Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  Eight months later, in December 1994, the writer Don Belton brought Isaac Julien and Essex together for a conversation about Riggs’ last film. Essex spoke with particular passion about the ending of Black Is . . . Black Ain’t, where bell hooks speaks about “communion,” which Essex defined as “a willingness to communicate with one another.” He and Julien then went on in their discussion to disagree about Louis Farrakhan and black nationalists in general. “I’m as black as anyone,” Essex insisted—“but not by the criteria the nationalists construct.” Still, he felt that some dialogue with those attracted to black nationalism was essential. Julien felt “the opposite,” felt that instead they “should be going back to the communities we are a part of and working on a grassroots level . . . to challenge hetero-normative assumptions.”

  But the “grassroots level,” Essex countered, meant “mostly poor, heterosexual working-class men—the very same men drawn to Farrakhan”—who mocked and denigrated black gay men. And that was precisely the reason, Essex went on, why it was a mistake to ignore them. He believed, adamantly, that they could be reached, that gay men like himself and Isaac Julien should “bear witness,” should insist on demonstrating that black gay men had “always been crucial to our communities” and should claim their rightful membership. He believed that if they approached heterosexual black men in a “supportive, caring, trustworthy, and loyal” way that the possibility would open up “of a formidable brotherhood that reaches beyond our sexual desires and connects us to every black male on the planet.” It was a view that the Los Angeles–based Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum also shared; after an extended discussion, the group ended up encouraging black gay men to attend Farrakhan’s Million Man March.6

  But Julien remained skeptical. Where Essex argued that opportunities for intervention can unexpectedly appear, Julien discounted the possibility. To him Farrakhan’s assumption that black straight men “owned” blackness was impervious to discussion; in Julien’s view, moreover, “Black macho discourses of empowerment” inherently denigrated women as well as black gay men—after all, the year before, Ben Chavis had been fired from his position as CEO of the NAACP when it was revealed that, without notifying the board, he’d made a large payoff to keep allegations of sexual harassment from being aired publicly. Picking up on the reference to women, Essex pointed out that “the [negative] things you’ve heard among gay brothers about women” weren’t any different from the disrespectful way straight black men talked about women. In both cases, it disgusted him. He felt passionately that black gay men had the obligation to work actively against sexism—which was exactly what Mike Callen had felt in regard to all gay men.7

  When Essex’s longtime friend Chris Prince asked him early in 1995 how work was going on his novel, Essex quietly told him that he wasn’t feeling much like writing anymore. His last spurt seems to have been during the summer of 1994, when he told Wayson, “It feels wonderful to be writing again. I have sorely missed putting pen to paper.” Nor was Essex any longer pursuing sex. He’d once thought that he and Chris might take their friendship “to another level” (Chris hadn’t been interested), but now, when Chris stayed over at Essex’s apartment one night, “he didn’t even try anything.” Essex had long been “a sexy man,” someone who pursued and enjoyed his assorted sexual encounters. He’d never boasted about any of his escapades, though he could be bold about them in his poetry:

  if I am indolent and content

  to lay here on my stomach . . .

  if I choose

  to be liked in this way,

  if I desire to be object,

  to be sexualized

  in this object way,

  by one or two at a time,

  for a night or a thousand days

  for money or power,

  for the awesome orgasms

  to be had, to be coveted,

  or for my own selfish wantonness,

  for the feeling of being

  pleasure, being touched . . .8

  Or:

  If he is your lover,

  never mind.

  Perhaps, if we ask

  he will join us.

  In this, as in all things, Essex held to his own guidelines. He would scold Chris, for example, about going to see gay strip shows—on political, not moral grounds. “You don’t know what their, the strippers, stories are,” Essex said. “They might have been abused” or “compromised in some way or another. And here you are, objectifying them, and giving them money to take their clothes off.”

  As Essex’s health declined, he was never afflicted with KS lesions but did come down with PCP—though why, given the availability of PCP prophylaxis, is unknown. What we do know is that after being released from the hospital, Essex spent most of his time alone in his apartment. As he put it,

  Some days it seems easier to sort dirty clothes to be laundered than to be sorting my mail and responding, promptly, to what it contains. It seems easier to dust furniture and listen to hours of music from early dawn to late evening. I ignore my telephone. . . . It seems easier to sweep floors and change bed sheets, easier to roast chickens and de-vein shrimp, to weigh potatoes and onions, peppers and broccoli, easier to simply entomb myself in a thousand domestic chores, escape to a land of Joy, Bounty and Cheer. Go there, a fugitive from my present world, a fugitive fleeing terminal illness and death, fleeing to a land of shiny floors, scented soaps and fluffy towels. . . . Never once do I forget that death is so near, but that doesn’t cloud my head with fear.9

  After returning from the hospital, he tried to restore some of his vitality by exercising in his apartment, but then one day he happened to glance into a mirror and saw “the first full-length view of myself”:

  I was in the bathroom, at home,

  undressing to take a shower

  I wasn’t watching myself undress

  In the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling mirror

  As I finally peeled out of my underwear

  I glanced in to the mirror and was devastated.

