25. Lorde to JB [January 1987]; Isaac Julien to JB, March 22, 1987; JB to Julien, March 31, 1987, all JBSC.
26. Philadelphia Inquirer, December 31, 1988. A scholarship was set up in Joe Beam’s name at Temple University with an endowment, raised from family and friends, of $6,000. A $300 annual award was to be given “to an African-American student on the basis of academic promise, financial need and an essay or literary piece on a topic related to sexual minorities” (Philadelphia Inquirer, January 21, 1992).
27. EH, “xix,” in Domestic Life, private edition, 1994, courtesy Wayson Jones.
Chapter 5: The Toll Mounts
1. JS, Ron Najman, MC, and Mathilde Krim, “Community Treatment Initiative (CTI): A Proposal for the Prevention of AIDS,” November 12, 1986, MCP; “Remarks of Michael Callen,” PAAC Teleconference, New Orleans, LA, May 17–18, 1989, MCP; Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (University of California Press, 1996), 216–19; MC, “AIDS Research: Missed Opportunities and Misplaced Priorities,” 5-p. transcript, MCP; JS, “Preventing PCP,” AIDS Perspective, n.d., http://aidsperspective.net/aidsperspective2010_006.htm. “Without Mathilde [Krim],” JS has said, “none of it [amfAR] would have happened.” He was a member of CRI’s board of directors and Institutional Review Board, and chair of its Scientific Advisory Committee. Due to financial difficulties, CRI dissolved in 1990, but it reconstituted the following year as the Community Research Initiative on AIDS (CRIA). Sonnabend quit amfAR when he felt “that scientific issues were being decided without my knowledge. The most glaring example is the effort in 1985 to put out the message that there would be a heterosexual epidemic for which there was absolutely no evidence at that time” (Sean Strub, “The Good Doctor,” POZ, July 1998, JSNYPL). The online version of Vanessa Merton’s article, “Community-Based AIDS Research,” can be found at http://erx.sagepub.com/content/14/5/502.
2. Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On (St. Martin’s, 1987), 585–89; MC, “AIDS and Passive Genocide,” MC testimony given at FDA hearing on aerosol pentamidine, May 1, 1989, printed in AIDS Forum 2, no. 1 (May 1989), 13–16. The FDA finally approved aerosol pentamidine in 1989.
3. MC, “AIDS Research: Missed Opportunities,” Los Angeles Times, December 25, 1988, May 6, 1989; MC, “Turning AIDS into a Chronic Manageable Disease: The Role of Prophylaxis,” 6-p. typescript, [1987?], MCP.
4. “Testimony of Michael Callen . . . before Subcommittee on Health and the Environment,” September 22, 1987, 4-p. typescript, MCP; MC to Marvin [?], April 15, 1988, MCP.
5. “Remarks of Michael Callen . . . at CRI Press Conference,” December 16, 1987, 4-p. typescript, MCP; JS, Najman, MC, and Krim, “A Proposal for the Prevention of AIDS,” November 12, 1986, MCP, New York Times, March 18, 1988; “Testimony of Michael L. Callen, before the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic,” February 19, 1988, MCP; MC to Governor Mario Cuomo, January 4, 1988, MCP.
6. Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (Simon and Schuster, 1999), 548–49; Epstein, Impure Science, 218 ff; Susan M. Chambré, Fighting for Our Lives: New York’s AIDS Community and the Politics of Disease (Rutgers University Press, 2006), 120–21; John-Manuel Andriote, Victory Deferred, rev. ed. (2011), chap. 17; Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and Act UP’s Fight Against AIDS (University of Chicago Press, 2009), chap. 2; Steven Chapple and David Talbot, “Burning Desires,” reprinted in While the World Sleeps, ed. Chris Bull (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003); “Remarks of Michael Callen,” PAAC Teleconference, New Orleans, May 17–18, 1989, MCP.
7. Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1999), 144–48, 162–67; New York Times, February 26, 2013 (Koop obituary).
8. Gould, Moving Politics, 49–53; EH, “The Occupied Territories,” in Ceremonies (Cleis 1992), 80–81.
9. MD diary, August 7, 8, October 13, 1987, in my possession but ultimately to be part of my papers at the New York Public Library; Pamela Robin Brandt, liner notes for Legacy by MC, recorded 1996; Amin Ghaziani, The Dividends of Dissent: How Conflict and Culture Work in Lesbian and Gay Marches on Washington (University of Chicago Press, 2008); MC, “How Should We Presume,” 11-p. ms., October 15, 1987, MCP.
