Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  Earl Ofari Hutchinson, the distinguished African American academic, writing in 1999, expressed the view that up to at least that point Afrocentric attitudes toward black gay men hadn’t changed one iota as a result of their participation in the Million Man March. They were treated civilly at the march because, in Hutchinson’s opinion, their participation marked “a tacit signification that all Black men, regardless of sexuality, face many of the same problems.” If true, that recognition alone might be considered sufficient to justify the views of Essex, Keith Boykin, and others that participation had been worthwhile. Yet Hutchinson felt certain that there had been no “sea of change” in black nationalist attitudes toward gays. He cited a 1997 TV interview with Rowland Evans and Robert Novak during which Farrakhan explicitly stated that he continued to regard homosexuality as an “unnatural act” and would do his utmost to discourage it.

  While discussing the March with Julien, Essex stressed the overriding importance of black gay men participating in the larger black community’s life. As an example of the need to intervene on a daily basis, he told Julien about a recent episode when he came upon three or four “young brothers . . . bigger than me” writing all over the storefront windows in his neighborhood with magic markers. “Something in me just snapped,” Essex said. “I’m sick of there being no intervention. I told them, ‘Don’t do that. That’s a black business. You’re destroying property.’ I was scared to death, but I wasn’t going to my apartment and locking my door. . . . Even a simple intervention could cost our lives.”

  In the end Essex would be too ill to attend the Million Man March, but his wish to do so speaks volumes about his priorities: “returning home” to the black world had always been his chief concern, but he stubbornly knocked on the door as an openly gay man insistent on being accepted for who he was, tenacious in that insistence. In his speech at the annual OutWrite conference in 1990, he advised black gay men and lesbians that “we are a wandering tribe that needs to go home before home is gone.”

  With calculated optimism Essex went on to say that “our communities are waiting for us to come home. They need our love, our talents and skills, and we need theirs.” Essex knew perfectly well that he was exaggerating; his own father, after all, had never accepted his homosexuality and had never been much of a presence in his life. And he personally knew any number of black gay men desperately ill with AIDS who more than anything had wanted to return to their families of origin to be taken care of and to die, but whose families had been unable or unwilling to take them in. Learning, often for the first time, of their son’s sexuality and illness, some of these families expressed their shock and grief as “shame and anger” and had disowned “their own flesh and blood, denying dying men the love and support that friends often provided as extended family.” Yet Essex put his hope in those many other families he’d known and seen who had understood and had “bravely stood by their brethren through his final days.”

  Those examples gave Essex the evidence to speak of the potential of a united black community and, at least as important, to draw a contrast with what in his view was the more entrenched hostility of the white gay world. Essex felt that initially he’d been “naïve” in approaching the gay community. Alluding to the common practice during the 1970s and 1980s of blacks being “carded”—kept waiting and waiting on line, and then being asked for three photo IDs before even being considered for admission to certain white gay bars and discos—Essex advised his audience in 1990 “not [to] continue standing in line to be admitted into spaces that don’t want us there.”

  His earlier assumption that “here [in the white gay world] you have a group of people under persecution, denigrated, working from spaces of disempowerment, if you will, working from spaces of invisibility, et cetera. One would suspect, at least on the surface, that those conditions would sensitize individuals to the struggles of others.” But that had been “hardly the case” in his experience. A chief concern of his about the white gay community was “its failure to make connections with other oppressions, with other spaces of disempowerment that need to be looked at and joined.” The “bonds of brotherhood . . . so loftily proclaimed to be the vision of the best minds of my generation” had revealed itself, in his opinion, as empty rhetoric. The “disparity between words and action was as wide as the Atlantic Ocean and deeper than Dante’s hell.” There was no “gay” community for black men to come home to in the 1980s. “At the baths, certain bars, in bookstores and cruising zones, black men were welcome . . . the black man only needed to whip out a penis of almost any size to obtain the rapt attention withheld from him in other social/political structures of the gay community.” Nor had Essex noticed any recent shift of opinion: the white gay world still operated, in his opinion, from “a one-eyed, one-color community that is most likely to recognize blond before black, but seldom the two together.”20