  I was as thin as a sheet of paper.

  I could see my ribs, I could see flesh

  sagging from my thighs . . .

  I gathered up my bones

  and showered them,

  while fighting back tears,

  while the mirror fogged over

  what I couldn’t bear to see.

  What little writing he seems to have done—some poems and a few prose jottings—were privately printed in a nineteen-page limited edition entitled Domestic Life. One of the unexpected, dominant themes of that final effort, obliquely but frequently stated, is the return of some semblance of Essex’s religious faith. Earlier, in his long poem “Vital Signs,” he appears resistant:

  I began looking at the world

  as a leather skullcap of countless

  driven nails meticulously bonneted

  on the head of the Christian God

  many offered me or tried to

  force-feed me. Or more often

  than not this figure was used

  to impose, contain and undermine

  my journey, all in the name

  of salvation, which was

  one more cemetery

  I sadly discovered.

  One more burning flag.

  Yet in Domestic Life Essex sounds a different note, suggesting a turn toward a kind of faith not explicitly named as Christian: “on the few occasions that I have seriously considered suicide, I have been fortunate enough to return to reason and forge a new peace with my life, reestablish my purpose, affirm my faith. . . . Betrayal and disappointment have been visiting at my door, but so have faith and continuance.”

  In one of the poems in Domestic Life, he moves closer to an ambivalent defining of his “faith” as a possible affirmation of “God”:

  . . . there is something

  Nagging to speak, something else

  That has had no voice until now.

  I listen to it calling my name,

  Clearl
y, gently calling me.

  I answer tentatively

  I have suspicions and doubts,

  But I answer because I think it’s God

  Or the distant whistle of my train.10

  Essex rarely spoke about his failing health, even with Wayson Jones, probably his closest friend. “I don’t even really know what his morbidity”—the incidence of disease—“was,” Wayson told me years later. Even before Essex learned that he was HIV-positive, he told Wayson that he didn’t think he’d live to be very old; perhaps, Wayson thought, because he’d “had a hard life, really.” The episodes of abuse and family dysfunction while growing up had left their mark. And in Wayson’s opinion, Essex as an adult “had never had a good [lover] relationship. I never met a boyfriend”—there had been only two extended relationships, Mel and Jerry, each lasting about three years—“that I thought was good for him, really.” Wayson knew whereof he spoke, since evidence has surfaced that one of the two lovers had assaulted Essex and threatened him with a gun. Chris echoes Wayson’s verdict, adding that Essex tended to be attracted to abusive men. Of the two relationships that proved more than casual, neither gave him the sustained comfort he craved. Essex put it this way in “Vital Signs”:11

  I am searching for whatever

  we relinquished that was

  deemed sacred between us.

  A living memory of this exists

  and I want to find it . . .

  We were not loathsome then,

  We were not dealing in cruelty,

  sabotage, torment, grief . . .

  I am searching

  for the irrefutable clarity

  to all I don’t presently comprehend

  at any hour

  about the hatred in our lives,

  the misplaced anger,

  the presence of death.

  Essex did tell Wayson that he was getting fevers and night sweats and had neuropathy in his legs, and Wayson could see for himself that Essex was becoming perilously thin. Yet as late as May 1995, Essex somehow—his willpower was strong—managed to host a showing of Marlon Riggs’ Black Is . . . Black Ain’t at the University of Toledo Student Union. Only about fifty people showed up, and only a handful attended a community reception the following day. It had hardly been worth what must have been a difficult outing for Essex; the sole consolation was financial—Essex was given a handsome fee.

  According to Wayson, Essex not only refused to participate in any of Ron Simmons’ Us Helping Us programs, but he “really never took a proactive stance with his own illness.” Ron feels that toward the end, Essex may have begun to suffer from dementia. When he reached him by phone one day and asked how he was doing, Essex replied, “I’m busy right now. I’m about to go down to the courthouse.” Startled, Ron asked him why. Essex said something about how his last boyfriend kept calling him up and bothering him, even after he’d told him to stop. What did that have to do with a trip to the courthouse? Well, Essex said, “I need to get a restraining order” to keep the man from pestering him. Ron tried to persuade him that maybe the ex-boyfriend was just trying to show his concern and wasn’t intent on stalking or harassing him. But Essex wasn’t persuaded.12

  Soon after that exchange, Essex was in and out of the hospital. On one of his better days, a friend gave him a haircut and, finding him “in good spirits,” wheeled him around West Philadelphia for an outing. But within days after that, he was reported to be “fading fast,” and it became clear that Essex was no longer able to take care of himself. He entered the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, and very few visitors were allowed to see him. Wayson and Chris saw him for the last time in August 1995. He was having considerable pain from neuropathy, and Wayson sat on his bed and massaged his legs—just as Doug Sadownick had done for Mike Callen. After that visit, one of the few reports that came through said that “Essex was no longer able to speak, he could only point and a horrible rattle came from his throat.” Chris called often, trying to reach Essex, but finally gave up. In one of his last poems, Essex had written:

  I am getting ready to depart

  for where, God only knows.