10. According to RB (interview of June 9, 2009), JS disapproved of MC taking time out from his AIDS work to devote to making music; MC interview with Dr. David Schmidt, November 12, 1987, 9-p. typescript, MCP (background to “Nobody’s Fool” and “Love Don’t Need a Reason”). Most of this section on Purple Heart, unless otherwise noted—as well as other aspects of Mike and RB’s musical history—is primarily based on my multiple interviews with Richard Dworkin. I’m especially grateful to Richard for his help with describing the special qualities of MC’s voice. See also Will Grega, “Michael Callen Up Close,” in The Gay Music Guide (Pop Front Press, 1994), 14–19. Grega’s book is dedicated to MC: “Thank you, Michael, for your generosity of spirit and support for this project. You will always be the spirit of gay music, and the very best of us.”
MC had intended to submit “Love Don’t Need a Reason” as the love theme for Barbra Streisand’s pending film production of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, but the project never happened. Another song on Purple Heart, “Nobody’s Fool,” derived from the two-year period when MC and his father didn’t speak; when MC would call home, his mother would try to persuade him to
Talk to your Daddy
He misses you. He does—
In his own way.
I know it was rough For you and your brother
But do it for me
11. Los Angeles Dispatch, August 3, 1988; Gay Community News, August 21–September 3, 1988; Gaybeat, June 1988; New York Native, July 11, 1988; Grega, Gay Music Guide; San Francisco Sentinel, July 22, 1988; MC, “Living with AIDS,” speech at the American Academy of Dermatologists, December 3, 1989, 7-p. typescript, MCP; MC, “In Defense of Anal Sex,” 11-p. typescript, PWA Newsline, February 1989; Jim Graham to MC, as printed in the April 1989 PWA Newsline; MC to Bruce [?], January 15, 1989, MCP; MC to Kevin Armington, February 25, 1989, MCP.
12. MC, ed., Surviving and Thriving with AIDS: Collected Wisdom (People with AIDS Coalition, 1988) in an edition of 12,000. Jim Eigo, “The City as Body Politic/ The Body as City unto Itself,” in From ACT UP to the WTO, ed. Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk (Verso, 2002). About half the articles in Surviving were reprinted from the PWA Coalition Newsline, and a few from other publications. Mike was committed to the principle of respecting diversity of opinion, and as a result the book contains a section on “Holistic Approaches,” for which in general he held scant regard, and even several arguments in favor of taking AZT. The book was gratefully received; in a typical response, James T. Beal thanked Mike “for taking the time and energy to make such a heroic contribution to our shared condition” (Beal to MC, July 10, 1987, MCP). For the condom study, see Jennifer Brier, Infectious, Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 46.
13. MC, “AIDS 201,” in Surviving and Thriving; multiple interviews with Richard Dworkin; MC to Holly Near, August 24, 1993 (Gay Men’s Chorus), MCP; EH, “The Imperfect Moment,” High Performance, Summer 1990; Albert Williams, “Essex Hemphill and ‘Cultural Transformation,’ ” Windy City Times, March 21, 1991. For a capella, see New York Times, June 22, 1997; Washington Post, March 12, 1997; Billboard, August 23, 1997. At the memorial service for Joe Beam more than a thousand people showed up (Washington Post, August 17, 1991).
14. See Black LGBT Archivist Society of Philadelphia (archivistssociety.wordpress.com) for EH and Dorothy Beam’s comments on JB; EH to JB, February 18, [1988?]; Washington Blade, July 11, 1991 (Dorothy Beam); EH to Barbara Smith, August 1, 1989, BSP; James Baldwin, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” New York Times, July 29, 1979; EH, ed., Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, conceived
by JB, project managed by Dorothy Beam (Alyson, 1991). Out-week, August 8, 1990; Network 1, no. 3 (December 1990); “Black Talk: A Personal Interview with Essex Hemphill of Tongues Untied,” Au Courant, July 29, 1991; Patricia Morrisroe’s fine biography, Mapplethorpe (Da Capo, 1997), doesn’t discuss black anger at his “objectification” but does provide considerable evidence of it. Essex’s introduction to Brother to Brother is xv–xxxi; the Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer essay, “True Confessions,” 167–73. It’s worth pointing out that in his introduction Essex made a point of acknowledging Adrian Stanford’s pioneering precursor, Black and Queer (Good Gay Poets of Boston, 1977); he also published four of Stanford’s poems in Brother to Brother; Stanford had been murdered in Philadelphia in 1983. David Frechette, “Renaissance for Black Gay Writers,” City Sun, April 19–25, 1989; New Republic, October 12, 1992. Essex’s later collection Ceremonies (Cleis, 1992) contains both “Civil Servant” and “To Some Supposed Brothers”; as well, under the essay title “Does Your Mama Know About Me?” Essex reprinted and added to his critique of the white gay world.
