also cite the fact that when Lost & Found opened in the fall of 1971 in D.C., the popular disco was immediately picketed by the newly formed and multiracial Committee for Open Gay Bars in protest over its racist and sexist carding policies. The well-known gay Regency Baths in D.C., which started in 1968 (and in 1985 was the first to close during the AIDS epidemic), had an entirely open membership policy. Similarly, the Black Panthers’ Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in 1970, held at the All Souls Unitarian Church in D.C., was an event staged with GLF’s strong support.

  Those instances can arguably be dismissed as the marginal residue of the radical decade of the 1960s. In New York City, after all, the hugely popular disco the Ice Palace, despite a long-term campaign against its carding policy in the early eighties, never capitulated to the protesters—and few whites ever withdrew their patronage. Similar failed campaigns against racist door policies were tried without success against a number of prominent New York City gay and lesbian bars from the 1970s through the 1990s. After the early seventies, the gay movement pretty much shed its radical origins and impulses and started on a trajectory that has veered ever closer to the nonradical goal of mainstream assimilationism. Yet at least at the fringe of the movement, white gay radicalism has persisted down to the present day. When Essex wrote his 1983 Essence piece, the organization Black and White Men Together did exist, as did the influential radical anti-racist publications Gay Community News, Conditions, and Fag Rag. But they were marginal to the mainstream gay movement. Essex’s allegiance, in any case, was clear-cut: his priorities understandably and overwhelmingly focused on the well-being of black gay people, not gays in general. Throughout his poetry the anger he felt about white bigotry often surfaced:

  I live in a town

  where pretense and bone structure
<
br />   prevail as credentials

  of status and beauty—

  a town bewitched

  by mirrors, horoscopes

  and corruption . . .

  (“Family Jewels: For Washington D.C.”)

  I could leave with no intention

  of coming home tonight,

  go crazy downtown and raise hell

  on a rooftop with my rifle.

  I could live for a brief moment

  on the six o’clock news,

  or masquerade another day

  through the corridors of commerce

  and American dreams.

  (“Cordon Negro”)

  In the country as a whole, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election on a wave of white popular support had seen a host of mounting ills for the working class as unionization declined, technology replaced workers, and corporations moved increasingly overseas—where the Reagan administration backed regimes, especially in Central America, notorious for their dictatorial brutality. Yet in regard to wars at home against poverty, racism, and AIDS, the federal government managed to remain passive and indifferent. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 made massive cuts in social services and wiped out most of the gains won against poverty initiated by Lyndon B. Johnson two decades earlier. As the number of AIDS cases aggressively mounted, topping three thousand by the end of 1983, Congress began to vote larger, though still not adequate, budgets for research and assistance—only to have the administration fail to spend all the funds allotted.

  The cities of San Francisco and New York suffered most. Washington, D.C., still had the comparatively low figure of eighty-nine cases, and the response there had been minimal. The gay STD clinic Whitman-Walker, in existence for a decade, was a comparative hub of activity, all but uniquely trying to do something. It had launched an Education Fund for AIDS, hired its first AIDS program director, and issued its first AIDS education pamphlet. Yet the candlelight march and memorial service that marked Gay Pride Day in D.C. on June 19, 1983, saw a turnout of fewer than a thousand people.

  Essex would later describe the black men who availed themselves of Whitman-Walker’s services as usually requiring “more than medication. . . . [They had] an almost common set of symptoms that blatantly spell out the oppressive conditions black males endure in American society. Some of the men coming into the clinic need job training, marketable skills, improvements in their reading comprehension, pills, if there were such, for self-esteem and confidence, and surely, they desperately need to know they are loved. . . . By the time they walk through the doors of the clinic . . . keeping their bodies alive is often in sharp contradiction to the suffering of their souls, the suffering they endure for simply being black and male regardless of sexuality. They need a healing requiring more than medicine, education, jobs, and T-cells.”

  The racial division in the D.C. gay community was further heightened when the organizers of an AIDS vigil chose an office space above Badlands, a Dupont Circle gay bar that discriminated against blacks. Only after pressure from the recently formed group Black and White Men Together was the office location changed. In the early years of the epidemic, the Whitman-Walker clinic, with limited financial support, built a variety of services for its clients. But over the years blacks would come to regard it less favorably, accusing it of essentially serving a white clientele. Several small minority AIDS agencies arose to fill the gap, including the Abundant Life Clinic run by the notoriously homophobic Nation of Islam. By 1993, more than 60 percent of D.C.’s AIDS cases would be among blacks, but the bulk of D.C.’s AIDS funding had continued to go to Whitman-Walker, with only 20 percent earmarked for minority agencies. The disparity in wealth and services between white and minority organizations was true across the country, meaning that communities of color were generally underserved—and rightfully resentful of the fact.7

  The political scientist Cathy Cohen has provided an unusually subtle analysis of the differences in how AIDS impacted white gay male and poor black communities. “In most communities of color,” she points out, “AIDS interacts with other crises, such as the lack of health care and education, homelessness, drug addiction, poverty, racism, sexism, and numerous other ills.” Some white gay men, Cohen fully acknowledges, have to deal with similar issues, perhaps poverty and lack of health care especially. Yet at the least one can say that such concerns are on the whole of greater magnitude in communities of color, just as (to quote Cohen) “the general resources afforded to each community for political struggles are also in no way equal.” This is not to say that African Americans are utterly powerless, but rather to emphasize that in the white world many more people of economic and political privilege exist capable of contributing individual resources to the AIDS struggle.

