Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  Mike wasn’t “exactly bitter.” He was “still able to remember the good times,” was still grateful to Richard “and his willingness, at the lowest possible moment of my life, to [quoting Archibald MacLeish] ‘blow on the coals of my heart.’ ” But Mike did feel abandoned by him and even wrote about Richard in his occasional column, “Dinosaur’s Diary,” for QW magazine: “I miss my ex. To the extent that I ever thought about my death from AIDS, I always assumed he’d be there to help send me gently into . . . whatever. And his gruff forcefulness would be so useful to me now. He’d know what to do, my mind races. He’d sit me down and tell me what my priorities ought to be, and then he’d help me accomplish them. But the divorce has been unusually bitter and protracted. Now I’m very much alone.”7

  Richard read those lines in QW and felt deeply, deeply hurt by them. He knew—and so did Mike in his calmer moments—that they still loved each other, and he also knew that their relationship wasn’t over. But at the moment he was dealing with Patrick’s failing health, as well as having to travel with various bands in order to provide for some sort of income. Their story wasn’t over, though what lay ahead would be equal parts comfort and desolation.

  Nor had Mike ceased to be political, even—when his stamina allowed—actively so. He feared that the conservative segment of the gay community was in danger of capturing the dialogue about sex, that a majority of gay men and lesbians had arrived at essential agreement with their oppressors about what were or weren’t “appropriate” forms of sexual behavior. Though Mike no longer patronized bathhouses and back-room bars, he continued to defend them—to defend any kind of sexual expression that wasn’t mainstream or heteroimitative—and he came to openly regret his role in helping the state to close the bathhouses and sex clubs in New York. Mike rejected any safe-sex guidelines that insisted on monogamy as the definition of “maturity”—let alone morality. He believed that gay men in the 1970s had “effected an unprecedented revolution in sexual practices” and the last thing he wanted was to see that legacy destroyed.

  Mike was convinced that radical feminism continued to provide the best guide for safeguarding the sexual revolution. He agreed with its disavowal of the widespread notion that sex had been unchanging through time and across cultures, and he rejected the ingrained view that some forms of sex are “better”—healthier, more moral—than others. He felt it important to resist the notion that the particular sex acts we preferred “should” be the ones everyone preferred, and he deplored those countless “Eroticizing Safer Sex” workshops that parroted “politically correct” guidelines for all those “agonized, confused and conflicted gay men fearful of being drummed out of the fraternity of cool, AIDS-adjusted, post-AIDS babies.” “A vast ocean of silence,” he felt, “surrounds what gay men are actually doing—or actually want to be doing. There currently is no permission to discuss, calmly and rationally, the many gray zones of safe sex.” The relative risks of some sexual acts were still surrounded, Mike felt, with confusing, contradictory, guilt-inducing guidelines. He rejected the view that every lesbian who refused to use a dental dam when engaging in oral sex, or every gay man who sucked dick without a condom, had a death wish. Mike’s attitudes about current safe-sex guidelines prefigured a debate within gay male circles that was about to erupt. The gap between public HIV prevention messages (the “condom code”) and the refusal in some gay male circles to abide by it was widening.8

  More and more gay men were feeling that the condom code was inhuman; they chafed against the tight strictures that circumscribed sexual pleasure. They’d significantly reduced their levels of risky sexual behavior but were unwilling never again to experience the satisfaction of skin-to-skin contact or the intimacy of exchanging semen. They’d accomplished a remarkable degree of self-policing, and doubted that many heterosexual men, with their attitude of entitlement, could ever have achieved a comparable level of behavioral change—hell, most of them couldn’t even sustain a diet or an exercise regime.

  What’s most remarkable about Mike’s carefully composed arguments about issues relating to safe sex is that he still cared enough to make them. Here he was, undergoing the torments of chemo treatments, told that his life span would likely be about a year, living alone in a studio apartment in subsidized housing where the toilets still had pull chains and some of his possessions had been stolen from a storage room in the basement—and he was still employing what he called his “sick sense of obligation to others.” Had he not been essentially modest, he might have substituted “noble” for “sick.”

  Essex, too, continued to engage with public issues, though his health was no less compromised than Mike’s. He joined with Audre Lorde to do a joint reading, “Gay Art Against Apartheid,” and when the prestigious Journal of the History of Sexuality—which at the time leaned heavily in the direction of LGBT content—published an essay by a black gay man that Essex found “ridiculous, pedestrian,” he used the occasion as a means to make a larger point: namely, that the journal did not have a single black gay male on either its editorial or advisory boards. In his letter of protest to the editor, Essex forestalled one familiar response by writing, “please don’t tell me there are no Black gay and lesbian scholars or scholars of color available to work with you all.” He offered his help in recommending “a number of very capable and brilliant scholars to you.”9

  Like Mike Callen, Essex roused himself to protest despite increasingly precarious health. His T cell count—the prime indicator of the health of an immune system—had been steadily falling. “I have so little energy and I’m faced with so much to do,” he wrote his agent, Frances Goldin. He did manage to complete his residency at the Getty Center, but his spirits were only “fair.” Yet he did remain ambulatory, and even managed, occasionally, to travel and give a reading or talk. The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) put on an “An Evening With Essex Hemphill” in 1993, and, before a packed audience, he gave a vigorous, energetic performance and at the dinner for him afterward managed to more than hold his own in a brisk, even forceful conversation.