The establishment by the OutWrite Conference of an award in JB’s name caused considerable controversy. In 1992 Dorothy Beam, at Essex’s urging, rescinded her permission to use her son’s name. In an extended explanation for the action (the 5-p. transcript is in ASSC, and a 1-p. summary, dated March 1992, in EH/WJSC), Essex cited the fact that “no input was sought from the Black gay and lesbian community” and that the titles nominated failed to include any of the books published in 1991 by black gays and lesbians, but did include two Alyson publications (Sasha Alyson had sponsored the award).
15. To work with Isaac Julien, Essex spent two weeks in London in August 1989; Julien was “a marvelous host” and Essex had “an excellent trip” (EH to Barbara Smith, August 18, 1989, BSP); Frank Broderick interview with EH, n.d., JBSC; Karl Bruce Knapper, “Raw, Fresh, Soothing, Unnerving,” Bay Area Reporter, May 30, 1991; Publishers Weekly, May 10, 1991; Jim Cory review in Windy City Times, March 21, 1991; Jim Marks review in Lambda Book Report, May–June 1991; interview with Ron Simmons, May 2009; Isaac Julien to JB, May 27, 1987, JBSC; and in Brother to Brother: Walter Rico Burrell, “The Scarlett Letter, Revisited,” diary entry for February 9, 1989; Assotto Saint, “Hooked for Life”; Craig G. Harris, “The Worst of It”; EH, “Looking for Langston: An Interview with Isaac Julien”; Ron Simmons, “Tongues Untied: An Interview with Marlon Riggs” and “Some Thoughts on the Challenges Facing Black Gay Intellectuals”; and Marlon Riggs, “Black Macho Revisited: Reflections of a Snap! Queen.” The typescript of the Riggs essay is in JBSC. EH’s essay on Welsing is entitled “If Freud Had Been a Neurotic Colored Woman: Reading Dr. Frances Cress Welsing.” It originally appeared in the radical gay Boston publication Gay Community News (February 25–March 3, 1991) and was then reprinted in EH, Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry (Plume, 1992). For a critique of EH’s Welsing essay, see Dwight A. McBride, “Can the Queen Speak?” in Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Devon W. Carbado (New York University Press, 1999).
16. Phillip Brian Harper, “Eloquence and Epitaph,” originally published in Harper, Writing AIDS (Columbia University Press, 1993); Elinor Burkett, The Gravest Show on Earth: America in the Age of AIDS (Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 186; Harlon L. Dalton, “AIDS in Blackface,” originally published in Daedalus, summer 1989. Both essays are reprinted in Bull, While the World Sleeps.
17. EH to Barbara Smith, December 20, 1990; EH and Dorothy Beam to Barbara Smith, March 14, 1991, both BSP; Don Belton, “Gay Voices, Gay Lives,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 25, 1991; see also Phil Harper’s review in Gay Community News, June 9–15, 1991, in which he finds “the structure of Brother to Brother . . . tighter and more cohesive than that of In The Life.”
Chapter 6: Drugs into Bodies
1. Susan M. Chambré, Fighting for Our Lives: New York’s AIDS Community and the Politics of Disease (Rutgers University Press, 2006), chap. 5. For a fuller analysis of how the New York Times treated AIDS up through 1989, see Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism (MIT Press, 2002), p. 137, fn. 15.
2. Douglas Crimp with Adam Rolston, “Stop the Church,” originally in AIDS Demo Graphics (1990), reprinted in While the World Sleeps, ed. Chris Bull (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003).
3. Duberman diary, June 1, 1989, in my possession (though I’ve published this entry in Duberman, Waiting to Land (The New Press, 2009), 64–65.
4. Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (University of Chicago Press, 2009) esp. chap. 4; Jim Eigo, “The City as Body Politic/ The Body as City unto Itself,” in From ACT UP to the WTO, ed. Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk (Verso, 2002).
5. Crimp with Rolston, “Stop the Church” and “Seize Control of the FDA,” originally in AIDS Demo Graphics (1990), republished in Bull, While the World Sleeps.
6. Darrell Yates Rist, “The Deadly Costs of an Obsession,” The Nation, February 13, 1989; follow-up responses, including my own, are in the issues of March 20 and May 1, 1989. For another instance of exasperation over the Rist piece, see Crimp, Melancholia, 144–45.
7. John-Manuel Andriote, Victory Deferred, rev. ed. (2011), 222–23; Chambré, Fighting for Our Lives, 127–29; Gould, Moving Politics, 285–86; Crimp with Rolston, “Stop the Church,” 171–77.
8. Gould, Moving Politics, passim; Maxine Wolfe, “AIDS and Politics: Transformation of Our Movement,” originally an October 6, 1989, speech—an edited version is in Bull, While the World Sleeps.
9. Jennifer Brier, Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), esp. chap. 5; Elinor Burkett, The Gravest Show on Earth: America in the Age of AIDS (Houghton Mifflin, 1995), chap. 6; Wayne Turner e-mail to me, January 28, 2013 (EH had no involvement with ACT UP/DC).
