20. EH’s 1990 speech at OutWrite was printed as “Does Your Mama Know About Me? Does She Know Just Who I Am?” in Gay Community News, March 25–31, 1990; Chuck Smith, “An Interview with Essex Hemphill,” Vanguard, August 23, 1991.
21. EH, “Why I Fear Other Black Males,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 7, 1990; Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1999), 101–11; EH, “Deliberations,” 7-p. transcript, EH/WJSC.
22. Ted Roulette interview with EH, Thing, n.d., SC; Los Angeles Times, January 14, 1989; Outweek, March 6, 1991; Network 1, no. 3 (December 1990), SC.
Chapter 7: Stalemate
1. Jennifer Brier, Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), chap. 5; Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (University of Chicago Press, 2009), chap. 7; Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (University of California Press, 1996), chap. 8.
2. MC, “Wading into the Deep and Messy Water of Sex in the Age of AIDS,” 31-p. typescript, [1990? 1991?], MCP; multiple interviews with Richard Dworkin; O Boys with Mike on Franklin, DVD, October 16, 1993; and MC on the Charlie Rose show Nightwatch, DVD, March 27, 1989, both RDP. Gayle Rubin’s essay is in Carole S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). MC also cited the seminal Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New Feminist Library, 1983).
3. The situation would later change somewhat. After the introduction of protease inhibitors in 1995, which for many made AIDS a “manageable disease,” there was a notable increase in “bare-backing” (having unprotected anal sex) and a substantial debate about the reasons behind it. For more details, see Gabriel Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (Dutton, 1997); Walt Odets, In the Shadow of the Epidemic (Duke University Press, 1995); and my review of the Rotello book in The Nation, May 5, 1997, reprinted in Duberman, Left Out: The Politics of Exclusion (Basic Books, 1999).
4. Gould, Moving Politics, chap. 6; Duberman diary (in my possession). A number of books and anthologies have memorialized artists lost to AIDS; see, for example, Philip Clark and David Groff, Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson, 2009). Five of Essex’s poems are included, along with work by several of his friends—Craig G. Harris, Assotto Saint, and Donald Woods.
5. MC, “Statement of Michael Callen,” Bethesda, Maryland, June 4, 1992, 4-p. transcript, MCP; multiple interviews with Richard Dworkin; MC, “A Farewell to Smarm, Swansong,” 6-p. transcript, MCP; JS interviews with Sean Strub, SSJS.
6. Martin Duberman, “Masters and Johnson,” in Duberman Left Out: A Political Journey.
7. EH to Barbara Smith, August 27, 1991, enclosing the exchange of letters (August 20, August 24) in regard to the Book World controversy and his letter of August 17, 1991, to Phill Wilson, BSP. In a note to her in 1993, Essex was still employing the brief, vague phrase “my health is good” (EH to Barbara Smith, March 3, 1993, BSP). Since I found no reply from Phill Wilson in EH’s papers, I sent him the relevant pages about Essex’s charges in order to give him the opportunity to respond. But he’s chosen not to.
8. Douglas Crimp, “Accommodating Magic,” in Melancholia and Moralism (MIT Press, 2002); Randy Boyd, “Just Like Magic,” Frontiers, December 6, 1991; MC to Frontiers, November 26, 1991, MCP.
9. “The Director with Tongue Untied,” Washington Post, June 5, 1992.
10. EH, Ceremonies (Cleis Press, 1992), reissued 2000; “American Wedding” is on pp. 184–85. Thanks to the success of Ceremonies, the Apples and Snakes agency sponsored a poetry tour for Essex in England from March 9 to 23, 1992. The flyer announcing the tour also stated that “Essex will be available to work with people around issues of HIV/AIDS awareness.” The flyer is in SC.
11. Randy Boyd, “Essex Hemphill’s Brutal Honesty,” Washington Blade, July 31, 1992; EH, interview with Paul Burston “Speaking for Myself,” Capital Gay, March 20, 1992; Ernest Hardy, “Conversations with the World,” Village View (L.A.), August 14, 1992; Alden Reimoneng review of Ceremonies in The James White Review, Fall 1992; conversation with Frances Goldin, February 22, 2013; EH, “Standing in the Gap,” passim.
12. Goldin to EH, September 1, 1992; Goldin to Peter Borland (NAL), November 4, 1992, courtesy Goldin. The publicity release for “Bedside Companions,” January 25, 1993, is in EH/WJSC. Essex may have misunderstood the Goldin/Borland response to his novel: in a letter to Barbara Smith (August 12, 1992, BSP), he tells her that his editor “phoned back several days after receiving it [the novel] to tell me, with much excitement, that they want it!”—and believed it could be on the stands by fall 1993. To compound the confusion, Essex also wrote Barbara that he was “going to try to negotiate this without an agent” and asked her to read over the pending contract. Yet Borland and Goldin were working hand in hand.