  The effect of AIDS on public opinion had, with the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992, become something of a double-edged sword; heightened fear of gay men as “carriers” had become increasingly counterbalanced by mounting sympathy for their suffering. In 1993, Hollywood released the big-budget film Philadelphia about a sympathetically drawn gay lawyer with AIDS, played by Tom Hanks (for which he won an Oscar). The film went on to earn $125 million at the box office. Soon after, the singer Elton John came out, and a year after that, Greg Louganis, the multiple gold medal winner in Olympic diving, not only came out but revealed that he was HIV-positive.

  None of which, needless to add, produced better treatments for AIDS, let alone a cure. By the early nineties, a pronounced demographic shift was taking place: 15 million people in sub-Saharan Africa were becoming infected, the large majority, in contrast with the United States, through heterosexual intercourse. This difference in transmission routes has never been fully examined or explained, though the dominant theory currently suggests that blood products rather than sperm is in Africa the primary culprit. In the United States by the mid-1990s, there were more new cases of AIDS among blacks than whites, with the large majority resulting from male-to-male contact (though a significant number did not self-identify as “gay”).

  The New York Times had greatly increased its coverage of the epidemic over the years, beating out all the other major dailies in the number of published articles on the epidemic. Yet only a shocking 5 percent of AIDS stories published between 1981 and 1993 focused on African Americans, and a mere 1.4 percent on Latinos—and most of those articles were about celebrity blacks like Magic Johnson and Arthur Ashe. (The figures would later go down still further. A Kaiser Family Foundation study published in 2004 surveyed all media coverage on AIDS from 1981 to 2002 and found that only 3 percent focused on minorities.)

  Nor was there a steady and reliable uptake in mainstream sympa
thy. When President Clinton ran into a barrage of opposition to his suggestion that the ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military be lifted, he quickly scurried for cover, settling on the “compromise” solution of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—which would remain official policy for another twenty years. Newsweek would (weirdly) write in 1993 that gay people were “the new power brokers,” yet the early nineties saw a 30 percent increase in assaults and hate crimes against them. The dragon of homophobia had hardly been slain, and the seeming increase in respect and attention mostly amounted to a fragile inclusion pretty much confined to those gay people who looked and behaved like “normal” folks—meaning primarily middle-class white men who put their faith in polite lobbying, eschewed the confrontational tactics of a group like ACT UP, and shied away from any left-wing identification.

  When I took part in the April 25, 1993, March on Washington, it seemed to me a bland, juiceless event that was more parade than protest—especially when contrasted with the earlier, more overtly political gay marches of 1979 and 1987. And the issue of AIDS no longer seemed in the forefront of concern, as it had been during the 1987 March. It was now one issue among many. If any theme was sounded with frequency, it was the new issue of “gays in the military”—an assimilationist goal that marked a new kind of gay movement, one that included AIDS as one among several issues of concern—along with the right to marry—and, further, replaced the raucous, direct-action demands of ACT UP with a “we’re just folks” façade that no longer indicted social inequities but rather requested permission to “join up.” Left-wing gays, now relegated to the sidelines, deplored the limited new agenda as an affront to the multiple sacrifices made and a dishonest disavowal of the special history and insights of a distinctive subculture. AIDS was being shoved to the margins by a polite new gay movement emphasizing an agenda of traditional values. More and more of its adherents felt it safe to emerge from the closet—even as they pushed the issue of AIDS into it.

  Even before the gay movement started its march toward innocuous centrism, Essex had long since rejected it as irrelevant to the needs of black gays and lesbians. He didn’t feel the movement had ever understood that for black gays “our sexuality doesn’t lessen the chance of us being randomly shot or harassed by the police. Any of the fears black men have, our sexuality doesn’t exclude us from them.” Even had his health been better, Essex wouldn’t have considered joining the vapid 1993 parade. And his health wasn’t better. Like Mike, he was by now receiving periodic blood transfusions, which did increase his energy level, but only for a short period. He didn’t consider himself depressed, but he did “at times feel mentally debilitated.” Never one to zone out on television, he now wasn’t much interested in reading, either.

  A kind of stasis had set in, during which he listened to an enormous amount of music, “mostly jazz, some classical, and some classic rhythm and blues and pop.” Music had always been important to him—Nina Simone a special favorite, a “fine inspiration”—but now it consumed much of his time. It was hard for Essex to accept the “slowdown” in his life “simply because I’ve always been so driven and so curious about things.” Fortunately, he was “in love with” his apartment, and once, when out on an infrequent walk, he came across an old oak school desk in a secondhand store in the neighborhood—and was thrilled. The shop owner suggested that he refinish the surface, covered as it was with pen carvings, ink drawings, “and the names of school kids in love.” But Essex chose to clean it with Murphy soap and coat it with polyurethane; he didn’t “want to rob the desk of its history.”

