Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  In general, though, How to Have Sex was well received, selling nearly all of the five thousand copies printed. “This is the sanest, most sensible advice I’ve read yet about AIDS,” wrote Edmund White, the novelist and co-author of the liberatory The Joy of Gay Sex. Dennis Altman, the well-known Australian writer of many gay-themed books, including The Homosexualization of America, hailed the pamphlet: “At last: a response to the effect of AIDS on our lives that goes beyond fears and myths to suggest positive actions.” Both GMHC and the state of New York flatly refused to distribute the pamphlet, but most people seem to have felt that in the face of conflicting dogmas, murky theorizing, and hysterically aggressive moralizing, Callen and Berkowitz had produced a pioneering, modulated, nonhectoring guide, and that it did something to assuage the confusion and anguish of those who’d considered celibacy as the only possible safeguard against death.

  The pamphlet elevated the two men to the status of minicelebrities, and Mike, especially, received a host of invitations to speak and write. His careful, moving remarks to the New York congressional delegation so impressed Representative Geraldine Ferraro that on May 18, 1983, she had them read into the Congressional Record. Mike eloquently described to the delegation the process by which at least some gay people were being radicalized as a result of the epidemic: “The tragedy of AIDS has made many . . . take a new look at the situation of America’s other disenfranchised groups. We are beginning to see that homophobia and racism are not, as some of us thought, totally unrelated. We are beginning to see that America’s fear and ignorance of homosexuals and its hate and bigotry toward black and brown people are not just coincidental.”17

  Mike pointed out that in the few years since AIDS had first been recognized, it had killed more people than swine flu, toxic shock syndrome, Legionnaires’ disease, and cyanide-laced Tylenol combined. Yet the federal government had continued to ignore the epidemic. After all, the disease had struck only “disenfranchised segments of American society: homosexual men, heroin abusers, Haitian entrants and hemophiliacs,” plus some prisoners, sex workers, “and the children of high-risk groups who are also victims of poverty.” Mike felt sure, he told the New York congressional delegation, that “if such a deadly disease were affecting more privileged members of American society, there can be no doubt that the government’s response would have been immediate.”

  He ended the speech with these telling and poignant remarks: “Surely when you first dreamed of holding public office you did not, in the furthest reaches of your imagination, foresee that your duties would include having breakfast on a Monday morning with a homosexual facing a life-threatening illness. You can be sure that ten—five—or even one year ago, I could not have imagined the possibility that I, too, would be up here begging my elected representatives to help me save my life. But there you are. Here I am. And that is exactly what I am doing.”

  Within two weeks of giving that speech, Mike, on June 1, 1983, spoke to the New York State Senate Committee on Investigation and Taxation. He reiterated many of the same points he’d previously made to the New York congressional delegation but put more emphasis on the demeaning and legally incriminating sorts of questions that government researchers were commonly asking AIDS patients. In the current CDC questionnaire, for example, they were being asked if they’d had sex with animals, and if so, how often; asked, too, to detail sexual practices “which are illegal in a number of states”; and asked as well to list which illicit drugs they’d taken. The answers were then stored on government computers, and many patients rightly doubted if confidentiality could be ensured. As a result, most AIDS patients were not providing truthful or helpful information to researchers.

  As Mike started to become better known, the media came calling regularly. His first experience with television in the fall of 1982 taught him much about the need to arm himself in advance for future encounters. That first trial by fire was an interview for CBS national news. It lasted a half hour, but when it aired that night the segment had been cut to twenty seconds. That was Mike’s first lesson: master the art of the sound bite. He was a quick learner, and mischievous. From then on he’d decide in advance of an interview the one or two points he wanted to make—and would then make them, come hell or high water. At that first CBS interview, he’d been asked the appalling question that he’d hear repeated hundreds of times in the future by different interviewers: “How does it feel to know you’re going to die?” He’d stumbled that first time around, unprepared for the callousness of the question. Thereafter, he learned to use the question as an excuse to make whatever point he wanted to; he would pause dramatically and then smoothly say, “You know, that reminds me of . . .” and then swiftly proceed to deliver his preplanned sound bite.