13. EH to Assoto Saint, June 10, 1993, ASSC; Borland to EH, December 15, 1992; EH to Goldin, December 21, 1992, February 16, 1993, July 28, 1993, September 7, 1993; Goldin to EH, January 13, 1993, all courtesy Goldin; Michelle Parkerson to me, April 8, 2013. In EH/WJSC there is also a publicity release for a third book, “The Evidence of Being: Call for Interviews,” which Essex intended to co-edit with Ron Simmons. The flyer announces that they “are seeking Black gay men sixty years of age and older to participate in a nation-wide oral history project about Black gay lifestyles in the early twentieth century. . . . This project seeks to uncover a generation of unheard Black gay voices and faces.” I’ve come across no other reference to this project, which leaves me to assume that it never got off the ground.
Chapter 8: Breaking Down
1. Unless otherwise specified, the section that follows largely derives from my multiple interviews with Richard Dworkin and my many conversations with Abby Tallmer. For Tim Miller, see David Roman, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Indiana University Press, 1998), 142–43.
2. The undated letter of apology from Dworkin to Mike is in MCP; MC to Pam Brandt and Lindsy van Gelder, May 28, July 5, 1993, MCP; “Dinosaur’s Diary,” 8-p. typescript, April 9, 1992, MCP; MC, “An Interview with Harry Hay,” February 17, 1992, 7-p. transcript, MCP. For more on the Jacks of Color and other spaces like it, see “Benjamin Shepard Interviews Liddell Jackson” (founder of the Jacks) in From ACT UP to the WTO, ed. Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk (Verso, 2002) 72–77.
3. New York Native, July 27, 1992; Washington Post, October 4, 1992; MC, “Dinosaur’s Diary,” February 6, 1992, MCP, is in a few places difficult to decipher. Since Mike seems to have scribbled the notes in great haste, I’ve had to make a few changes in tense or spelling for coherence.
4. MC, “Wading the Deep, Messy Waters of Sex: Wear Your Rubbers!” QW, June 7, 1992; MC to Tim Miller and Doug Sadownick, January 18, 1992, courtesy Tim Miller.
5. Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (University of Chicago Press, 2009), chap. 5 (the Sullivan and Shilts quotes are on p. 282); Douglas Crimp, “Right on, Girlfriend!” reprinted in Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism (MIT Press, 2004), 130–49; Jeffrey Schmalz, “Whatever Happened to AIDS?” New York Times Magazine, November 28, 1993.
6. MC to Karen Ziegler “(and Randa, of course),” June 15, 1992, MCP.
7. QW, June 7, August 30, 1992; multiple interviews with Richard Dworkin. Mike even wrote to President Clinton protesting the ban on gay people serving openly in the military; Clinton replied, in what was probably a form letter, “I believe that people should be judged by their conduct, not by their status” (Clinton to MC, February 25, 1993, MCP).
8. Martin Duberman, Left Out: The Politics of Exclusion (Basic Book, 1999), 407–12.
9. Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1999), 159–68; Keith Boykin, Beyond the Down
Low (Carroll and Graf, 2005), 87–88; EH to John Fout, June 22, 1993, JBSC; EH to Goldin, September 7, 1993, March 15, 1994; Goldin to EH, March 29, 1994, courtesy Goldin. The theories about AIDS in Africa include lack of male circumcision, the frequency of “concurrent partners,” endemic infections, and blood-borne, nonsexual transmission (e.g., reusing needles, inadequate sterilization of equipment). The circumcision theory has most recently been associated with the much-controverted Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin book Tinderbox (Penguin, 2012). More highly regarded is Jacques Pepin, The Origins of AIDS (Cambridge University Press, 2011); also, JS to me, February 3, 2013.
10. Avena to Goldin, December 1, 1995, courtesy Goldin; EH to Alexis De Veaux, September 29, 1985, AVSC; EH, “Vital Signs,” in Life Sentences, edited and with an introduction by Thomas Avena, 21–57 (Mercury House, 1994).
11. EH to Goldin, July 26, September 9, 1994, courtesy Goldin.
12. EH to Barbara Smith, December 12, 1994, May 16, 1995, BSP. The poem “Thanksgiving 1993,” dated November 28, 1993, was enclosed in a letter from EH to Barbara Smith, December 8, 1993, courtesy Smith.
