Unexpectedly, Essex had to cancel the performance at the last minute, a cancellation that he mysteriously and somewhat ominously attributed to “circumstances related to my health.” He went into no detail, nor was Joe Beam forthcoming about some of his own proliferating physical symptoms. In a letter to Joe, Essex made an oblique reference to “believing this period of my life to be a test,” and Joe similarly acknowledged in a letter to his parents that “I am so tired and troubled all the time.” But beyond that, both men seemed to keep matters relating to their health primarily though not entirely to themselves.
When asked by an interviewer for the publication Network, “What’s your sense of the toll that AIDS has been taking on the Black gay creative community?” Essex bluntly answered, “It’s just been cutting it to shreds.” He thought “a fundamental mistake” had been made in the early 1980s: because the initial AIDS deaths seemed to be largely of gay white men, black gay men had felt they had little to worry about—“and that had been crazy.” It had led, Essex felt, to a dangerous passivity in regard to the epidemic. The myth of AIDS as a white disease, Essex believed, continued in 1986 to encourage inactivity within the gay people of color community. The writer Craig Harris was among those who broke through the barriers erected within and without the black gay community to emphasize publicly the havoc that AIDS was wreaking on their lives.
Harris had been a classmate of Abby Tallmer’s (Sonnabend’s assistant) at Vassar, and she describes him as “whip smart, witty, a sweetheart and while bold had a very, very shy side. He also had no tolerance for stupidity or bigotry of any kind.” Soon after graduating, Harris had become active with Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD) and was one of the organizers (others included Gil Gerald, the Reverend Carl Bean, Suki Ports, and Amanda Houston-Hamilton) of the July 18, 1986, National Conference on AIDS in the Black Community held in Washington, D.C. Some four hundred educators, health care providers, and activists attended.
When it came time for Harris to give his speech as conference coordinator, he spoke of the “need for culturally sensitive risk education in the Black community. We must consider how people at risk perceive themselves and address that. For example, black bisexual men tend not to identify themselves as bisexuals, so they may exclude themselves from information targeted to gay men.” Harris was well aware that as of 1986 the crisis of AIDS in the black community had reached staggering proportions. Although African Americans comprised 12 percent of the population, 25 percent of the diagnosed AIDS cases were among blacks—with only 30 percent of them self-identifying as gay and 42 percent as IV drug users. Moreover, the mean survival time for blacks after diagnosis was eight months—compared to eighteen to twenty-four months among whites: this differential reflected, among much else, that blacks avoided and/or couldn’t afford to seek health care until they’d reached the end stage of the disease. Later in the conference, a number of its organizers talked for more than two and a half hours—the meeting had been scheduled for fifteen minutes—with Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, then in the midst of preparing what would be a historically important report on AIDS.
Soon after, in October 1986, Harris daringly disrupted the American Public Health Association’s first session on AIDS. Not a single person of color had been invited to participate in the event, but Harris was determined to be heard. He stormed the stage, grabbed the microphone away from San Francisco health commissioner Dr. Mervyn Silverman, shouted, “I will be heard!” and proceeded to lecture the audience on the specific challenges AIDS posed in communities of color. The following year, Harris and other activists formed the National Minority AIDS Council “to build leadership within communities of color to address the challenges of HIV/AIDS”; Patti LaBelle became one of its spokespersons.