  But though he learned how to steer an interview, Mike would never get over the discrimination and abuse that attended such sessions. At NBC, he became aware that the other guests for segments of the show were together in a guest lounge—but Mike had been asked to wait, by himself, in a different room. The others were taken one at a time for makeup; Mike wasn’t offered any. When, eventually, they came to take him to the studio for his interview, a soundman “tossed a microphone at me and told me to pin it on myself. I noticed that he was wearing rubber gloves. I had never met a sound person who didn’t prefer themselves to pin the microphone. I asked him to please do it for me. He refused. I was faced with a terrible choice. I could storm off the set, I could get angry on camera, or I could swallow my anger, pin the microphone on and use my minute of airtime to spread a little hope” (the segment was about long-term survival). Shaking with anger, Mike chose the latter course. But as soon as he left the studio he put in a call to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU acted swiftly—and henceforth NBC was forced to educate its employees about AIDS.

  As hysteria about AIDS continued to mount, irrational practices of various kinds were taking hold. One union of social workers threatened to go out on strike if forced to help AIDS patients fill out social security or welfare forms. When Sonnabend—who’d joined with Dr. Mathilde Krim and other colleagues to form the AIDS Medical Foundation (a precursor to amfAR) for coordinating research—tried to send a package to another colleague, the delivery company refused to handle it because the word “AIDS” appeared in the name of the foundation on the return address. Mike did his best in his public appearances to educate people about the fact that AIDS was the kind of contagion that develops within an individual over a period of time and was not readily or casually transmitted. He emphasized the point that to date not a single case had been reported of a health care professional developing AIDS solely from contact with patients.

  Mike was fully aware that “conservative forces are attempting to use this tragedy for their own political ends.” In Texas, for example, a group calling itself “Doctors to Wipe Out AIDS” had called upon the state legislature to recriminalize consensual sodomy. In New York City, the Post had printed several of Pat Buchanan’s nationally syndicated and inflammatory articles calling AIDS “Nature’s retribution”—the implication being that those with AIDS, having committed unnatural acts, were themselves responsible for their own suffering and death.

  Joe Sonnabend may have had his “eccentric” moments, but he cared deeply about the stricken, terrified young men who clogged his waiting room. He cared as little about money as he did about surface appearances, and as the epidemic spread, he started to see patients who couldn’t afford to pay. And so, out of his own pocket, he’d foot the bills for lab tests or the shipment of samples and other assorted treatment expenses that his patients couldn’t afford. And he’d often spend hours with a single patient, as his waiting room overflowed, every chair taken, frightened young men standing against every wall. Had Sonnabend not had able assistants in Abby Tallmer, who often socialized with the patients while they waited, and Harley Hackett, the situation might well have become unendurable.18

  Eventually it did become untenable. Sonnabend started actually to lose rathe
r than make money. Hackett, an unsung hero of the epidemic, not only stopped drawing a salary, but dipped into his own savings in order to keep the bill collectors from closing down Joe’s office. Others on staff drew only minimal salaries. Joe remained obliviously unconcerned, but the day came when Hackett ran out of money and had to take another job; even then, he’d come into the office every Saturday evening to do the bookkeeping and to check on medical test results. It wasn’t masochism on Hackett’s part. He simply shared Mike’s belief that Sonnabend “was the perfect man at the perfect time.” Not everyone agreed, of course. Among the dissenters were the members of the co-op board at 49 West Twelfth Street, the building that housed Joe’s office. In a shock to him and his staff, the co-op refused to renew Sonnabend’s lease, citing the “danger” and “unsightliness” of so many AIDS patients coming in and out of the building—even though it was a fact, if not widely accepted, that AIDS couldn’t be casually transmitted. Joe fought the eviction in court—one of the first such cases challenging AIDS-related discrimination—but lost. He had to move late in 1983 to much less desirable quarters—to an office that lacked even a refrigerator.

