Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  In it, he not only provided a detailed history, dating back to the Harlem Renaissance, of black gay male literature, but also mounted an angry attack on the white gay world in general and one of its celebrities in particular—Robert Mapplethorpe, then known for his series of “erotic” (Essex called them “racist”) portraits of black men. He angrily denounced the post-Stonewall white gay community as having been basically unconcerned with the lives of black gay men and lesbians—and Mike Callen would have agreed with him. White gay men, Essex pointed out, become “other” in this country only when and if they choose to come out of the closet. But all blacks “are treated as ‘other’ regardless of whether we sleep with men or women—our Black skin automatically marks us as ‘other.’ ”

  Essex made the further point that unless the racial divide that characterized the gay world was somehow healed, the gay community could never “become a powerful force for creating real social changes that reach beyond issues of sexuality.” If he was surely accurate in declaring that “there was no gay community for black men to come home to in the 1980s,” any prescription for the failure of solidarity had to include, along with white racism, the endemic homophobia that then characterized the straight black community. Some individuals on both sides (gay and black) of the equation were attempting in the 1980s to heal the division, but in Essex’s view all that the AIDS crisis had succeeded in doing was to “clearly point out how significant are the cultural and economic differences between us. . . . We are communities engaged in a fragile coexistence if we are anything at all.”

  Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe was for Essex the iconic representation of the white gay community’s lack of serious concern “with the existence of black gay men except as sexual objects.” Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989, while Essex was at work on the anthology, but that didn’t stay his hand. He excoriated Mapplethorpe’s catalogue Black Males as well as his 1986 The Black Book as centrally supportive of the stereotype of black men as headless, heartless creatures with monstrous phalluses. To Essex and others, Mapplethorpe’s famous Man in a Polyester Suit, a photo that focused on a large, flaccid black penis dangling out of an unzipped trouser, reiterated the standard sexual fantasy of blaxploitation movies of the 1970s. “What is insulting and endangering to black men,” Essex wrote, “is Mapplethorpe’s conscious determination that the faces, the heads, and by extension, the minds and experiences of some of his black subjects are not as important as close-up shots of their cocks.”

  Essex wanted to make it clear that his critique of Mapplethorpe wasn’t mistaken for prudery. “I don’t have any problem with erotic art,” he told one interviewer. “In fact, I think much of it, when rendered well, can be very beautiful and very moving. I think that Mapplethorpe was an excellent eye and an excellent talent. But again, that doesn’t negate the question of why are the heads of some of his images missing? . . . The Man in the Polyester Suit . . . should have been called, Black Dick in a Polyester Suit, because that’s essentially what it is. . . . Being on the outside and looking at that image, for me it just continues to perpetuate this whole notion that we are beasts.” Essex refused explicitly to call for censorship; he had no wish to see Mapplethorpe’s work banned from exhibition. What he did call for was an end to silence about calling “racist” representation by its name and exempting artistic work from political analysis. The reactions of some white gay men to his criticism of Mapplethorpe further confirmed his position; they “reacted as if what I had said,” Essex wrote, “was sacrilegious. They also acted as if black men had no right to critique Mapplethorpe.”

  Underscoring Essex’s opinion, the British filmmaker Isaac Julien (Looking for Langston) and the art history professor Kobena Mercer in the essay “True Confessions,” which appeared in Brother to Brother, were no less denunciatory about “the exclusion of race from the gay agenda” and the objectification of the black subject in Mapplethorpe’s racist “phantasms of desire.” They acknowledged that the mythology of “black macho” was further maintained by sexist elements in the black community itself, which made the stereotype a more general site of struggle. A multipronged confrontation was necessary—against white gay racism, against sexism within both black and white male communities, and against the heterosexual black world’s homophobia, as heightened by the current agenda of such revolutionary black nationalist leaders as Eldridge Cleaver. “Black nationalist sensibility,” Essex wrote, “positions homosexuality as a major threat to the black family and black masculinity.” No black gay man, Essex pointed out, “had openly participated in the 1960s Black Arts Movement”—and certainly not James Baldwin, who was never drawn to nationalism of any kind.

  Though the nationalist sensibility had considerable support in certain black circles, Essex located his own yearning for “home” in the larger straight black world. “Our mothers and fathers are waiting for us,” he wrote. “Our sisters and brothers are waiting. Our communities are waiting for us to come home. They need our love, our talents and skills, and we need theirs. . . . They will remain ignorant, misinformed, and lonely for us, and we for them, for as long as we stay away, hiding in communities that have never really welcomed us or the gifts we bring.” In the late eighties, the expectation that the straight black world was “waiting for” its gay children to “come home” partook to some degree of wishful thinking. The Dorothy Beams of that world had opened their doors and put candles in the windows, but the pulpits of many black churches were still issuing thunderbolts against “perverts” and equating AIDS with “God’s righteous wrath.” For too many black gay people the choice was akin to the devil and the deep blue sea.