  He did start to write just a little, “but it seems to take so much effort at this time.” He slowly got back to revising a long poem that had begun “as a highly internalized poetic narrative,” to which he gave the poignant title “Vital Signs.” It would appear in 1994 in Life Sentences, a collection of memoirs, poems, and interviews relating to AIDS and edited by Thomas Avena, the founder of Bastard Review, a literary periodical out of San Francisco (Avena himself later died of AIDS). His connection with Essex went back to 1988, when Avena had published and edited the journal 89 Cents, in which one of Essex’s most powerful poems, “Heavy Breathing,” appeared:

  At the end of heavy breathing

  the dream deferred

  is in a museum

  under glass and guard.

  it costs five dollars

  to see it on display.

  We spend the day

  viewing artifacts,

  breathing heavy

  on the glass

  to see—

  the skeletal remains

  of black panthers,

  pictures of bushes,

  canisters of tears.

  Essex had found Avena to be a sympathetic, sensitive editor and subsequently gave him two of his other major poems, “Tomb of Sorrow” and “Civil Servant,” for the Bastard Review. In a letter accompanying the poems Essex urged Avena to “please feel free to be very demanding of this work. I have been quite demanding of it myself, but I can demand more from it. I look forward to your commentaries. And, you don’t have to be gentle with the knife.” Essex found Avena’s subsequent edits incisive and decided to entrust him with “Vital Signs,” the longest and among the richest of his poems. The tone throughout is elegiac, a gallant but sorrowful recollection of times past and a future foreshortened:10

  . . . come stir

  the ink blue dusk with me,

  come stir it with me

  ’til it’s thick enough

  to rub onto our skins,

  massage into our thirsty pores and follicles,

  so that distant stars

  might see themselves

  reflected in our shiny

  new blackness,

  and the planets, too,

  and the galaxies

  where our new names await us

  in full bloom, their succulence,

  the taste of victory will dribble

  down the sides of our mouths,

  sweet juice that will cause us

  to be high with liberation

  when we announce our new names.

  In the internally subtitled “The Faerie Poem,” Essex recalls his earlier self:

  Once upon a time

  I was black and fertile,

  I was virile, coltish,

  straining leashes,

  refusing collars.

  Once upon a time

  balls of energy

  exploded from

  my fingertips,

  rolled out of me

  in brilliant flashes

  that blinded

  even me.

  But that time, he knows, is past. Now, with apparent transparency and acceptance, he quietly laments his changed self:

  With twenty-odd T cells

  I am nearly defenseless

  and counting. I have to learn

  multiplication tables, after all,

  and put them to wise use.

  I am not the wand waver

  you may be quick to recall.

  I cannot make another thing

  disappear. The illusionist tricks

  all fail me now,

  they draw on my strength

  in ways that endanger me.

  With deliberate artlessness, Essex gravely considers his remaining options:

  In the cluttered afternoons

  I rearrange little bits

  of my person.

  I carefully excavate

  those memories

  that are most delicate

  And for that reason

  could still cause

  harm and injury.

  and I thought

  these would be my tasks

  when I became an old man,

  but I am clearly

  not a prophet or a seer.

  At the close of “Vital Signs,” Essex returns to prose, as if it was the more appropriate form for expressing the factual:

  Some of the T cells I am wit
hout are not here through my own fault. I didn’t lose all of them foolishly, and I didn’t lose all of them erotically. Some of the missing T cells were lost to racism, a well-known transmittable disease. Some were lost to poverty because there was no money to do something about the plumbing before the pipes burst and the room flooded. Homophobia killed quite a few, but so did my rage and my pointed furies, so did the wars at home and the wars within, so did the drugs I took to remain calm, cool, collected. . . . Actually, there are T cells scattered all about me at doorways where I was denied entrance because I was a faggot or a nigga or too poor or too black. There are T cells spilling out of my ashtrays from the cigarettes I have anxiously smoked. There are T cells all over the floors of several bathhouses, coast to coast, and halfway around the world, and in numerous parks, and in countless bars, and in places I am forgetting to make room for other memories. My T cells are strewn about like the leaves of a mighty tree, like the fallen hair of an old man, like the stars of a collapsing universe.

  In a real sense, Essex had written his own obituary.

  He still hoped to revise “Standing in the Gap,” the novel that hadn’t found any takers on a first go-round, and he hoped, too, to get on with the anthology he’d contracted for of short fiction by black gay writers. At the margins he entertained the notion of a third project as well: “The Evidence of Being,” narratives of older black gay men, but there’s no indication that he ever started on a series of interviews. There were still a number of days during 1994 when he felt energized and clearheaded enough not only to write, but also to plan on attending and presenting work at this or that event, and he even gave thought to applying for a Guggenheim fellowship. He did manage one trip from Philadelphia to New York City and one to Washington, D.C., to see his mother and his siblings. In the closing section of “Vital Signs” he’d written about “the love and anger my mother and I hold for one another,” and the visit to her was “exhausting” for him but made his mother “very happy.”11