Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  A year later, Essex was still reporting to Barbara Smith that his health was “good.” It was typical of him to provide no further details: he wasn’t a complainer and would rarely if ever elaborate about whatever symptoms he may have been suffering. He did tell Barbara that during the year he’d been hospitalized while in Chicago, but rather than explaining why, he wrote instead about his battle with Medicaid for denying him any financial assistance because he was a visitor from out of state. Essex’s lifelong motto—and the way in which he closed nearly every letter he wrote—was to “take care of your blessings.” Obversely, one did not itemize or dwell on disabilities and distress.

  On November 7, 1991, Earvin (“Magic”) Johnson announced his retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team because he’d tested HIV-positive. To forestall any speculation that he’d contracted the disease through drug use or homosexual contact, Johnson appeared the following night on the Arsenio Hall Show and declared “I’m far from being homosexual. You know that. Everybody else who’s close to me understands that.” The reassurance produced wild cheering from the studio audience. Just in case “far from” left room for interpretation, Johnson removed the ambiguity a week later in Sports Illustrated: “I have never had a homosexual encounter. Never.” In all likelihood, he speculated, he’d contracted the virus before his marriage when, as a freewheeling star/stud, he’d “truly lived the bachelor’s life,” doing his best “to accommodate as many women as I could—most of them through unprotected sex.”8

  “Accommodate” made it sound as if Johnson had had no say in the matter, that he was the passive plaything of female lust. It had been brave of him to acknowledge explicitly his HIV status, but the gay community was less than enamored with his commentary about it. As Randy Boyd, a young African American writer, put it in the publication Frontiers: “To the world, Magic Johnson is one of the innocent victims, like babies. . . . From Rome, George Bush called him a hero. . . . Remember—he [Magic] didn’t get it the wrong way; it was some dirty woman’s fault, just like Eve.”

  In a letter to Frontiers praising Boyd’s piece, Mike Callen reminded everyone that although the government lists “some 4,000 American men . . . as having gotten AIDS from sex with an HIV-infected woman,” the facts were a bit more complicated. Two thousand of the four thousand were Haitian men who’d simply been dumped into the heterosexual category. And who were the remaining two thousand? One widespread assumption was that they’d gotten the disease from prostitutes. But in New York City, the epicenter of the epidemic, where many female prostitutes work to support their drug habits, the city’s AIDS surveillance unit listed exactly six men as having gotten AIDS from commercial sex with a woman (the figure had been eight, but two were discovered to have lied). The point was that the sexual transmission of HIV to men from women was rare.

  Mike praised Magic Johnson for his courage, and had little doubt that his revelation “will have a major, positive impact on America’s response to AIDS, particularly in the black and teenage communities.” There was indeed a flood of media coverage following Magic’s announcement, though his recommendation of abstinence probably had little effect on horny teenagers, and though the media coverage of Magic continued largely to ignore the disproportionate number of cases among black gay men. The limited media coverage of AIDS in black or Latin communities continued to focus on its “innocent victims”—women and children—while repeatedly publishing stories about the threat of AIDS spreading to the general population.

  Marlon Riggs was more generous toward Johnson than Essex, calling his efforts to educate about AIDS “heroic.” But the following year, Marlon Riggs and Essex did see eye to eye about the reluctant disclosure by the tennis star Arthur Ashe of his own HIV-positive status—the result, he claimed, of a tainted blood transfusion when he’d had heart surgery. Ashe had kept quiet about his status until USA Today published a story about his gaunt appearance and rumored health, which forced Ashe’s hand. Unlike Johnson, Ashe deteriorated quickly—he died in early February 1993—but in the year left to him he did do much to call attention to the disease. Still, as Riggs put it, “many people remain indifferent to, or even contemptuous of, black gay men with AIDS. . . . To the degree that one feels sympathy at all, [it] is extended only to people like Magic or Arthur Ashe who got it ‘innocently.’ That is, not through homosexual sex or IV drug use.”9

  Marlon and Essex also shared the same judgment on the kind of black representation that mainstream TV featured (when it treated the subject at all). Marlon’s new film, Color Adjustment, which aired in June 1992 as one of the POV series, contained a sharp critique of the hugely popular miniseries about African American history, Roots. He jolted “liberal” whites with the accusation that Roots actually minimized the evils of slavery while promulgating the myth that “traditional values were all it took . . . to triumph in America”—though Marlon did acknowledge that Roots was “a powerful breakthrough against the historic denial of slavery in American popular culture.”