  As a young man Essex had characterized black literature from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s through the protest era of the 1950s and 1960s as a period that “consistently ignored homosexuality except as something comic—or as a tragic example of white corruption of black manhood.” After Essex came out, he began to recognize that “some of the finest writers in African-American literature were homo-or bisexual.” Still, the Harlem Renaissance was a period where “your sexuality was tolerated at best, or overlooked or considered an aberration.” Thus it was that W.E.B. Du Bois had objected to works like Claude McKay’s homoerotic Home to Harlem, writing that he “distinctly felt he needed to take a bath” after reading the book.

  Yet Essex felt that gay men of African descent had played a significant, if at times closeted or coded role in the Harlem Renaissance; such writers as Claude McKay, Alain Locke, Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes often wrote in sufficiently suggestive ways as to allow for subsequent “de-coding.” Only Richard Bruce Nugent, whose short story “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” continues to be admired, was daringly upfront about same-sex desire. Essex was fascinated enough by the Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1920s that he drew up a seminar syllabus, “Evidence for Being,” that he taught in the spring of 1991 at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., and he also did a series of readings and performances at the Rodde Center, People Like Us bookstore, and the Randolph Street Gallery. Post-Renaissance, Essex felt there wasn’t enough black “gay” literature to allow for any claim to a “tradition.”

  But as Essex argued in the introduction he wrote to Brother to Brother, the 1980s had proved “a critically important decade” for the reemergence of same-gender desire in African American literature. Not only did a significant number of publications and journals appear—Blacklight, Black/Out, and in L.A. BLK, to name but a few—but as well the collective in New York City called “Other Countries” brought together a community of writers for workshops, readings, and eventually a journal. A number of black gay poets self-published their work—including Essex, Donald Woods, and Roy Gonsalves, who also founded a literary journal. This efflorescence of black gay writing produced some novels that “crossed over” to a mainstream audience; this was especially true of Randall Kenan and had already proven true for Samuel Delany.

  The new flowering of black gay art was being
consciously hailed as “a second black renaissance.” The New Yorker David Frechette, the poet and cultural critic (and a founding member of the black gay collective Other Countries), headed one of his articles in 1989 “Renaissance for Black Gay Writers.” In it, Frechette, who later became yet another AIDS casualty, singled out Essex as in the forefront of the new movement, giving special prominence to the choral poetry group’s recent performance of his poem “Civil Servant” at the Kitchen. The long poem, now well known, describes the infamous Tuskegee experiment in Alabama, where for decades two hundred black men with syphilis were given, without their knowledge, placebos rather than medication so that government scientists could study the long-term effects of the disease when not treated.

  “Civil Servant” chillingly focuses on the role of Nurse Eunice Rivers, a black woman who worked on the experiment:

  I could perform my job no other way:

  obey instructions or be dismissed,

  which would end my nursing career . . .

  I didn’t talk back,

  raise my voice in protest,

  or demand the doctors save the men.

  It wasn’t my place to diagnose,

  prescribe, or agitate . . .

  I never thought my duty

  damned the men.

  They were sick with bad blood,

  but I thought they were lucky.

  Most Colored folks in Macon

  went from cradle to grave without ever visiting a

  doctor . . .

  As the men died, I wept

  with their wives and families.

  I was there to comfort them,

  to offer fifty dollars

  if they let the doctors

  “operate”—

  cut open the deceased

  from scrotum sack to skull . . .

  I never thought my silence

  a symptom of bad blood.

  I never considered my care complicity.

  I was a Colored nurse, a proud

  graduate of Tuskegee Institute,

  one of few, honored by my profession.

  I had orders, important duties,

  a government career.

  The performance of “Civil Servant” at the Kitchen was followed with Essex’s “poetic manifesto, “To Some Supposed Brothers.” Like Mike Callen, Essex was a confirmed feminist who deplored the dominant male sexism of the day:

  You judge a woman

  by what she can do for you alone

  but there’s no need

  for slaves to have slaves . . .

  But we so-called men,

  we so-called brothers

  wonder why it’s so hard

  to love our women

  when we’re about loving them

  the way America

  loves us.

  Frechette ended his article by hailing the Hemphill event at the Kitchen as a significant marker of “a new renaissance,” but Essex himself gave prime credit for the outburst of black creativity to black lesbians like Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Parkerson, and Jewelle Gomez for “breaking the silence surrounding their experiences.” He also singled out two filmmakers for special praise: Isaac Julien (a member of the British film collective Sankofa) for Looking for Langston and the greatly gifted Marlon Riggs (who later died of AIDS) for the pivotal 1989 documentary Tongues Untied, in which Essex and his poetry would prominently appear.