Neither Essex nor Joe Beam felt equipped to match Harris’ public activism. The two were intensely private people who disliked and avoided speaking about their own health issues, even with friends, preferring to focus on staying busy with their writing and with black gay cultural activism. In the 1990s Essex would occasionally speak out openly, and eloquently, about “being a person with AIDS,” but in the mid- to late 1980s his poetry rarely referenced AIDS. “O Tell Me, Brutus,” published in 1986, was among the few:
O tell me, Brutus,
With corpses decomposing
In the river,
Loved ones keeping fevers
Quiet in city hospitals,
The backrooms, locked and chained,
The police with new power to seize
And search our hearts, our kisses,
Our mutual consents around midnight . . .6
Late that same year, Alyson published Joe Beam’s anthology In The Life, with an initial printing of 7,500 copies. Giovanni’s Room threw a book party for him, and within the first three weeks of publication the store sold 120 copies. Although the anthology was ignored in the straight black world, it garnered considerable attention in the gay community. Several black gay reviewers offered searching evaluations rather than perfunctory praise, though they differed with one another over the book’s strengths and weaknesses. If any of the contributors came off unscathed, it was Essex. One reviewer praised his “open dark, ruminating glimpses of the human condition” and his “deceptively plain, visceral use of language.” The somewhat well-known black gay novelist Larry Duplechan wrote in the national gay publication The Advocate that he found the anthology “an uneven reading experience”—yet he singled out Essex’s poems as “more finely wrought than the short stories” in the anthology.
Both Joe’s parents attended the book party, and he felt “so pleased and thrilled that my father had the courage to come out and support his gay son. Those few moments with me made up for so much in the past, so much.” Joe started to get letters almost every day from black gay men around the country telling him “how heartened they’ve become from reading the book.” Within a month, the glossy new thirty-six-page issue of Black/Out appeared, and a nonprofit foundation, the Chicago Resource Center, simultaneously renewed its annual $10,000 funding of the publication for another year. Alyson and Joe were soon discussing a sequel to In The Life, tentatively titled “Brother to Brother.” Joe found all this “exciting but overwhelming.”7
He hoped that his writing would eventually afford him “an actual living, perhaps not a great one, but a living nonetheless.” But in the meantime, he still had to pay the bills, and he again took a job as a waiter in a Philadelphia restaurant. With editorial help from Barbara Smith, he also began work on collecting his essays, some old, some new, for publication, probably with Essex’s Be Bop Books (publisher of his own earlier chapbooks, including Earth Life, which had two sold-out printings). Be Bop Books also had in the works a collection of Michelle Parkerson’s prose and poetry and a volume of Assotto Saint’s poetry.
An incident involving New York City’s preeminent gay publication, the New York Native, helps to illustrate why Essex, Joe Beam, and most of their circle gave primacy to black over gay liberation. In celebration of Black History Month in February 1986, the Native, unlike other white-dominated gay publications (like The Advocate), did publish a special supplement, “Heritage of Black Gay Pride,” edited by Craig Harris. It was an excellent collection, and Sidney Brinkley, the pioneering founder of the Blacklight Press in D.C., sent Harris his congratulations. But Brinkley went on to point out that in the very same issue of the Native—and typical of “their hypocrisy, their racism”—was an ad in the employment section which they’d been running for several weeks: a lawyer was advertising for a legal assistant, preferably a “WM in mid-’20s.” That, as Brinkley put it, “blatantly breaks discrimination laws in 3 categories: race, gender and age.” And this wasn’t the first or last time, though the discriminatory ads varied, sometimes explicitly barring replies from “fats and femmes,” sometimes “people over 30,” sometimes nonwhites. Was this a free-speech or a hate-speech issue? Well, one might say, free for whites, hate for blacks. Legally, the racial references in the
employment ads were blatantly discriminatory.8
Colin Robinson, who lived in New York City and was an influential Blackheart editorial board member, sent his own response directly to the Native’s editor, Chuck Ortleb. Robinson graciously began by congratulating Ortleb on the supplementary section “Heritage of Black Gay Pride,” and did so even though “in the Black gay community, it is considered by some leaders impolitic to praise white gay publications, by some unprincipled even to work with you.” Robinson then went on to deplore the “WM in mid-’20s” ad and further to point out that the Native’s record on racial issues had been at best spotty. The Native had never, for example, published a review of any of the three issues of Blackheart, or covered any of the frequent literary readings in the city by black lesbians and gay men. The oppression most black gays shared with white gays, Robinson pointed out, “is much less often mitigated by socioeconomic status,” making it even more critical that white gay publications and institutions make room for addressing and expressing minority points of view. Robinson was neither soliciting nor advocating white paternalism; he was simply registering the fact that the black gay community lacked the organizational and financial resources readily available to many within the white one.
