Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  Yet as Essex and other black gay people well knew, social and cultural circles in D.C. were mostly divided along racial grounds. One of the best-known hangouts for black gay artists was (Valerie) Papaya Mann’s brownstone in Northeast D.C.—a salon-like setting reminiscent of 1920s Harlem Renaissance gathering spots in New York City, of which A’Lelia Walker’s and Carl Van Vechten’s were probably the most famous. Papaya herself had come out in the midseventies and immediately gotten involved in D.C. lesbian and gay life, organizing a variety of social events and becoming a central figure in Sapphire Sapphos, Washington’s first organization for African American lesbians. It was at Papaya’s that Essex first met his future good friends Chris Prince and Garth Tate and then, through them, any number of other black gay singers, writers, painters, and filmmakers.

  One of the early (1979–80) products of these gatherings was the publication of the short-lived but handsomely produced bimonthly Nethula Journal of Contemporary Literature (the name “Nethula” had come to Essex in a dream). He co-founded Nethula with two young women, Kathy Anderson, whom he’d known at the University of Maryland, and Cynthia Lou Williams. Essex served not only as the journal’s publisher, but also as its graphic designer—he’d learned offset printing and typesetting at one of his part-time jobs, and showed a striking gift for it. With wonderful paper stock, stunning cover design, and challenging content, both poetry and prose, Nethula was a state-of-the-art publication devoted largely to the work of the newest generation of black artists. Both Sterling Brown and E. Ethelbert Miller of the older group of black writers were among the journal’s five contributing editors. Miller especially—a poet on staff at the Howard University library—served as an important bridge between the generations.

  In 1980, Miller arranged for Essex and the black lesbian poet and filmmaker Michelle Parkerson to share a bill together at the citywide Ascension Poetry Reading Series at Howard University’s Founders Library, which Miller coordinated. Michelle had graduated from Temple University, was then working at the local NBC television affiliate, and had just completed her first film, But Then, She’s Betty Carter. The two had never met before and the connection proved immediate and consequential for both. As Michelle recalls the evening of their joint reading, “I was just struck by this young brother, whose poems were incredible . . . beautifully sensual and homoerotically brave, which was right where I was at with my own work.” After the event concluded, Michelle approached Essex: “Hey, where you been all my life?” she laughingly asked, and told him how much she loved his work. Essex felt the same about hers and the two became fast friends. In the mid-1980s Michelle wrote a poem, “Highwire,” that celebrated the friendship:

  We poise above teetering earth

  Defying limitation

  Mere lines suspend us

  We do not know fear

  A precision for danger

  Instructs our hand

  Chaperones the passions

  Propelling us:

  Partners

  Skin to skin

  Flung vast beyond gender

  The sweaty grip of Spirit

  is all that joins us

  Sequined

  Caped

  We test precarious

  air.

  The two had much in common. Both came from the Anacostia section of Southeast Washington, both were living in the “gayborhood” of Adams Morgan, and both were gay writers who (in Michelle’s words) “loved to push edges.” Anacostia sat beyond the army/marine barracks at the southern edge of Capitol Hill and was mostly black and poor. As Essex would later put it, “the city doesn’t think kindly of Anacostia. . . . [It’s] viewed as a jungle of sorts, breeding crime, poverty and other social ails and traumas no-one really wants to discuss.” But Southeast D.C. had been the home of Frederick Douglass, and a number of black artists had lived there. Essex felt a strong attachment to the area, which he made clear in a later poem, “My Funny Valentine/for Southeast”:

  Green Dolphin Street is Kind of Blue.

  Cool cats lean on the Avenue.

  They keep swing and bop alive.

  They brew rhythms, cook blues

  In mumbo sauce . . .

  Some people can’t see Southeast

  For the Harlem it is.

  They hear go go and call it noise,

  Fear its criminal,

  But it’s the best of our blood

  Dignified without violins.