  Nor, Essex felt, had the scourge of AIDS bound black and white together into anything more than

  a fragile coexistence, if we are anything at all. . . . What AIDS really manages to do is clearly point out how significant are the cultural and economic differences between us, differences so extreme that black men suffer a disproportionate number of AIDS deaths in communities with very sophisticated gay health care services. . . . Our most significant coalitions have been created in the realm of sex. What is most clear for black gay men is this: we have to do for ourselves now, and for each other now, what no one has ever done for us—we have to be there for one another and trust less in the adhesions of semen and kisses to bind us. The only sure guarantee we have of survival is that which we construct from our own self-determination.

  In justifiably pointing up the racism that disfigured the white gay world, Essex, for dramatic emphasis, was teetering on some half-truths. There were many reasons, besides white gay indifference, for the disproportionate number of black AIDS deaths, including lack of access to affordable health care, the initial insistence of both black churches and black leaders that AIDS was a gay white disease to be contracted only by sleeping with whites, or a plot by the government to destroy black people—as well as the reluctance of many black gay men to admit to same-gender sex or to acknowledge that they were infected.

  By the time Essex gave his OutWrite speech in 1990, traditional attitudes and organizations had begun to change; even the black church had started to show heightened concern. This shift had a lot to do with the work of black AIDS activists like Gil Gerald. And the extent of the shift can be exaggerated; one case in point is the fierce controversy, with many black and Hispanic leaders spearheading the opposition, that surrounded New York City’s efforts to provide clean needles to addicts; one of David Dinkins’ first acts after becoming mayor of New York City was to dismantle the city health department’s small-scale needle exchange program.21

  Essex was well aware that the black world—the “home” he aspired to—was rampant with crime, drug trafficking, and “self-destructing” youths ending up in prison. And he freely acknowledged that such a world frightened him. One evening in the summer of 1989, wearing shorts, sneakers, and an old gray T-shirt, he left his apartment to buy cigarettes, juice, and cat food. As he approached Sixteenth and Irving Streets, three teenage figures jumped out from behind the bushes, slammed him up against a parked van, and put a cocked gun to his head. “Shoot him! Shoot him!” the smallest of the three shouted. “For the hell of it,” Essex later wrote, “he wanted to blow me away.” One of the other two had his arm against Essex’s throat and kept slamming him into the van. He had enough presence of mind to remain “calm and passive.” After they took the $13 he was carrying in his shorts, they released him and casually walked away. Essex claimed that if a gun had materialized in his hand, he “would have used it without mercy.” Later, he indignantly blasted “black people [who] have only one political reflex—the assumption that racism is the root of every issue in the black community.”

  A second incident further unsettled him. A group of young bla
cks marched around a store near his apartment, taunting the Asian shopkeeper, Yong Chang, with racial slurs and verbal intimidation, in retaliation for Chang’s son having shot and killed a black male who’d reached for a knife when attempting to rob the store. The police had ruled the killing a justifiable act, and Essex was in agreement with the ruling: “I, too, would have shot the robber. . . . Tell me why is it racist to defend your property and your life?” It isn’t, but Essex’s further gloss on the incident—the dead black man “chose to be a criminal no matter what socio-economic conditions may have motivated or can explain his actions”—could be contested. Others would prefer to argue that it was the “socio-economic conditions” that did the choosing.