Chapter 9: Wartime
1. MC, “Dinosaur’s Diary,” QW, August 30, 1992.
2. MC, “Reprieve from the AIDS Governor,” 9-p. transcript, MCP; MC to Sean Strub, June 22, 1992, courtesy Strub.
3. MC, “Doxil,” 4-p. typescript, MCP; MC to Flirts, January 11; MC to Anthony Roberts, February 16; MC to Cris Williamson and Tret Fure, February 19; MC to David Groff, March 19; MC to Wayne [Brasler?], March 19; MC to Nick Mulcahey, March 24; MC to his brother, Barry, March 24; MC to Karen Ziegler, April 20, May 25; MC to Alex Dallas, June 21; MC to Corey Rhodes, September 2, all 1993, all MCP. Doxil didn’t cause MC’s KS of the lungs to regress, but it did for a time stop it from advancing. The notion of a memorial orgy is on the DVD O Boys with Mike on Franklin, October 16, 1993, courtesy Dworkin. A friend of Mike’s, David Roman, the theater historian, describes Mike being “very excited over a breakthrough shark-cartilage treatment” (David Roman, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS [Indiana University Press, 1998], 217, 221).
4. Unless otherwise noted, my multiple interviews with Richard Dworkin are the source for most of the quotations that follow in this section.
5. MC to Barry and Patty Callen, March 24, 1993; MC to Deborah Tannen, April 1, 1993; MC to Pam Brandt and Lindsy van Gelder, May 28, 1993, all MCP.
6. MC to Alex Dallas, June 21, 1993, MCP; multiple interviews with Richard Dworkin. For more on Sear Sound, see Steve Guttenberg’s interview with Walter Sear, “Walter Sear’s Analog Rules,” March 27, 2005, www.stereophile.com/interviews/305sears/.
7. Daily News, April 29, 1993; MC to Karen Ziegler, April 20, 1993; MC to the Flirts, June 23, 1993, both MCP.
8. MC to the Flirts, June 23, July 6, 1993; MC to Tim Rasta, June 23, 1993, both MCP; MC to Pam Brandt and Lindsy van Gelder, July 5, 1993, MCP. Mike’s appearance at the April 25, 1993, March on Washington to sing “Love Don’t Need A Reason” was described by the journalist Karen Ocamp, who was there: Mike “stood solo, thin as a rail on this massive stage, and sang with such simple joy—he was mesmerizing. . . . I wanted to stand up from my little spot at the corner of the stage and yell, ‘Do you guys know what you’re witnessing? This is Art defying Death! This is what courage looks like.” (Ocamp to me, June 19, 2009.) The Flirtations didn’t last very long without Mike; after Cliff Townsend and Aurelio Font both left, Jon Arterton and Jimmy Rutland tried to resurrect the group by adding the lesbian singer Suede; they did put out a record, mostly of songs the Flirtations had earlier recorded, but folded soon after. The moment, culturally and politically, had passed. (Multiple interviews with Richard Dworkin.)
9. MC to Holly Andersen, July 5, 1993; MC to Alix Dobkin, July 5, 1993; MC to Celia Farber, September 1, 1993, all MCP; phone interviews with Tim Miller and Doug Sadownick.
10. Sadownick to Alan [Gassman], Marshall [O’Boy], Shawn Eric [Brooks—Mike’s “AIDS Buddy”], Matt [Silverstein], Tim [Miller], and other interested parties, n.d., MCP.
11. MC to Celia Farber, September 1, 1993, MCP; Doug Sadownick, “Gay Psyche Politics,” April 24, 2010, and Doug Sadownick, e-mails to me; MC, “The Finale,” Genre, December 1993.
12. MC to “Doug-alla,” September 23, 1993, courtesy Sadownick.
13. Multiple interviews with Richard Dworkin; MC to Holly Near, August 23, 1993, MCP; MC to Dino Sierp, July 5, 1993, MCP; Sadownick, “Agenda,” November 10, 1993, courtesy Sadownick.
14. Sadownick, “Gay Psyche Politics,” April 24, 2010, 24–25, courtesy Sadownick; MC to David Hofstra and Lynne Tillman, November 12, 1993, MCP.
15. Multiple interviews with Richard Dworkin; Sadownick, “Gay Psyche Politics,” April 24, 2010, 29–30, courtesy Sadownick; MC to George Harvey, November 7, 1993; MC to Holly Near, August 24, 1993, both MCP; MC, “The Finale.” Genre, December 1993.
16. CC to MC, July 3, 1992, MCP; CC and BAC to MC, April 11, 1993, MCP; Sadownick to Barry and Patty, November 24, 1993; Barry to Sadownick, n.d., courtesy Sadownick.
17. Sadownick, “Gay Psyche Politics,” April 24, 2010, 31–32, courtesy Sadownick; multiple interviews with Richard Dworkin; MC interview in the Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1989 (the light); MC interview with Celia Farber, Spin 10, no. 1 (1994). I’ve deliberately not identified the “acquaintance” by name. A good deal of conflict—accusations and counteraccusations that continue to the present day—developed between her and Doug Sadownick. Though I tend to lean toward Doug’s version of Mike’s last few days—especially when corroborated by Richard—the “acquaintance” did truly care for Mike and tried to be helpful; I don’t wish to cause her needless pain by using her real name. Accordingly, her articles and e-mails to me are not cited, except for one crucial document: “Alice” to me, 9 pp., June 19, 2009, in my possession.