  In addition to Michelle, Essex began to work with other writers he was meeting at Papaya’s and elsewhere, including Gideon Ferebee Jr. and Larry Duckett (Larry would for a time become a close friend and performance partner). What followed within a few years in the early eighties was a proliferation of contacts, multitasking (Essex, for one, became poet, graphic artist, organizer, set designer, and actor), artist collectives, publications (the first, MOJA, would last for only a few issues but led to a host of others, including ARISE, BGM, Women in the Life, and the Au Courant group in Philly), performance sites, and personnel—all of which helped spawn the widely shared sense that an outburst of creative energy was in play strong enough to warrant being called a second Harlem Renaissance, “second” in relation to time, not quality, and this time around, moreover, centrally, overtly gay. “Every week,” as photographer and writer Ron Simmons tells it, “there would be an opening, or a reading, or an exhibition—it was incredible.” The multiplicity of events from roughly 1980 to 1985 made for animated high spirits, a heady, intoxicating buzz—and a hectic, hazy chronology:

  —in 1980 Essex became a founding member of the performance poetry group Station to Station. Its first performance, at D.C.’s Gala Hispanic Theatre, was also the first time Wayson heard Essex read publicly. The poem he chose was “Balloons,” his intense take on the serial killer John Wayne Gacy. It left Wayson feeling “awed by the audacity and freakishness of the subject matter”:

  In black plastic bags

  tied at the top

  they were buried.

  Their faces

  swollen with death

  rise in my dreams.

  I was seventeen

  when I read of them:

  young boys, young men

  lured to a house in Texas.

  Their penises were filled

  with excited blood:

  first hard then soft they became

  as Death with its blistered lips

  kissed them one by one . . .

  —in late December 1981, Essex made his first appearance on the late Grace Cavalieri’s WPFW radio show The Poet and the Poem (he would appear again in 1985 and for a third time, with Wayson, in 1986).

  —Nethula continued to publish for a while longer, with Essex assuring the poet (and future biographer of Audre Lorde) Alexis de Veaux that it would no longer be as “thematic” as the initial number. He told her, too, that he was “pleasantly stunned” to read her piece on “Sister Love” in Essence: “I could feel the courage it took to name and say what is real on this human journey we are all making. . . . You made me proud. . . . I seem to be realizing how important coalescing is going to be among our variousness [sic] in order to make change and survive. This is no place to rest. There must be ‘freedom . . . for all of us.’ The synthesizing of politics and culture, and who we are . . .”12

  —Essex now began to self-publish his poetry chapbooks. After a number of commercial publishers told him that they liked his work but “you’re a poet and a young one and come back some time later,” Essex decided, “with no concern about accusations of vanity and the like . . . to get my words out . . . to take a chance on myself. Trust my own judgment a little more. Become self-sufficient.” He felt that the first step “in self-empowerment and control of your image is to do it yourself; from that point of view there is less of a chance of your message being distorted or diluted.” He decided to call his venture Be Bop Books—“because there is so much music in my life now.” In 1982 he published Diamonds Was in the Kitty and Some of the People We Love Are Terroris
ts; the following year he issued four hundred copies of Plums. In 1985 would come the more ambitious Earth Life, which the Washington Post would favorably review, Essex telling its reporter that he drew most of his subjects “from personal experience,” and citing Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Billie Holiday as his “influences.” In 1986 he’d publish Conditions, his most substantial work to date; the critic Donald Hutera would praise it as “rarely didactic . . . not experimental . . . more of a tender-tough confessee . . . he pares down his words and phrases carefully, for maximum rhythmic impact.”