  Nor did Essex have any patience with blacks who insisted that the recent downfall of Mayor Marion Barry—he’d been caught on camera smoking crack with a prostitute—was the result of a concerted white plot to destroy a powerful black male. Essex would have none of it: “To suggest that the federal government went out of its way to catch Barry was an attempt to obscure the issues of Barry’s conduct, his character, and the legality of his actions . . . particularly regarding his drug use in a city where his leadership was supposed to bring the community out of the throes of a savage drug crisis.” Black leaders, in Essex’s view, were just as accountable for their actions as anybody else, and if Marion Barry was a victim at all, “it was as a result of his own wrong-doing.” Nor did Essex have any sympathy for the argument that such tragedies could basically be traced back to white racism. Racism was real and had profound consequences, Essex felt, but it couldn’t legitimately be used to “transform flawed men into martyrs,” nor convince us that “criminals are victims. . . . Barry is responsible for his transgressions and his downfall. Not the government. Not white people.”

  Essex admitted that he himself had politically “steered clear of any heavy group involvement,” except for membership in the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays. His group experiences had always been in the cultural context of performance art—Station to Station or Painted Bride, for example. He told one interviewer that he didn’t “expect ACT UP and Queer Nation to march in the neighborhoods that I know against the drugs that are in those communities.” But he did feel “as a black gay man . . . [that] something needs to be done in those communities. . . . It’s not as if they [ACT UP and Queer Nation] don’t have my support as a gay man and that we can’t work together when our goals are parallel, but I have to take care of home. . . . I just can’t sit back. That’s what I mean about coming home. My sexuality isn’t so big a thing that it’s going to overwhelm my desire to see us [black people] live and survive.”22

  Essex did participate in fund-raisers for AIDS in the D.C. area and also gathered together artists regardless of sexual identity to benefit a homeless shelter (they raised $500 and ten cases of canned food). As well, he often wove material relating to AIDS into his performances—even if, in 1989, the reviewer for the Los Angeles Times disparaged the AIDS material as “melodramatic excesses.” “There’s been a certain knowledge of giving back,” Essex said at one point, “that’s been instilled in me by family.” He also felt that support groups for black gay males, like those pioneered in the women’s movement, “would be a great undertaking in terms of consciousness.” By the end of the eighties, there was evidence that such groups were spreading around the country: GMAD (Gay Men of African Descent) in New York City, Black Gay Men United in Oakland, Unity and ADODI in Philadelphia, Black Men’s Network in Delaware.

  But if Essex didn’t expect majority white organizations like ACT UP to devote resources to combating drugs and crime in black neighborhoods, he could grow exceedingly angry at the opposite suggestion that black gays relied heavily on white-dominated groups for shared political or medical needs. He pointed to people like Gil Gerald, Craig Harris, Chuck Hicks, and Colevia Carter as prominent examples of how black gays and lesbians were performing “the back-breaking and poorly rewarded work” of black organizing. In regard to AIDS, he believed it was absurd to argue, as some did, that the cultural differences between the black and white communities were so huge—though they were real—that the black community needed to establish entirely separate institutions, right down to different flyers, in order to reach their own constituencies. That argument, Essex believed, was one more offshoot of a racist paradigm. In fact, the caregiving services and educational materials that the white-dominated Whitman-Walker clinic were offering, he felt, were being fully utilized and were fully “understood” and appreciated by black gays.

  When the publication Network, out of Newark, Delaware, interviewed Essex in 1990, its reporter Chuck Tarver remarked that “a number of creative folks have succumbed to AIDS.” Essex picked up on the remark and elaborated it further: “I think there was a fundamental mistake made in the early 1980s. Because the initial deaths were largely White gay men, Black people didn’t think they had anything to worry about. That was like sitting on the train tracks with the train bearing down on you and saying, ‘I will not get hit by this train.’ And that was crazy. . . . I partly think that some of the issues of racism were played out in that as well. Because for some Black people, it was almost glee for them that it was White people who were dying and not Black people. It set into motion a certain inactivity that has proven itself to be very fatal.”