  Essex also agreed with Marlon’s negative judgment of the wildly successful The Cosby Show. Yes, Marlon argued, Bill Cosby’s show was preferable to previous sitcoms about black people, just as, in the evolutionary hierarchy, Good Times was better than its predecessor Julia, which in turn was preferable to Amos ’n’ Andy. The Cosby Show did (mostly) avoid “slapstick, buffoonish, eye-rolling, insulting humor,” but at the same time it was wholly apolitical. It insultingly avoided most of the issues that afflicted most black families, opting instead for a format that “would be acceptable to the myths of the majority . . . this family could be looked at as, in many ways, no different from any other ethnic immigrant group that had finally reached the pinnacle of success in American society through hard work, family values, integrity, discipline, education.” In other words, The Cosby Show advanced the pernicious myth that no racial barriers existed to black advancement that wouldn’t yield to the traditional virtue of putting one’s nose to the grindstone.

  Marlon and Essex continued to work together on projects that revealed rather than erased additional dimensions of black life—and especially black gay male life. The first Riggs film to follow immediately on Color Adjustment was Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, a thirty-eight-minute profile of five HIV-positive black men, which premiered in 1992 at the New Festival, New York City’s annual showcase of gay film and video. Riggs then turned to work on Black Is, Black Ain’t a feature-length documentary about competing versions of what was considered within the black world itself an acceptably “authentic” identity.

  Essex worked along steadily with Marlon, but most of his attention was centered on gathering together a collection of his own writing. It appeared, under the title Ceremonies, in 1992. To handle its publication, Essex turned to the agent Frances Goldin, who was a housing activist and also represented a considerable number of authors with left-wing politics (I’d been one of them for a long time and in fact recommended her to Essex). Frances did her usual devoted, obstinate job for him, writing him long letters commenting on his work and sending it out to those publishing houses most likely to be receptive. She and Essex grew fond of each other and forged a bond of genuine trust.

  Ceremonies was a selected collection of Essex’s poetry to date, including a number from his early chapbooks Earth Life (1985) and Conditions (1986), and containing as well some half dozen of his short essays. Thematically the collection centered on his life as a black gay man, belittled or condemned by the straight black world (even as he shared its racial indignities) and ignored or patronized by the white gay world. His voice throughout was anguished and angry in equal parts, intensely proud and independent while forlornly in search of sustained connection. He pulled no punches in either his essays or his poetry, bluntly describing his lust and voicing his deep-seated contempt toward those who would censor him.10

  In his long, blistering poem “Heavy Breathing,” he asks an unnamed antagonist:

  And you want me to sing

  “We Shall Over
come”?

  Do you daddy daddy

  do you want me to coo

  for your approval?

  Do you want me

  to squeeze my lips together

  and suck you in?

  Will I be a “brother” then?

  Rejected by black men who only want to fuck blondes, he masturbates:

  Occasionally I long

  to fuck a dead man

  I never slept with.

  I pump up my temperature

  imagining his touch

  as I stroke my wishbone,

  wanting to raise him up alive,

  wanting my fallen seed

  to produce him full-grown

  and breathing heavy

  when it shoots

  across my chest;

  wanting him upon me,

  alive and aggressive,

  intent on his sweet buggery

  even if my eyes do

  lack a trace of blue.

  He finds the human landscape bleak and ominous; disenchantment haunts his imagination:

  I plunder every bit of love

  in my possession.

  I am looking for an answer

  to drugs and corruption.

  I enter the diminishing

  circumstance of prayer.