  —starting in 1982, Essex and Larry Duckett found a group they called Cinque (named after the West African Joseph Cinqué, the legendary hero who led a successful mutiny on the slave ship Amistad in 1839). The following year Essex invited Wayson to join them, adding music to their poetry performances. The trio started to perform publicly, including at the black gay bar Bachelor’s Mill. Cinque’s performances blended jazz, pop, and words, which Essex named “choral poetry—a kind of melodic and intelligent rap music.” As Wayson describes it, the three “would recite in unison or would weave their voices together, dividing the lines or stanzas between voices, the pattern varied to suit the particular poem.” All the words were memorized in advance of a performance, the three men meeting at least twice a week for two to three hours and then, as a performance date approached, increasing rehearsal time to three to four times a week. They recorded all rehearsals and listened intently to the recordings in order to critique their own process. This strenuous schedule was eased by smoking a joint or two before each rehearsal.

  In “Brass Rail” (named after a black gay bar)—which Essex called his “breakthrough piece” (and which would later appear in Marlon Riggs’ film Tongues Untied)—“one voice starts at the end of the poem and another at the beginning, so that they cross, repeating a line in the middle.” They were using the speaking voice as an instrument of musicality, employing the “ecstatic call-and-response of the Baptist church to convey the erotic urgency of a night in the black gay bar”:

  I saw you last night.

  Many occupants are never found

  in the basement.

  Many canoes overturn

  of the Brass Rail.

  Your dark, diva’s face.

  a leg

  lushing and laughing.

  I hear the sea,

  your voice

  screaming,

  falling from the air,

  dancing with the boys on the edge of funk,

  twilight.

  Another main feature of the performance style that began with Cinqué and continued throughout their work during this period was (in Wayson’s words) “the idea of considering the natural spoken inflection as musical pitches and trying to match between the voices, so it sounded like one person speaking.” This gave the sound richness and resonance; in some pieces they actually sang, providing a continuum between normal speech and music.

  —Cinqué developed a loyal following. Wayson was quoted in the Washington Post saying “there is a big tradition of jazz poetry, which we are a part of but not limited to. We’re trying to overlap between some already established traditions [to develop something] that, if not brand new, is creative and fresh.” Wyatt O’Brian Evans, a friend of Essex’s, attended one performance on a sweltering night in 1985 and found it “absolutely mesmerizing.” The writer Jim Marks, of the gay bookstore Lambda Rising, was so enthralled with Cinque that he attended not once, but three times. Wayson recalls that the stillness of their audiences during a performance was so profound that “the cliché ‘you could hear a pin drop’ was literally true.”

  —Wayson briefly left Cinqué for about a year to work in a band and was replaced by Chi Hughes, both a poet and a performer. In 1984 Essex, too, left to form a duo with Wayson, billing themselves simply as “Essex Hemphill and Wayson Jones.” They performed at D.C.’s Blues Alley and at the ENIKAlley coffeehouse. Larry and Chi carry on Cinqué together.

  —The Coffeehouse became the most prominent nurturing ground and outlet for gay black artists in D.C., and Ray Melrose its chief figure. Located between I and K Streets in Northeast Washington in an old two-story carriage house owned by Ray’s partner, in what some Washingtonians viewed as an “unsafe” part of town—meaning that to reach the Coffeehouse you had to come off the street and walk down an alley. Ray was (according to Wayson) “irreverent and in your face . . . charismatic, extremely intelligent, arrogant, creative, connective.” He would bring people together, was (as the photographer Sharon Farmer describes him), “a great unifier, a hero who tied all the threads together.” Ray was also one of the founders of the D.C. Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, and an activist in other regards as well. A few years later he would share a house with Wayson for a time. Later still, in 1994, he would be one of many from the black D.C. artistic community who would die of AIDS. But in the early 1980s, according to Wayson, AIDS wasn’t “a real issue. . . . It was around then, but we didn’t know about it.” When the Washington Blade ran a brief story in July 1981 that a few cases of some rare “gay cancer” had occurred in New York City and California, the news hardly registered. Such weird, isolated incidents—like Legionnaires’ disease or toxic shock syndrome—were always surfacing, and would, it was assumed, just as suddenly disappear.