18. Multiple interviews with Richard Dworkin. Barbara Callen later wrote to Doug (March 12, 1994, courtesy Sadownick) that the final exchanges with Mike had been “so very important to all of us, since we were able to clear up some false beliefs that Michael held concerning how we felt about him as our son. We really did always love him, and tried to show him our support.” And she also wrote to Richard to express her gratitude “for the important part that you played in Michael’s life,” and to assure him that “you will be welcome and loved” when next they met (n.d., MCP).
Chapter 10: Home
1. Interview with Ron Simmons, May 2, 2009; GLBPOC “Tribute,” EH/ WSSC.
2. EH, “Living the Word/Looking for Home,” in Martin Duberman, ed., Queer Representations (New York University Press, 1997), 305–10; EH, Ceremonies (Cleis, 1992), 63–64.
3. Ron Simmons, “Some Thoughts,” in Brother to Brother, ed. EH, pp. 211–28 (Alyson, 1991); Larry Duckett, “The Unknown Road to Paradise,” 3-p. ms., 1999. Larry died the following year in an apartment fire.
4. Interview with Chris Prince, May 2009; EH, Domestic Life, 19 pp. of poetry and prose that seem to have been privately published in a limited edition; my copy is courtesy WJ; Craig G. Harris, “I’m Going Out Like a Fucking Meteor,” in Freedom in This Village: Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men’s Writing, ed. E. Lynn Harris, 150 (Carroll and Graf, 2005).
5. “Interview: Marlon Riggs,” in Life Sentences, ed. Thomas Avena, 258–73 (Mercury House, 1994); Steven Fullwood’s commentary on the manuscript, April 29, 2013.
6. Don Belton, ed., “Where We Live: A Conversation with Essex Hemphill and Isaac Julien,” in ([speak my name]): Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream, 209–19 (Beacon, 1995); Robert F. Reid-Pharr, “It’s Raining Men: Notes on the Million Man March,” in Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Indiana University Press, 2001). The paragraph invoking “racist oppression” is from EH’s unpublished novel, “Standing in the Gap,” FGAF.
7. EH, Ceremonies, 146; Belton, speak my name, 217; EH to Wayson Jones, July 23, 1994, EH/WJSC; EH to Barbara Smith, May
16, 1995, courtesy Smith.
8. EH, Ceremonies, 77, 79.
9. EH, Domestic Life, courtesy Wayson Jones.
10. Interview with Wayson Jones, May 2009; EH, Domestic Life, courtesy W.J.
11. Interviews with Wayson Jones and Chris Prince, May 2009; EH, “Vital Signs,” in Avena, Life Sentences, 36–38.
12. EH, “Vital Signs,” in Avena, Life Sentences, 50–51; interview with Ron Simmons, May 2009; Regie Cabico, “Poetic Ancestors,” Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Fall 2012, quoting Chuck Tarver (rattle); Chuck Tarver to GLBPOS, n.d., EH/WJSC.
13. Interviews with Chris Prince and Ron Simmons, May 2009; EH, Domestic Life; EH, “The Tomb of Sorrow,” Ceremonies, 90; Chuck Tarver, “Take Care of Your Blessings,” http://www.qrd.org/qrd/www/culture/black/essex/blessings.html; Wayson Jones’ commentary on manuscript, April 15, 2013.
14. Interview with Michelle Parkerson, May 1, 2009; program for “Victory Celebration,” November 9, 1995, courtesy Barbara Smith.
15. Ron Simmons, “Testimonial for Essex Hemphill Celebration Service,” SC. Later, Michelle Parkerson edited a montage of Essex’s work in film and video. Lois Holmes, one of Essex’s sisters, printed an angry rebuttal to criticisms of the family’s behavior: “An Open Letter for Essex, My Brother,” Standards, January 13, 1996.
16. [email protected], November 1995, and “James Miles,” November 13, 1995, SC; the press release for the Philadelphia celebration, which Sonia Sanchez, Houston Baker, and Dorothy Beam, among others, attended, is from BSP.
Index
Abundant Life Clinic (Washington, D.C.), 84
Abyssinian Baptist Church (Harlem), 139
ACT UP, 129–31, 152–53, 184–93
and AZT controversy, 129–31
Callen and, 129, 164, 192, 194–96, 222, 257
and CRI, 194–96
dissent/divisions over race, gender, class, 188–93, 222–23, 257
“drugs into bodies” slogan, 92, 188–89, 192, 194, 222, 228
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