Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  Struck at how full of children England was, Mike realized, as he put it, “how absolutely sequestered from reality I am—living in NYC in the USA as a queer man.” He didn’t want children—quite the contrary: he thought that “surely if hets [heterosexuals] knew before hand—truly knew—the horrific responsibility of raising kids, there’d be no more of them.” He felt that one aspect of straight resentment against gay people was precisely their freedom from child rearing, freedom to focus on their own needs and pleasure. His feminist sensibility rebelled at the sight of all those mothers traveling with kids: “Most engineer collapsible strollers and Kleenex and diapers and harnesses and candy and toys.” In awe, he watched them patiently tell their offspring, “No. Don’t bite Mommy”—leading the kid “to increase his screaming several decibels, while the father sits willfully oblivious reading the paper.” Little could Mike have guessed at the wave of gay parenting that would soon occur.

  The feminist in him delighted in the discovery of a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft in a museum—but he then became appalled when he spoke to the guide and she knew of Wollstonecraft only as “the mother-in-law of Shelley.” Mike the tourist was taken most of all with English botanical gardens. He thought them “spectacular” and couldn’t quite figure out “why verdure makes me so calm”; he thought maybe it was the smell. At one point they passed a couple of apple trees and Mike the cook was transported by the idea of “baking lard-crusted pies out of fresh apples. . . . I’m sure I could change Richard’s mind about fruit pies!”

  From London they went briefly to Paris. Richard spoke French, which was helpful, though verbal Mike hated being stripped of communication through language. But he loved being with Richard—“my sweetest man,” he called him—and he romantically picked wildflowers to press into a book to give him. Mike decided that what frightened straight men most—and he didn’t think “gay politicos” understood this—wasn’t the notion of sex between men, but rather affection. “Two men fucking they might understand—as aggression, as competition. But two men kissing? I would say that the average het male would be less offended watching one of Berkowitz’s S/M sessions than watching a loving and affectionate pairing of two men.”

  Throughout the trip, he and Richard succeeded in accommodating each other’s very different pace and style. Once awake in the morning, Mike quickly showered, brushed his teeth, and wanted to eat—breakfast was his favorite meal. Besides (as he put it), “I need focus, a goal, I can’t hang loose”; he was “no good at wandering aimlessly.” Richard was very nearly the opposite. He liked to take things slowly, especially in the morning: “Have a cigarette or two and read. Then, shave, then shower, then another cigarette, then maybe breakfast.” Mike, a non-smoker, nonetheless sympathized. “I wouldn’t want to travel with me,” he wrote. He realized that he and Richard were “oil and vinegar” but thought they made “a delicious if exotic salad dressing in these salad days. . . . We’re getting along amazingly well.” Mike only wished he had his health: “I feel I could move on and lead a good life.”

  “What does fate have in store?” he wrote sadly in his diary. “My pressing sense of my fragile mortality.”

  4

  The Mideighties

  Joe Beam’s ad soliciting manuscripts for a black gay male anthology initially produced only a few responses, and it made him more aware than ever that “the path I’m on is basically an untrodden one.” Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa had published the pioneering anthology This Bridge Called My Back for women of color in 1981, and Barbara Smith had put out a similar collection of writings for black feminists, Home Girls, in 1983, but nothing comparable existed for black gay men. Both Smith and Audre Lorde were supportive with their advice to Joe Beam both in terms of the specifics of contributors’ contracts and by way of general encouragement to persevere. And despite his discouragement at times, he did. By the spring of 1985, he’d collected about a hundred manuscripts from which to make his choices. In the end, he’d include twenty-eight contributors, several of them (including Essex) appearing more than once.1

  Part of Beam’s discouragement while putting the anthology together related to matters peripheral to it. Two of the contributors died of AIDS before Joe could fully edit their work, and in Philadelphia, where Beam lived, came the additionally horrifying news on May 13, 1985, that the police had bombed the building in which the black urban commune MOVE had long lived. The action destroyed sixty-one homes in the Osage Avenue neighborhood, killing eleven residents—five of them children—and leaving 250 people homeless. The only known adult to escape the fire, Ramona Africa, was sentenced to prison. Though MOVE had had a long series of conflicts and confrontations with its neighbors, it was inconceivable to many that Philadelphia’s first black mayor, Wilson Goode, would approve such violent and repressive action. The bombing produced a national uproar and a plethora of conflicting testimony and theories.2

  Essex was outraged at the bombing and wrote a poem to add to the new version of Voicescapes—a stripped-down version, without the elaborate slides and film that had been part of the original piece—that he, Wayson, and Michelle were performing in 1987:

  What will be bombed today?

  What will be bombed today?

  What will be bombed today?

  American café at noon

  A playground full of nappy heads.

  Do you dread your house will cinder

  and firemen stand ground

  watching the block burn to the

  ground like a Salem witch, a nigger

  in a tree?

  Do you see?

  Do you dread?

  Do the papers panic you?

  Do you sleep with a gun under your pillow?

  What will be bombed today?

  The A uptown?

  Another funeral in Soweto?

  An abortion clinic?