  The Coffeehouse had a fireplace, a welcoming atmosphere, and an open loft with a rail around it that overlooked the main floor. Chris Prince remembers it as a “very special” place, “vibrant artistically,” a cutting-edge outpost for mostly (but not entirely) African American gay and lesbian artists. They chipped in a few dollars each to keep logs in the fire (the place was unheated) and to pay for minimal snacks. The Coffeehouse when crowded held at most thirty or forty people. Performances were predominantly by local African American artists, but not solely—the black lesbian vocal duo Casselberry and DuPree and the New York poetry collective Other Countries were among the many well-known figures who performed there early on. Later, in 1985, the Coffeehouse would play host for three days of performances to the Blackheart collective, which included Joe Beam, Craig G. Harris, Donald Woods, and Assotto Saint—by then all well-known figures in the black gay artistic world. For Essex, the Coffeehouse proved an artistic awakening ground. He met a large number of other black artists there and watched them “work out the butterflies.” He and Wayson not only performed there together, but Essex did some of his first solo readings.

  —Michelle Parkerson, who’d been friendly with Essex since 1980, became part of a circle of friends that also included Sharon Farmer (the well-known community photographer) and her lover Joyce Wellman, the painter. Michelle joined Alexis de Veaux in a joint reading sponsored by Nethula at the Market Five Gallery, which the African American journalist Dorothy Gilliam praised in the Washington Post as another important marker of the growth of a creative community among black gays and lesbians in D.C. Another marker came in 1983 when Michelle and Essex received a collaborative performance grant from the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) to co-produce Murder on Glass, an experimental dramatization of their poetry, for which Wayson mixed sound and provided music. The WPA was a nonprofit visual and performing arts space in operation since 1975 that had become the premier venue in D.C. for postmodern work; it was particularly devoted to showcasing new artists who lived in the D.C. area. Murder on Glass was staged in 1983 at the WPA’s Monday Night Performance Series in its black box theater, which accommodated two hundred people.

  Murder on Glass was conceived by Essex and Michelle in the context of a crack epidemic, accompanied by drug wars, that by the early 1980s had become rampant, especially in their own Southeast neighborhood in D.C. Serial murders occurred along the freeway, chopped-up bodies of young men and women showing up randomly in garbage bags on the strip of Interstate 295, the borderline between Southeast and the rest of Washington. The duo described Murder on Glass as “contemporary urban poetry” visually underscored through a “stark and minimalist” backdrop. On
entering the performance space, the audience was confronted by DayGlo body outlines and black plastic bags that moved and rustled on the stage floor, eighties club music with an avant-garde edge sounding in the background. Suddenly the lights came on, a target-practice figure unscrolled onstage, and the live torsos of young men crept from the garbage bags as Essex, standing in the foreground, started to read from his powerful ode “Homocide (for Ronald Gibson),” a young transvestite hustler whose chopped-up body had been one of those found in a trash bag on Interstate 295:

  Grief is not apparel.

  Not like a dress, a wig

  Or my sister’s high-heeled shoes . . .

  While I wait,

  I’m the only man who loves me.

  They call me “Star”

  because I listen

  to their dreams and wishes.

  But grief is darker.

  it is a wig

  that does not rest gently

  on my head.

  Essex, Wayson, and Michelle continued to work collaboratively, but one theater piece, due to be performed in Brooklyn, produced conflict between the two men. Apparently at some point Essex insisted (“adamantly,” according to Wayson) that Wayson quit his day job, move in with him to save money, and that the two devote themselves full-time to becoming artists. The idea was “way too much” for Wayson; he “couldn’t imagine not having a regular paycheck—I had absolutely no talent for frugality,” he humorously admits. With hindsight, he acknowledges that he was also afraid of being “totally subsumed” in Essex’s vision. Wayson felt that Essex was “the most ambitious person I’ve ever known, and had a backbone of steel.” His response to Wayson’s hesitation was to tell him that he “needed to grow a spine.” If he had, Wayson later wryly commented, that would have produced still more conflict in their relationship.