  3

  Career Moves

  By mid-1983, Joe Beam “had grown weary of reading literature by white gay men.” One could read issue after issue of The Advocate, the national gay biweekly, without once encountering anything about black gay life. At the time, Beam worked at Giovanni’s Room, Philadelphia’s gay bookstore, and he longed to see more titles on its well-stocked shelves that spoke to black gay men like him. Beam also wrote for Au Courant, an alternative paper to the Philadelphia Gay News (which featured mostly white gay news). The same bias that Joe protested was true of the whole range of gay male publications—from porn mags like Drummer or Mandate to the highbrow literary magazine Christopher Street. Beam decided to do something about it. He sent out press releases through the black and gay media soliciting manuscripts for a black gay male anthology.1

  Beam wasn’t exaggerating or overreacting. The gay press, with its emphasis on the world of middle-class white men, accurately reflected the state of the gay political movement. The leading organization, the National Gay Task Force (belatedly renamed the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force), focused its efforts on trying to secure basic civil rights through the traditional devices of voting and lobbying—probably the most that could be hoped for at a time of deepening economic recession and conservatism (the columnist George Will, for one, denounced the efforts to pass gay rights ordinances as “part of the moral disarmament of society”).

  But the marginal status of the organized gay political movement and its pragmatic goal of trying to shrink the boundaries of official homophobia didn’t explain the absence in its ranks of people of color. The first African American elected to the board of the National Gay Task Force, Jon L. Clayborne, resigned after a short time, complaining that racism within the movement wasn’t being adequately addressed. The black writer Thomas Dotton angrily complained in a 1975 article, “Nigger in the Woodpile,” that after five years of working in the movement he’d become fed up with “the endless apologies and excuses” for failing to deal with the absence of black faces. Pat Parker, the black lesbian writer, put it more succinctly: the white lesbian’s foot might well be smaller than the white man’s, she wrote, “but it’s still on my neck.”2

  The Beam/Parker indictment certainly ties in with my own experience in the movement during those years. At a 1980 high-priced dinner at the Waldorf to celebrate Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale, I’d been struck at the near total absence of people of color, and two years later, when giving a speech at a Lambda Legal Defense Fund event, I referenced that fact and said that it seemed to me symbolic of the lack of representation of people of color in the agendas and personnel of our political organizations. As if in confirmation, a number of gay white men angrily walked out in the middle of my speech, and others later protested what one of them called my “inappropriate and offensive” remarks.

  Beam had read the writing not only of Pat Parker, but of other black lesbians as well—Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, June Jordan, and Michelle Cliff. Such works, he felt, had greatly informed his perspective, but he longed for comparable black gay male voices. There were certainly a number of prominent black gay writers in these years—preeminently James Baldwin and Samuel Delany—but none were active in the gay movement. Determined to repair the lack of representation, Beam set to work on the anthology he would call In The Life.

  Essex saw one of the ads Joe Beam placed soliciting material, immediately decided that he “wanted to be a part of it,” and submitted ten poems for Beam’s consideration; ultimately Beam included four of them when In The Life finally appeared in 1986. By then the two men had long since become friends. According to Essex, Beam initially wanted a romantic relationship but Essex firmly told him, “Joe, that is not for us.” But they became such close friends that Beam was the only man in the country who had keys to Essex’s apartment.3

  The two young men had much in common. They were roughly the same age (Joe was two years younger) and both had gone to college, although Joe had subsequently dropped out of graduate school at Iowa; neither believed in religion or in moneymaking as significant elements in their lives; both were handsome, smart, and full of natural charm; both were open and proud, yet wary, about their status as double-outsiders—usually angrier about being treated badly by white gays than by black straights; and both could be moody. Essex was the more passionate perfectionist and Joe the more easily given to depression (“I am so weary of my hopes being dashed against the rocks; after a while one (me) begins to internalize this sort of thing”). He was vulnerable, sensitive to slights, and deeply lonely. Unlike Essex, who’d started having sex (and writing poetry) at fourteen, Joe thought of himself as “asexual”—or, alternatively, as “androgynous”—and had his first experience at twenty-two.