10. EH, “Family Jewels,” in Ceremonies (Cleis, 1992), 119; Robinson as quoted in Andriote, Victory Deferred, 195; Brier, Infectious Ideas, 163–71, 184 (Agosto).
11. Celia Farber, interview with MC, Spin 10, no. 1 (1994); Gould, Moving Politics, 282 (Shilts), 334, 340, 346, 348, 363 (Saunders), 374–83; Harlon L. Dalton, “AIDS in Blackface,” Daedalus, Summer 1989. JS criticized TAG, as well as Project Inform, on the grounds that it was “collaborationist”—that is, sat “on all these committees with industry and government representatives” (Sean Strub, “The Good Doctor,” POZ, July 1998). The paragraphs from “As yet . . . to climb” are essentially taken from my Waiting to Land (The New Press, 2009).
12. Louis Grant, “Open Letter” of January 4; MC to CRI Board, January 11; Grant to MC, August 10, 17, September 11, 12, 29, November 1, December 26, all 1989, all MCP; Grant to Board, January 4, 1990, MCP; MC, “The Finale,” Genre, December 1993; Gregg Gonsalves to MC, July 27, 1993; MC to Gonsalves, August 19, 1993, both MCP. Burkett, Gravest, chap. 7 (women); MC’s Speech as Grand Marshal of the Gay Pride Rally, 6/29/91 (“brutal”), DVD, courtesy Dworkin; JS to Paula Treichler, December 27, 1989 (“romantic”), JSNYPL.
13. MC, 3-p. memo to Board of Directors and Staff, May 10, 1989, MCP; MC to Judy and Sam Peabody, February 27, 1989, MCP.
14. MC to Mathilde Krim, April 30, 1989, MCP; PWA Newsline, January 1989; MC to Bill Case, July 30, 1989, MCP; MC to Editor, Time, June 24, 1989, MCP. Mathilde Krim basically supported amfAR financially for at least the first year and a half of its existence. At some point JS, having been made to feel unwelcome as a result of his opposition to the notion that AIDS would soon spread to heterosexuals, resigned in frustration (JS interviews with Sean Strub, SSJS).
15. Multiple interviews with Richard Dworkin; Bay Area Reporter, April 13, 1989; Bay Times, May 1989; The Advocate, November 21, 1988; Effie Pow, “The Flirtations Tantalize,” The Ubyssey, February 14, 1991; “Untied Inspirations,” Network 1, no. 3 (December 1990); Outweek, March 6, 1991; Cliff Townsend to me, April 13, 2013.
16. Ron Simmons, “An Interview with Marlon Riggs,” 11-p. typescript, [1990?], SC; Thomas Avena, ed., Life Sentences (Mercury House,
1994) 265.
17. EH to Gittens and Zalbowitz, May 7, 1990, SC; phone interview with Jim W. Marks, March 5, 2013; New York Times, June 25, 1991; Gay Community News, February 25–March 3, 1990; Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 16, 1991; Isaac Jackson, “An Open Letter to the Black Gay Community on Loving Black Men and ‘Sleeping With the Enemy,” 5-p. ms., SC; for a more recent critical view of Tongues Untied, see John Champagne, The Ethics of Marginality (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), chap. 3—but see, too, the persuasive reply, particularly regarding EH, by E. Patrick Johnson, “ ‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother,” in Black Queer Studies, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Duke University Press, 2005); Chuck Kleinhaus and Julia Lesage, “Listening to the Heartbeat: Interview with Marlon Riggs,” UC Berkeley Library, http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/RiggsInterview.html; Avena, Life Sentences, 258–73; Kobena Mercer, “Dark and Lovely Too: Black Gay Men in Independent Film,” in Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, ed. Martha Gever, John Greyson, and Pratibha Parmar (Between the Lines, 1993), 238–56.
18. Kleinhaus and Lesage, “Listening to the Heartbeat”; Avena, Life Sentences, 267; Gay Community News, February 25–March 3, 1990; EH, “Choice,” 6-p. typescript, BSP; EH, “Standing in the Gap,” FGAF.
19. “Where We Live: A Conversation with Essex Hemphill and Isaac Julien,” in speak my name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream, ed. Don Belton (Beacon, 1995); Darren Lenard Hutchinson, “ ‘Claiming’ and ‘Speaking’ Who We Are,” and Earl Ofari Hutchinson, “My Gay Problem, Your Black Problem,” both in Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Devon W. Carbado (New York University Press, 1999); Keith Boykin, Beyond the Down Low (Carroll and Graf, 2005), 216–17, 255–56; Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Black Gay Man (New York University Press, 2001), chap. 8.
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