Essex often had to live close to the margins. In 1984–85 he’d worked for a time as a graphic artist with the Potomac Electric Power Company (PEPCO). According to Wyatt O’Brian Evans, a friend Essex made at PEPCO, the “racist, demoralizing” higher-ups “worked overtime in attempts to subjugate [him] but to no avail. . . . Although he was a sensitive, caring guy, ‘Es’ took no crap. From anybody.” He simply quit his job with PEPCO.
Like many other low-income writers, white and black, Essex tried to piece out an income from grants. He first applied to the National Endowment for the Arts. Turned down, he tried again the following year, but again failed to win support. On both occasions he’d been entirely circumspect about his sexual orientation. But that didn’t come naturally to him; as Evans, his buddy at PEPCO, has put it, “confident about and in who he was, ‘Es’ was firmly grounded and rooted in his sexuality. He was unabashed about it. His affecting smile and that mischievous twinkle which danced in his eye—both ‘slightly corrupting’ in a good kind of way, of course—could win you over in no time flat. The ‘bruh’ had swagger, and exuded raw sexual appeal.”
And so in 1985, when Essex next applied for a grant, he decided, “Fuck it. I’ll send what I want to send, not what I think they want to read,” and he included gay-themed poetry from his current chapbook, Conditions, that he’d been compiling (he’d been self-publishing his chapbooks—five in all—since 1982). This time, the application was approved—a major surprise. Over the course of time, Essex would go on to receive four additional grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and later, he’d be awarded a Pew Charitable Trust Fellowship, an Emery Award for community-based activism, and a visiting fellowship at the Getty Center in Santa Monica. By living frugally, he was usually able to avoid taking on any additional work.
The grants he received were sometimes accompanied by attempts at censorship, but Essex invariably bucked all efforts to dictate how and where he expressed himself. At the ceremony for the Washington, D.C., Mayor’s Arts Awards in the fall of 1987, for example, Essex (along with Wayson) was invited to perform his poem “Family Jewels,” about a young black man unable to hail a taxi because of his race. The black executive director of the D.C. Arts Commission asked Essex, just hours before the show, to omit the word “corruption” or not perform the poem at all, the implication being that it might embarrass Mayor Marion Barry, whose administration was then famously under investigation.
To placate the executive director, Essex agreed to drop the poem—or said he would. But once he got onstage he read it anyway, and without omitting “corruption.” He followed the poem with a short speech in which he specifically detailed the Arts Commission’s attempt to censor him and his work. After a brief silence, the crowd reacted with thunderous applause, and Essex completed the performance with another poem. A Washington Post reporter subsequently interviewed the commission’s executive director, who confirmed her effort to remove “corruption” from the poem. “I considered it inappropriate for the event,” she said in her defense, which was designed as a “celebration of artists—a light, upbeat evening. There’s a fine line between saying what’s appropriate and censorship.” She likened Essex to “a spoiled child who has reprimanded us publicly.” She might more accurately have referred to him as a consistent defender of free speech.
The following year, a nonprofit progressive radio station in D.C., WPFW, a member of the Pacifica broadcast network, invited Essex and Wayson to be part of its ongoing “The Poet and the Poem” series, hosted by Grace Cavalieri. No suggestion was made to them about cutting, editing, or substituting material to bring it in line with FCC guidelines about what might be “offensive.” Yet when they subsequently heard a broadcast of the program, they discovered that not only had “seven dirty words” (as Essex called them) been edited out, but the “progressive” station had also edited various ideas and concepts—and without prior consultation.