  What will be bombed today?

  A critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer who interviewed the trio after their performance told them that she felt their work “has no deliberate desire to unsettle, disorient and provoke audiences, [that] engagement comes from identification and understanding rather than confrontation.” Essex laughingly replied that he didn’t think you had to say, “I want to make this audience walk out of here with their minds in shatters, tatters, they’ll be recuperating next week.” “Valiums for everybody,” Michelle interjected. “Right!” Essex added, “a nurse at the door. Nurses in the bathroom. Nurses at the stage.” But, Michelle added, “we need a bigger budget to hire nurses.” On a more serious note, Essex told the interviewer that “I may, at the point of starting out, be heavily moved by something, something that I may have seen on the news or on the street or heard on the phone or in a letter or in a conversation. That may be the stepping stone, but where I wind up after that, I’m as amazed as everybody else because I’m just following the flow of what’s being unleashed.”

  Joe Beam was no less horrified by the MOVE bombing, by “the madness of the incident.” It heightened the moody sense he often had of feeling “real weary” or, as he put it succinctly to Isaac Jackson, his friend and managing editor of Blackheart, “Underneath this strong, efficient exterior is a man easily devastated.” And the horrors of the MOVE episode continued to have lingering effects on him. He felt that if it wasn’t for the anthology, “I’m sure I’d go into hiding. I just feel too vulnerable” and “I [am] weary of being misunderstood.”

  He wasn’t simply referencing the hostile power of the white world, which was real enough, but also the sense that he didn’t have a community: “You have to fight Black people for inclusion on grounds of sexuality; you have to fight white people for inclusion on grounds of race; you have to fight with other Black gay men on the grounds of age and jealousy. All I really want is a place where I can be all of who I am at the same time, a place where it’s not necessary to check parts of myself at the door.” Above all, he wanted a steady lover and, handsome and gifted as he was, seemed mystified at his inability t
o connect with one.3

  Temperamentally, Essex wasn’t nearly as anguished as Joe, nor as lonely. Until recently, moreover, he’d been living for three years with a partner (“Mel”), who ended up giving primacy to his career in the navy and broke off the relationship. Essex missed “the domestic repetition of beauty that is found in caring for and being cared for by a lover.” He thought it would console Joe to know that he, too, has “calendars of months that have gone by without so much as a hint of love. Or either love has come to me disguised so perfectly I have not, in all my haughtiness, seen it.” But Essex didn’t want to dwell on his own complaints. He wanted simply to tell Joe “quite frankly, I love you, for the man you are, which is why I believe our friendship will be forever. . . . A friendship tied to concerns that when galvanized will [help] us all. . . . Please stay well in spirit, and believe love will come to you and make you stronger, but be strong, now, while it seems love is not near. And please know, we’re brothers.”

  Essex did, unlike Joe, later enter into another relationship that again lasted for about three years. Several of his friends thought he made bad choices in his partners, and one of them felt Essex was in general attracted to men who mistreated him, the attraction a product of his early experience with his own abusive father. When word leaked out that the current lover had actually threatened Essex’s life, an alarmed Joe wrote to remind him that “you weren’t put on this planet to leave on the end of a jealous lover’s gun.” Essex himself referred to the dangers he risked in that relationship in a poem entitled “The Tomb of Sorrow”:

  I was your man lover,

  gambling dangerously

  with my soul.

  I was determined to love you

  but you were haunted

  by Vietnam.

  taunted by demons.

  In my arms you dreamed

  of tropical jungles,

  of young village girls

  with razors embedded in their pussies,

  lethal chopsticks

  hidden in their hair,

  and their nipples clenched

  like grenade pins

  between your grinding teeth.

  You rocked and kicked

  in your troubled sleep,

  as though you were fucking

  one of those dangerous cunts,

  and I was by your side,

  unable to hex it away,

  or accept that peace

  means nothing to you,

  and the dreams you suffer

  may be my only revenge.

  Despite Essex’s best efforts to bring him some solace, Joe’s dejection remained deep-seated. He could only briefly shake the sense that to the extent he was loved at all, it was “for what one does as opposed to who one is. . . . No-one wants to touch this baby. He writes well and does wonderful things, but don’t touch him.” Though he’d been motivated to do In The Life, he wrote Essex, “in an effort to create community, yet I’ve alienated much of the community in which I wish to belong. The book isn’t even out and I’ve been transferred to this league of folks who are idolized but not dealt with.” So sensitive was he that “a single shard from a cutting remark is enough to wound deeply, so I keep myself safe, at home: the door locked, phone off the hook. . . . Rejections like mercury accumulate in the body, in the heart. I have had more than my share. Initially I could dodge the rebuffs, discount individual reactions, but the cumulative effect is shattering.”

  Joe was fortunate in that at least his immediate family, his parents, Sun and Dorothy Beam, supported, if warily, his lifestyle and his literary efforts. His father, born in Barbados, was (in Joe’s words) “kind and gentle . . . but we are not friends. . . . We are silent when alone together. I do not ask him about his island childhood or his twelve years as a janitor or about the restaurant he once owned where he met my mother. He does not ask me about being gay or why I wish to write about it. Yet we are connected. . . . His thick calloused hands have led me this far and given me options he never dreamed of.”

