Authors: Martin Duberman

Hold Tight Gently (20 page)

In August 1984, he let Richard Dworkin persuade him that they could squeeze just enough pennies together to jump off the New York fast track and take a brief holiday in Europe. It proved a restful break overall, though Mike preceded Dworkin by a few days and those proved somewhat difficult for him. Along with periodic fever and exhaustion, Mike had a cyclical history of depression, going back ten years, which usually occurred in late summer. True to form, when he was alone in Wales in late August, the weather penetratingly cold and wet, “an incipient depression”—as he wrote in the occasional diary he kept during the trip—“imperceptibly began to gather. I had that most dreaded feeling: racing mind, dry throat and cough, queasy anxiety.” He’d learned from past experience that “the key is control and distraction.” He took some Valium and talked quietly to himself about how he’d “survived worse depressions in the past” and how Richard would soon be meeting him in London. It worked. The depression was aborted short of the “lethal momentum” of past episodes. Once he and Richard were together, travel became easier, though Mike’s exhaustion
periodically resurfaced, along with abrupt alternations between sweating and freezing.
¹⁵

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.”

The Mideighties

J
oe 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?

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 to 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