Early in 1987, Essex jumped at the chance to leave such hassles behind him for a bit and welcomed an offer to do a set of readings in London and environs, after which he planned two weeks of travel through the Netherlands “to visit relatives and to spend some time in Amsterdam.” The trip “turned out to be a very fine experience” for him, one that he felt sure he’d be “synthesizing for many months” thereafter. In all, he presented twelve readings—mostly from Conditions and Earth Life, along with a few unpublished poems—in the space of six weeks, and in his opinion the work “went over very well with audiences there.” Additionally, he met the black gay filmmaker Isaac Julien for the first time. The meeting came about after Julien had called Michelle Parkerson to talk with her about his forthcoming project on Langston Hughes and Michelle had suggested Julien contact Essex, about to leave for England. The two men did meet in London, got along well, and would do important work together in the future.
The reading Essex did in Manchester—a city outside of London with a large black population—exemplified the growing impact of his poetry and person on the upcoming generation of younger blacks, as typified by the reaction of one young man in an audience of some forty people. He’d been familiar with only a few of Essex’s poems before attending the performance, which was held in the city’s small black community center. Those few poems had put him, like others in the audience, in a state of “high anticipation.” Nor was he disappointed: the reading, he felt, was “absolutely brilliant”; Essex touched him “deep inside,” so much so that he mustered up his courage after the reading and introduced himself. Essex kindly answered the young man’s many questions: “He really allowed me to feel free to probe and discover who he was.”
Essex told him that he was taking the train back to London the following morning and spontaneously asked his new fan if he’d like to accompany him. The answer was an enthusiastic yes, and the train trip proved memorable: “Essex was so revealing, considering that neither one of us knew much of the other. I felt I could quickly trust him.” They had a “great conversation”; Essex left the young man “with questions and answers that sparked in him new ways of thinking.” Years later he still regarded the trip as having been “memorable”: Essex had “helped influence me in a positive way about accepting myself as a dignified black gay man.”
His is but one of the many tributes that would accumulate over time attesting to Essex’s seminal influence. “The first time I saw him read,” another black gay man would write, “was a revelation . . . accomplished, funny, heartbreakingly honest.” Another man found him “SO down to earth.” A third spoke of his “generosity,” yet a fourth about how he “usually brought the house down wherever he performed,” and a fifth about how the reading Essex did in Detroit “was the most powerful thing that [had] ever happened in Detroit’s black gay communi
ty.” And so on. Essex was decidedly becoming a writer to reckon with.
Yet on his return to the States, among the first things he learned was that he’d lost his part-time job—the company had decided to move to San Diego. And jobless the sage of Manchester would remain for a number of weeks before finding just enough work to keep him in food and to pay the rent. “Times are lean, pretty baby,” he wrote Joe Beam.
Mike Callen’s black and Latino friends also provided him with evidence of how subtle omissions could cause hurtful consequences for people of color. Emilio, a Puerto Rican friend of his, had been diagnosed with KS in 1984, but had ignored the brown lesions that began to develop on his skin because GMHC and the gay papers kept saying that KS lesions were purplish-pink, failing to note the fact that in brown or black people they were likely to appear brown. A.J., a black friend of Mike’s, told him that when he visited San Francisco he was impressed with how much more the city was doing about AIDS than New York—every day some item about the disease appeared on television. But then A.J. realized that the reports always showed white men, even when the stories were about volunteers at the AIDS agencies. Mike agreed with A.J. that (as Mike put it) “in a better world, white gay men who have themselves experienced the bitter sting of oppression for being gay would make an effort not to oppress others.”
Not that Hispanics and blacks did much better in their relations with each other. By 1985, New York’s Health Department had still not developed AIDS prevention material in Spanish, though it was the city’s second language. Late in that year, with the formation of the Hispanic AIDS Forum and the New York chapter of the Minority Task Force, an opportunity seemed at hand for cooperative efforts to do more in reaching minority communities. But when suggestions were made that the two organizations merge in order to better utilize the limited resources available, the Hispanic group refused on the grounds that past experience in mixed minority groups showed that African Americans ended up setting an agenda that ignored cultural differences. Proceeding on separate paths, both agencies experienced slow growth. What many of the heterosexual members of the two communities did share was the view that homosexuality was shameful and that an AIDS diagnosis should be concealed.
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