  With his mother, Dorothy, Joe had a much deeper connection. He showed her everything he wrote, though he felt that “somewhere along the line she has either stopped reading it or simply doesn’t comment upon it.” Yet in one letter to him, Dorothy Beam warned him that “the world is a cruel place to live,” and she worried that his open acknowledgment of his homosexuality would bring him harm. “Joe,” she wrote, “gay people have a long way to go before society will truly accept them.” Over lunch one day, Joe kidded his mother about starting a meeting of parents of black gay activists, where they “could sit around exchanging horror stories about their crazed children.” Dorothy laughed but seemed as if she might actually be interested. “We are putting them through changes,” Joe wrote Essex, “forcing them to grow as we are doing.”4

  Joe also felt lucky in his job at Giovanni’s Room. He considered the bookstore “a warm, supportive, nurturing place to work.” The money wasn’t great, but he felt he was making “a contribution to the gay community, and the community at large.” To him, Giovanni’s Room was a wonderful “vestige of the 1960s.” The store used a toolbox for a cash register, let people sit as long as they liked on the sofa to read books they might not be able to afford, and posted free of charge a wide variety of community announcements and flyers. In many ways, Giovanni’s Room functioned more like a community center than a business.

  Yet the time came when Joe felt he had to devote himself full-time to the anthology, and on July 12, 1985, he left his job at the bookstore. Ed Hermance, its co-owner, knowing about Joe’s project, had all along been generous about letting him take time off, and Hermance now gave him a large enough severance check to free him to work solely on the anthology till at least the end of the summer.

  All of which gave Joe a needed boost of confidence: “I am more sure each day,” he wrote a friend, “that this is precisely what I should be doing. Everything that has needed to happen for this book to become a reality has happened.” He was nearing a final decision about which essays and poems to include and he’d lined up a group of strong contributors. They included many of the prominent and promising black gay male writers of the day—the poet and novelist Melvin Dixon; Gil Gerald, the executive director of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays (which was headquartered in D.C.); Essex (four poems); the essayist and poet Craig Harris; the Haitian-born poet Assotto Saint, who also wrote musical theater pieces; the well-known science fiction writer Samuel Delany; and Sidney Brinkley, the founder of Blacklight—and Joe had left space as well for a significant number of unknown newcomers.

  By mid-September, though, he was so low on finances that he couldn’t afford the bus fare from Philadelphia to D.C. to pay Essex a surprise visit. Not that Essex was doing much better; at one point his phone service was cut off for lack of payment. Both men were living the lives they wanted to, and they treated financial hardship as an inescapable aspect of the choices they’d made. Essex self-published his latest chapbook of poetry, Earth Life, in 1985, and then turned it into a performance piece with Wayson—who in Essex’s view was “becoming such a fine musician and a willing adventurer.” Joe, too, was nearing completion of the manuscript for In The Life, though toward the end he gave in to necessity and took a part-time sales job at a Barnes and Noble bookstore, while also moonlighting as a part-time restaurant waiter to make ends meet. He finished the manuscript in early November 1985, and the prominent gay press Alyson accepted it for publication.

  By way of celebration, he and seven others, including Essex, drove out to St. Louis in a rented fifteen-passenger van for the NCBLG weekend-long convention. For Joe it was an “absolutely fantastic” event. He renewed old friendships with people like Pat Parker and for the first time met face-to-face with people he’d talked with on the phone countless times, thus initiating new friendships. To top off the excitement, he was elected to the NCBLG board of directors and asked to edit its new newsmagazine, Black/Out (Blackheart, Brinkley’s earlier journal of writing an
d graphics by black gay men, had ceased publishing after its third issue); Essex, Barbara Smith, and Audre Lorde all joined Black/Out’s publications committee. Essex, too, had been stirred by the convention. The NCBLG’s “Statement of Purpose” tied in closely with his own values. Its emphasis on “Black Pride and Solidarity” concurred with his own primary commitment to creating “positive attitudes between and among Black non-Gays and Black Gays.”5

  But if racial solidarity took primacy over gay liberation for Essex, the former didn’t invalidate or cancel out the latter. Multiple ingredients based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, education, income, and so forth contribute to forming an individual “identity,” rising and falling in comparative importance depending on immediate circumstances. Just as the NCBLG statement declared the need “to work cooperatively with other national and local lesbian/gay organizations in the pursuit of human/civil rights,” so Essex the individual would himself acknowledge a few years later that “a lot of my recognition is attributable to support from the gay and lesbian community,” particularly but not exclusively from the black gay community.

  The St. Louis convention also set in motion plans for holding the first National Black AIDS Conference for “some time late in 1986.” Essex also planned what he called “the Membership Cabaret,” a series of performances that included his friends Wayson and Michelle and was designed to extend the rolls of NCBLG’s membership. Joe Beam knew the owners of the Allegro café in Philadelphia and organized one of the events there.