  This was true not only on the individual level, but also in regard to how governmental agencies—preeminently the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)—perceived the nature of the crisis. Put most simply, the CDC, at least initially, treated AIDS as a disease of gay white men, and, as counterpoint, minimized its impact on women, poor people, children, sex workers and their partners, and IV drug users (where, we now know, AIDS appeared at least as early as the 1970s). The poor and marginalized, to the extent they had access to medical treatment at all, had to rely—much like today—essentially on Medicaid mills and the emergency rooms of hospitals for their care. Until the women in ACT UP (founded in 1987), many of them lesbian, pressured the CDC to revise its definition of AIDS to include pelvic inflammatory disease and other markers, women were not officially classified as “having AIDS” and were thus denied access to federal disability benefits.

  For black gays in D.C., an artistic community had decidedly emerged, but no political organizations had taken deep enough root to serve as cohesive rallying points for dealing with the emerging epidemic. Sexual behavior and medical services alike continued to be the preserve of the individual. Besides, many blacks (even some who were gay) commonly dismissed AIDS in the early eighties as a white affliction—in parallel to the way the black church dismissed homosexuality itself, arguing (falsely) that it had been unknown in precolonial Africa. As a result, in the early years of the epidemic, the sole acknowledgments in the African American D.C. community of the new health threat were a forum at the African American bar Nob Hill and the September 1983 AIDS discussion held at the Clubhouse dance club, which was managed by Rainey Cheeks, who later found Us Helping Us.

  In 1984, Reginald G. Blaxton, a young ordained black pastor, became a special assistant for religious affairs to Washington’s mayor. Soon after Blaxton started work, Jim Graham, administrator of the Whitman-Walker clinic, approached him for help in identifying local black clergy who might join an advisory panel designed to stimulate the religious community’s involvement in the AIDS crisis. The idea was certainly appropriate, given that D.C. was the oldest majority-black city in the country, with no fewer than eight hundred congregations, and that it contained some of the black community’s most prestigious churches—including the National Cathedral of African Methodism and the Metropolitan AME Church. The Howard University School of Divinity also lay within the city limits, rivaled only by Atlanta University in the number and quality of black theological leaders it produced.

  It was already clear in 1984–85 that white church leaders would lead the howling pack in denouncing gay sinners who’d contracted AIDS. There was some expectation that the black church and black people in general, given their own history of suffering, would respond less venomously. In fact no black church person would ever match the Jerry Falwells of the land for sheer rhetorical viciousness. Considerable anecdotal evidence further suggests that many black churches (and families), however profound their homophobia, never “threw away” their gay members with comparable ease; for some a silent compact existed instead: the doors to church and home would remain open so long as the closet door remained shut.

  This comparatively softer edge may have reflected the black community’s awareness of the alarming fact that the
rate of infection among African Americans was much higher than their 12 percent of the population: of the roughly thirteen thousand Americans who had died from AIDS by the end of 1985, some 3,500 were African Americans. Yet formally, the black church in the early days of the epidemic was less forgiving than were black families. To Reginald Braxton, it had already become clear that the religious community’s response to those afflicted with AIDS was “a harsh public piety unmixed with compassion.” Braxton gave Jim Graham of the Whitman-Walker clinic the names of fifteen black clergymen in Washington who might join its advisory panel on AIDS. Fourteen of the fifteen refused any involvement to any degree with the work of the clinic. The one pastor who did agree to assist deserves noting: the Reverend J. Terry Wingate, pastor of the Purity Baptist Church in Northeast Washington.

  A few years later, when public health authorities were pushing for more AIDS education in schools, including making condoms available, the Reverend Willie Wilson, black pastor of Union Temple in D.C., publicly denounced the suggestion: “This policy teaches the wrong values in a society already crippled and dying from a lack of morals and values.” When D.C. officials suggested that condoms be made available in prisons, the Reverend D. Lee Owens, black pastor of the Greater Mount Zion Missionary Church, argued vehemently against the proposal: “Perhaps the fear of AIDS is just what is needed to scare these men straight.” White religious figures, of course, were no less—and arguably more—unforgiving in their attitudes.

  In reaction to the stark homophobia of the black church, Dr. James S. Tinney, the white Pentecostal church historian and theologian—who was himself gay and would die of AIDS in 1988—decided as early as 1982 to found Faith Temple in D.C., a predominantly black lesbian/gay institution. A few months earlier, another black gay church had been started in New York City but had soon lost its struggle to survive. Determined not to be dismissed as a mere cult, Faith Temple announced it “would not use the term ‘Christian’ loosely enough to include anything outside the essential, fundamental, orthodox beliefs that had identified most Christians through the ages.”8