  While Essex was still at work on the anthology, Washington, D.C.’s mayor stopped the Tenant Assistance Program and sought as well a 38 percent cut in the annual AIDS budget—though the number of new AIDS cases in the United States had by then reached nearly 43,000 and the number of deaths 27,680. One of the newly deceased was the first black news anchor on network television, Max Robinson. Public discussion surrounding his death in December 1988 exemplified the attitudes current in the black community and informed much of the commentary in the anthology. How Robinson contracted AIDS remains to this day a subject of speculation, but mainstream African American discussions of the matter largely precluded same-gender sex—or, for that matter, intravenous drug use—as the cause.15

  Robinson had expressed the hope that his death would become an occasion to educate blacks about AIDS, but neither the obituaries nor the statements that issued from black spokespeople allowed room for discussing the possibilities either of homosexuality or of drug addiction. Jesse Jackson, for one, spoke of Max Robinson as a family friend who’d confided his HIV status to the Jacksons, even while “reassuring” them that he’d been infected not from homosexuality but from heterosexual promiscuity. Yet Jackson failed even to suggest how rare it was for a man to contract AIDS from intercourse with a woman—even less likely if the “promiscuity” involved protected sex. Had Jackson—or someone—bothered to make those points, Robinson’s dying wish that his passing would be used to educate other blacks about AIDS might have been met. Instead, disinformation was substituted—and AIDS continued to hit the black community hard. By 1989, 25 percent of all persons with AIDS in the United States were African American. Among those newly diagnosed, the figure jumped to 36 percent.

  At its completion late in 1990, the manuscript for Brother to Brother ran to more than 550 pages; as a result of further cutting, it was reduced to 490 pages—with Essex having to inform five contributors that he’d had to pull their work. By December 1990, the manuscript of Brother to Brother was at the typesetters. Audre Lorde and Samuel Delaney both agreed to blurb the book, which was published in 1991. Essex hoped that Brother to Brother would both demonstrate and consolidate how much had been achieved in black gay literature, as well as inspire future accomplishments. His dearest wish was to end the emasculation of “not speaking out,” of remaining mute in the name of preserving the possibility of “middle-class aspirations.” He understood those aspirations as a hoped-for compensation for “the shame and cruelties of slavery and ghettos.” But in his opinion it wouldn’t work. “Whitewashing” the black experience would neither help the race nor impress “the racists, who don’t give a damn.”

  To help promote the anthology, Essex traveled the country and also did a number of interviews on TV and radio. He felt the effort—a considerable challenge given the ups and downs of his health—was well worth it. Not only did the book sell well (it started out as number nine on national gay bookstore bestseller lists), but by extension, he felt, it could open up dialogue within the general African American community. During many of the engagements he undertook, Essex talked often and openly about what he called “the dysfunction” of the black intelligentsia, and in particular assimilationist black academics who kept their posts, he argued, by toeing the greater society’s party line. “To my mind,” he said during one interview, “they’re no better than Jerry Falwell.”

  Essex also lambasted “other consciences of the black community,” with Spike Lee a particular target: “He’s been hostile to the black gay experience, and reinforces the homophobia found in the black community.” Essex singled out Lee’s film Jungle Fever and the scene in which a group of black women complain that black men are either addicts, or in jail, or homosexual. It was a bracketing Essex detested: “I’m just sick of being lumped in with those categories!” “All of what his films have done,” Essex added, “is breed more factionalism.” Which made Essex all the more grateful, he said, for younger black filmmakers like Michelle Parkerson, Isaac Julien, and Marlon Riggs: “There’s a sincere hope there that dialogue from the marginalized and disempowered will be handled by people who don’t have a commercial interest but a humanistic one.”

  But as one reviewer of Brother to Brother put it, currently black gay men “have historically occupied the untenable position of being part of two communities and fully acceptable to neither.” As if in confirmation of that view, the one “white” review I was able to find—in Publishers Weekly—was largely negative, characterizing the anthology as “offerings of dubious literary merit.” Black reviewers were mostly more appreciative. The writer Don Belton, for exa
mple, proclaimed Brother to Brother “every bit as fine a work as its predecessor, and it brings up to date much of the dialogue begun by the earlier collection.”16

  But there were dissents. When the black gay writer Donald Suggs reviewed Brother to Brother in the Village Voice (October 1, 1991), he offered an unusual criticism of the section on AIDS: “I needed to know less about how these men experienced AIDS in their daily lives and more about the ways in which their own responses to AIDS were shaped by the attitudes of those around them. Even Black PWAs who can afford health care suffer the poverty of the Black community’s resources in dealing with AIDS.” Suggs did praise Essex’s “outstanding selection of poetry” but further objected to his choice of “a cheerleading quote” from Joe Beam as a preface to the anthology, namely, “Black men loving black men is a call to action, an acknowledgement of responsibility.” Suggs thought that Charles Harpe, another contributor to the anthology, “better identifies the root of our creativity, both as writers and as black gay men. It is, he [Harpe] says, the ‘beginning of [the] feeling that the word faggot did not accurately name the man I was or the man I was aspiring to become.’ ”

  In a comparable vein, the New Republic review raised the question of “whether we can have a gay literature that is not merely about its own gayness, but is true to the variety of ways in which gays relate to each other and to the world.” The reviewer apparently preferred gay writers like Samuel Delany, Michael Nava, and Joe Keenan, who placed gay characters in settings where homosexuality was “simply taken for granted” and the characters were shown “exploring worlds, solving murders, getting laughs” that required their authors to employ “the advantages of indirection” in discussing sexuality. But for many readers of Brother to Brother, the subtle virtues of “indirection” paled, became something of a literary luxury, when placed in the context of a community devastated by AIDS and desperate for succor.