  7

  Stalemate

  At the June 1989 International AIDS Conference in Montreal, a good deal of optimism was expressed about AIDS soon becoming a manageable disease. The optimism hinged on the number of “promising” drugs—like the nucleoside analogues ddI and ddC—currently in the pipeline. A variety of federally sponsored AIDS clinical trials began (with blacks, Latinos, women, and IV drug users woefully underrepresented), and within a year it had become disappointingly clear that the new drugs, taken either singly or in combination, lacked efficacy.1

  Some activists felt that the drugs still held promise and that the pharmaceutical companies should provide the funding for additional, larger trials. But many others, activists and otherwise, fell into a kind of blunt despair. The bubble had burst. Nothing of promise was on the horizon. Nothing stood between a person with AIDS and inevitable death. By early 1990, more than fifty thousand people had died of AIDS in the United States, with twice that number known to be infected with the HIV virus. Drug after drug had been run up the flagpole with a surge in hope, then just as quickly lowered. There was no magic bullet. By 1991, ACT UP/New York, the country’s largest chapter, would begin to splinter into factions, each claiming to represent the “right” priorities.

  In a climate of growing desperation, Mike Callen unblinkingly stared the facts in the eye and issued a lengthy, lucid, cool-headed assessment of the current situation—all the more remarkable given the state of his own health. He’d recently been diagnosed with KS of the lungs, was often “literally breathless,” and had been given a maximum of one to two years to live. He was nonetheless determined to prevent “this latest moral panic” from crushing the liberatory spirit of the gay sexual revolution. In 1990, statutes declaring homosexuality illegal were still on the books in twenty-six states, and many Americans still believed that any sex that was not connected to marriage, procreational in nature, and confined to the missionary position was vaguely shameful and unacceptable.

  “What breaks my heart,” Mike wrote, “is my sense that the vast majority of gay men and lesbians appear to be in essential agreement with their oppressors—at least about the married and missionary part of ‘appropriate’ forms of sexual expression”—which made them “virtually indistinguishable, sociologically, from their conservative suburban heterosexual counterparts.” Many gay men, Mike felt, were “just like our parents in the sense of wanting a marriage, house in the suburbs, career, and the right to dip into the gay sexual revolution now and then.” By contrast, Mike wanted them to spend whatever political capital they had “defending the right of gay men or lesbians to explore radical forms of sexuality—that is, se
x which isn’t ‘married’ nor essentially missionary, the kind that used to occur in bathhouses, backrooms and private sex parties, specifically non-monogamous, group sexual expression.” Mike credited feminist sex radicals—in particular, Gayle Rubin’s groundbreaking essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”—for having turned him into a serious student of sexual politics.2

  Mike believed that in the seventies gay men had effected “an unprecedented revolution in sexual practices,” and he felt strenuously that the revolution—even in the face of AIDS—needed safeguarding. In his view, that could happen only if what he called “the many grey zones” around safe-sex practices could be rationally debated, which in his opinion they weren’t being: “At countless ‘Eroticizing Safer Sex’ workshops, the ‘right,’ ‘politically correct’ answers are parroted by agonized, confused and conflicted gay men fearful of being drummed out of the fraternity of cool, AIDS-adjusted, post-AIDS babies. A vast ocean of silence surrounds what gay men are actually doing—or actually wanting to be doing.”

  As the granddaddy of safe-sex guidelines, Mike had reached firm conclusions about certain sex acts that most discussions of safe sex either avoided or distorted. One such act was oral sex. There had been much hemming and hawing on the subject; as of 1990 the official position of GHMC and other gay “mainstream” organizations (in contrast to those in Canada and Australia) was that any cock sucking taking place without a condom fell into the category of “unsafe sex.” Nonsense! Mike roared. There simply wasn’t enough evidence to warrant such a conclusion—that is, so long as ejaculate wasn’t swallowed. Besides, in the actual acts he witnessed in his travels (when he felt “obligated” to visit local sex emporiums and “observe” behavior—like the serious-minded investigative reporter he actually was), he’d “never, ever seen anyone suck a dick with a condom on it,” and, to the extent he could tell, rarely saw anyone swallowing cum. He felt that gay men intuited what was or wasn’t safe sex better than the honchos of the AIDS establishment.