  Inside a homemade Baptist church

  perched on the edge

  of the voodoo ghetto,

  the murmurs of believers

  rise and fall, exhaled

  from a single spotted lung.

  The congregation sings

  to an out-of-tune piano

  while death is rioting,

  splashing blood about

  like gasoline.

  Most of the essays in Ceremonies had appeared elsewhere. In them, Essex spoke as a man caught and torn between the homophobia of the black world and the racism of the white gay one. In “Does Your Mama Know About Me?” he summarized the post-Stonewall white gay community of the 1980s as “not seriously concerned with the existence of Black gay men except as sexual objects. In media and art the Black male was given little representation except as a big, Black dick”—as revealed most strikingly, as he’d earlier argued, in the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.

  “Coming out of the closet to confront sexual oppression,” Essex wrote, “has not necessarily given white males the motivation or insight to transcend their racist conditioning. This failure (or reluctance) to transcend,” he continued, “is costing the gay and lesbian community the opportunity to become a powerful force for creating real social changes that reach beyond issues of sexuality.” In 1992, this last comment was prescient. Essex’s analysis and complaint falls on still more fertile ground in 2014, particularly among younger gays who join older left-wingers in deploring the mainstream assimilationism of the contemporary gay movement.

  Though more comfortable in the black world than in the gay one, Essex continued to disparage “the middle-class aspirations of a people trying hard to forget the shame and cruelties of slavery and ghettos.” His poem “American Wedding” seems designed to mock the traditional rituals of marriage:

  In America,

  I place my ring

  On your cock

  Where it belongs . . .

  And in his brief essay “Loyalty,” he deplores, “through denials and abbreviated histories riddled with omissions”—he had Langston Hughes, among others, in mind—“the middle class sets about whitewashing and fixing up the race to impress each other and the racists who don’t give a damn . . . I can’t become a whole man simply on what is fed to me: watered-down versions of Black life in America. I need the ass-splitting truth to be told, so I will have something pure to emulate, a reason to remain loyal.” This was the same indictment Essex had leveled at the white gay community: don’t distort your own culture in the attempt to win acceptance and appease through assimilation.

  Ceremonies reached the gay bestseller lists—and won the National Library Association’s New Authors in Poetry Award—but was largely ignored by both white and black mainstream media outlets. The reviews and interviews carried in the gay press were always appreciative, sometimes glowing. Despite Essex’s warranted distrust of the white gay movement, it did have a left-wing cohort, and one of its reviewers characterized Ceremonies as “harsh, stark, and unyieldingly honest.” Another smartly caught the book’s tone: it’s “marked by an acuity of insight and an ironic, often sarcastic, exposing of the bigotry, hypocrisy and ignorance that plague black gays.” Alternatively, the collection was characterized as “replete with battle cries, wounded warriors, and soldiers who will not die. The inner struggle with self-identity and acceptance is turned outward and made public.” The only complaint I found was in a review that preferred Essex’s poetry to his prose, finding “too much venom” in the latter and complaining that “his dogmatism does not invite intellectual elasticity.” The reviewer used Essex’s attack on Mapplethorpe as a case in point, claiming that it failed to consider the possibility—remote, in my view—that his photographs can be read as critical of the distorted view of black men that they simultaneously display.11

  In one of the interviews Essex did after Ceremonies came out, he responded to the question “How is your health?” with the circumspect “It’s pretty good. I’ve had mild disturbances, but I’ve been fortunate so far, and that is the qualifier: so far.” He proved as much by accepting most of the invitations that now came his way, traveling widely to read and speak. Over the next eighteen months, he appeared at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, UCLA, the Folger Library, and the National Black Arts Festival (the first openly gay writer invited to read from his work). He also began to get a number of awards. Brother to Brother had already received the Lambda Literary Award for the best gay men’s anthology, and now additional prizes began to arrive for Ceremonies, including the American Library Association’s Gay and Lesbian Literary Award and a Pew Charitable Trust Fellowship in the Arts.