  Both men, too, were deeply reliant on the friendship and advice of black lesbian feminists. “Lesbians,” Joe Beam wrote a friend, “appear to be so much more supportive of each other or am I just perceiving the grass as greener, but I am at a loss to find that quality of support from other gay men.” Joe’s particular mentor was Barbara Smith, founder of Kitchen Table Women of Color Press and author of the pioneering anthology Home Girls. Barbara gave Joe advice on issues ranging from literary agents and publishers to the wording of contributors’ forms. He also turned, on an occasional basis, to Audre Lorde (Zami), Anita Cornwell (Black Lesbian in White America), and the Latina writer Cherríe Moraga (Loving in the War Years). Essex’s special ally continued to be Michelle Parkerson.4

  Essex had already self-published two chapbooks, Diamonds Was in the Kitty (1982) and Plums (1983), and at least one poem of his had been printed as early as 1977 (in Obsidian). Others appeared soon after in Painted Bride Quarterly, Callaloo, and Black Scholar. The biggest break yet in Essex’s burgeoning career came in 1985 when he, Michelle Parkerson, and Wayson Jones performed for the first time at d.c. space, the most prestigious of all the outlets for the downtown arts scene. Located on Seventh and E Streets, and known to the cognoscenti simply as “the space,” the club presented everything from performance artists like Tim Miller (later to become a good friend of Mike Callen) and Karen Finley (she did her infamous piece, “Yams Up My Granny’s Ass” there), to progressive jazz like Sun Ra and the World Saxophone Quartet, to influential punk rock groups, to Cecil Taylor and Cassandra Wilson. “The place just glowed,” according to one frequent attendee; it “was electric with talent and love. It’s difficult for me not to weep remembering being there.” Ray Melrose, who’d run the Coffeehouse, became a manager at d.c. space, serving as a kind of bridge between the two venues, and Bill Warrell, d.c. space’s owner, proved particularly supportive, hosting an outdoor arts festival that took place right next to the National Portrait Gallery. Essex, Wayson, and Michelle also made strong connections at “the space” with those artists in the punk community who formed the soc
ial activist group Positive Force. By 1986 the three were regularly receiving favorable reviews from W. Royal Stokes, the jazz critic for the Washington Post, and word of their artistic promise had begun to spread beyond the borders of the District of Columbia. It was also in 1986 that d.c. space hosted a heralded monthlong performance series, “Four Nights of Music, Poetry and Disruption,” that also featured the gay and lesbian artists Cheryl Clarke, Jewelle Gomez, Chris Prince, and the rock group Betty.5

  Of Essex’s published work to date, an article he did for Essence was probably his most significant. “I am a homosexual” was its dramatic opening line, and he elaborated with a series of provocative comments. He claimed to have known since age five “that I would love men,” though he didn’t know at that early age that “ ‘brother,’ ‘lover,’ ‘friend’ would take on more intimate and dangerous meanings. I did not know a dual oppression, a dual mockery, would be practiced against me.”

  He went on to reveal in the article that when, at age nineteen, he told his parents he was gay, “they had trouble accepting the news.” His mother (as is often the case) blamed herself, though Essex assured her that no blame was involved and that homosexuality was entirely “natural,” as was “sensitivity”—it wasn’t a “sissy” thing. “I have yet to understand,” he wrote, “why emotional expression by men”—emotion other than anger, that is—“must be understated or under control when the process of living requires the capacity to feel and express.” Essex claimed that he got some encouragement from his family “to aggressively pursue my human rights,” though given his father’s emotionally distant and at times violent temperament and his mother’s ambivalence (at best) about his homosexuality, the human rights in question may well have been black, not gay.