  I have no meaningful guesses,

  I have no hints, no clues

  It is better this way

  that I not be expecting

  more than what may come.

  Essex, age thirty-eight—the same age at which Mike Callen had died—passed away on November 5, 1995, with his family around him.13

  When I die,

  Honey chil’

  my angels

  will be tall

  Black drag queens.

  I will eat their stockings

  as they fling them

  into the blue

  shadows of dawn.

  I will suck

  their purple lips

  to anoint my mouth

  for the utterance of prayer.

  My witnesses

  will have to answer

  to go-go music.

  Dancing and sweat

  will be required

  at my funeral.

  Someone will have to answer

  the mail I leave,

  the messages

  on my phone service;

  someone else

  will have to tend

  to the aching that drove me

  to seek soul . . .

  Essex’s friends discussed whether or not to attend the funeral service scheduled to be held in his mother’s A.M.E. Zion church. They recalled what had happened at the funeral of another black gay writer, Donald Woods; there had been no mention in the service that he’d been gay, which had led an outraged Assotto Saint, who also later succumbed to AIDS, to commandeer the microphone and to say that he was there to honor Woods as an openly proud black gay man. He asked that if anyone else had come to the funeral for that same reason, to please stand up. Half the church stood up, and the Woods family had been horrified.

  Barbara Smith, the pioneering black lesbian publisher and writer, told Ron Simmons that in her opinion the funeral belonged to the family and that Essex’s gay friends should not attend but should hold a separate event of their own to honor Essex. Wayson agreed with Barbara that it would be inappropriate to “hijack” the family service; indeed, at the request of Essex’s mother, Wayson, though uncomfortable, agreed to deliver the eulogy (which was in fact written by the family), and both he and Michelle Parkerson were among the six pallbearers. Ron (and also Phill Wilson of the AIDS Project Los Angeles) also decided to attend. His friends reported back that during the service no mention was made of Essex being a gay man, and that his mother, Mantelene, had spoken of him in his last days as accepting Christ as his Savior. In the program for the services (“Victory Celebration for Essex Charles Hemphill,” November 9, 1995, Full Gospel A.M.E. Zion Church), one of the six printed paragraphs of his biography reads: “On September 17, 1995, Essex made the most important decision of his life. He accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior at Full Gospel A.M.E. Zion Church.”14

  Ron’s report of the funeral service outraged most of Essex’s friends, who refused to accept the family’s account of his last days—even though such an outcome was hinted at as at least possible in Essex’s final poetry, “Vital Signs” and Domestic Life (which in all likelihood only Wayson had seen). His friends held an alternate ceremony at the Hine Junior High School in D.C., which, to their considerable surprise, Essex’s mother and one of his three sisters attended. There were choral ensemble readings from Essex’s writings, and various people shared anecdotes about their friendships with him, Ron Simmons among them. He spoke frankly about Essex’s “perfectionism”—so akin to Mike Callen’s—which made working with him sometimes “difficult, sometimes painful. But if you too were willing to accept nothing less than the best in what you brought to that creative process, it would be a joyful thrill unlike any other.”15

  Ron also spoke about the impact of Essex’s work on the black gay community:

  It was
utterly profound. His work gave us a voice we had never heard before. So many of us were living as marginalized souls of internalized guilt and shame, despite our suits and ties, and suddenly there was a writer whose work captured our fears, anger, confusion, frustration, passion and desire as no artist had done before. . . . He encouraged us to celebrate. Imagine that. We who were told that our God despised us . . . And [Essex] dared all of us to envision a new community beyond gay and straight, black and white, male and female.

  When the ceremony was over, Essex’s mother and sister quietly came up to Ron and thanked him for his remarks. They were apparently as torn between love and unease as Essex himself had been toward them.

  Three organizations, Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD), Other Countries, and Black Nations/Queer Nations?, declared December 10, 1995, a National Day of Remembrance for Essex at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York City. They urged all those around the country who “knew, loved or were inspired by Essex and his work to join us by staging memorials in your city on that day.” We know that at the least, Philadelphia and Detroit, as well as New York City, held such remembrances.16

  That same month and year, December 1995, the FDA approved the release of saquinavir, the first of a new class of drugs called protease inhibitors, which for many would convert AIDS from a death sentence to a manageable disease.

  The FDA announcement came one month after Essex’s death.

  Acknowledgments

  Many people helped to bring this book into being. I’ll start my thanks with its publisher, The New Press. This is the fifth book I’ve published with TNP in the last six years, which is itself a measure of the deep satisfaction I feel about our relationship. Everyone on the staff at The New Press has been consistently kind and helpful, though for this book I want to single out the special contributions of Ellen Adler, Julie Enszer, and Ben Woodward. They’ve greatly eased my path even as they offered smart, candid suggestions for improving the manuscript. As well, Maury Botton directed all aspects of production for this book and did his usual sterling job.