  With so much encouragement, Essex decided to try his hand at writing a novel. His agent, Frances Goldin, “adored” him, and when Essex was in New York she’d put him up in her own apartment and cook for him. On one such visit he told her an anecdote about his mother: During a sermon in her fundamentalist church, the minister had railed on and on against homosexuality. Finally Mantalene Hemphill stood up in the middle of the congregation and angrily said, “ ‘You’re talking about my son! And if you don’t stop, I’m never coming back to this church!’ ” And with that, she’d stormed out.

  The episode is confirmed and amplified in the manuscript of Essex’s novel in progress, “Standing in the Gap,” which I recently discovered in the Frances Goldin Agency’s files. The section is long but, because it tells us a great deal about the relationship of mother and son, is, in condensed form, worth quoting:

  For a long time she had kept her silence in the face of often blatant condescension, but one Sunday, nearly two years ago, her minister began preaching a sermon about how AIDS is “the just punishment” of homosexuals. Right in the middle of his sermon she stood up, mad enough to start cussing in the church and shouted, “Excuse me Reverend Jenkins! Excuse me! If AIDS is the punishment of homosexuals then it must be the punishment of adulterers, murderers, and thieves, too, and all other manner of criminals and deviates you could want to name! Now, I don’t mean to challenge your cloth this morning, but you know my son is a homosexual. He’s one of those ‘gay’ people you trying to condemn to hell, but in my eyes he has committed no crime. Some of these people sitting up in here have sons who would rape them if they were pretty enough. Some of them can barely leave their homes and come here to hear you preach because they fear that when they return home those same sons will have sold everything that isn’t nailed down to get some of that crack, and whatever other drugs they got out there. . . .

  “Up to this point,” she continued, “I’ve been praying for a wisdom to visit you that would cause you to see we are all God’s children and no mere man can stand
in judgment of another. That’s God’s privilege, not man’s. I’ve been praying for you to preach love, but you keep preaching hate from your pulpit. And you ain’t nothing but a man yourself, strutting around here with the pennies I put in your collection plate jingling in your pockets. But let me tell you, Reverend, as surely as the candle of my Lord does not blow out in any wind, I’m not going to sit here and listen to you preach my son into damnation. . . .

  “Before I listen to you blasphemy my son, my love, and the dear Lord I trust, I’ll leave this church this very day, Reverend. I don’t know why our young men and women are dying like they are, and you don’t know why, either, but I know in my heart that the God I worship does not carelessly take life in order to terrorize us into righteousness! My God doesn’t punish love! Men do! And you ain’t nothing but a man! But my pennies won’t be jingling in your pockets no more. I work too hard to be giving my money to a fool. I believe in God too sincerely to trust you to handle my prayers. If you don’t know tolerance, Reverend, then how can you possibly recognize a prayer?”

  And with that, Mantalene (“Mary” in the novel) gathers up her things, walks out “with her head held high, and she never looked back.” Her son—called “Eddie” in the novel—tells her that he’s “proud of you for leaving there and joining a church that isn’t homophobic and woman hating.” But Mary, like Essex’s mother, Mantalene, continues to feel “her loyalties torn between her religious beliefs and her son. In this howling gap, her fears for Eddie proliferate. They seep into her dreams long before they’re articulated in her prayers. . . . ‘I’m angry and sad, and my fears for you have increased tremendously. . . . I want you to survive America. I don’t want you fighting to stay alive with handicaps. Homosexuality is a handicap, Eddie. That’s how society sees it, son . . .’

  “But when she finally came to terms with Eddie’s dilemma, and she did see it as that—his dilemma, but hers as well—she established a delicate balance between suspending all judgment and maintaining all loyalty.” She tells her son, “I may never fully understand your sexuality, Eddie, but I don’t want to judge you or condemn you for it. I’d love you then. That has always been real clear to me, even as I’ve struggled to understand. The thought of losing you frightened me into acceptance.” Eddie, in turn, “knew he would always have her God-fearing love and she would have his, that was their mutual commitment, but accepting every part of him was not guaranteed, and he knew this, too, as clearly as he knew he was homosexual.”