Authors: Martin Duberman
The following year, the PBS documentary series
POV
(Point of View) scheduled
Tongues Untied
for a ten p.m. showing. A national viewing audience at last seemed possible. The Reverend Donald E. Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, a conservative media watchdog group, expressed his wish for as many people as possible to view
Tongues Untied
, secure in the belief that its “offensive” nature would swell conservative ranks. But Wildmon failed to get his wish. Affiliated stations aren’t required to broadcast PBS programs and a number of them immediately announced that they wouldn’t show the
film during prime time; eighteen of the top fifty markets refused to show it at all. In total, 174 out of 284 stations—more than 60 percent—that ordinarily carried the
POV
series refused to show
Tongues
. Perhaps most hurtful of all, a number of local black leaders spoke out against the film. One bank vice president sounded a common note: “I had a strong concern that it was sort of degrading to African-American men, and just represented a small segment of the population,” too small to be allotted that amount of time.
Another kind of controversy opened up within the black gay community itself. It centered on the bold lettering that closed the film: “Black men loving Black men is
the
revolutionary act” (the phrase originated with Joe Beam). When it became known that Riggs’ lover was in fact a white man, one well-known figure in the black gay community, Cary Alan Johnson, published a review in the left-wing
Gay Community News
in which he wrote: “that Riggs has a white lover struck me as ironic and may leave some feeling cheated. I do not fault Riggs for his choice of a partner, only for what I see as a deception. . . . If Black men loving Black men is truly ‘
the
revolutionary act’ . . . then why isn’t he acting?” Since the British filmmaker Isaac Julien also had a white partner, the issue for a time became heated.
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And Essex jumped right into the middle of it. He characterized Cary Alan Johnson’s remarks as “blatantly intrusive,” even while acknowledging that many black gay people were suspicious, if not downright hostile, about those who took white partners. Did that mean, Essex asked, that “we burn the writings of James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry (they had white lovers)? Should we not acknowledge civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington (he had a white lover, too)? Should we not honor the significance of poet Pat Parker’s work (she had a white lover)?”
Essex directly entered the debate over “identity” that Riggs himself had earlier outlined. “What is this ‘blackness’ that is being addressed?” Essex asked. “Is one still being black if one is out attacking innocent citizens? Is it black to be buried denying one was ever homosexual? Is it black to be fucking without a condom? Is it black to be shooting each other dead in the streets? Is it black to be selling cocaine or crack to black people?” Was it “revolutionary” to love
any
black man regardless, say, of his behavior—like betraying friends, employing violence, preferring lies to truth, terrifying children?
Besides, Essex went on, the phrase “Black men loving Black men is
the
revolutionary act” was never meant to refer to strictly sexual or romantic matters: it was meant to “speak of a responsibility we must each have and maintain as it relates to home, community, self and each other”—in other words, Essex argued, Riggs was envisioning something more encompassing than physical intimacy, something like the generalized support and comfort black men should try to offer one another. Isaac Jackson, another black gay writer, joined the debate to ask, “Is this a movement for all black gay men—or only those with black lovers? . . . Relationships in general between gay men are so hard to maintain, why must we chastise the black man who found what satisfies him, regardless of the color of his lover? . . . Why do we always come out of one limiting situation right into another?”
In Essex’s view, the implication of Cary Alan Johnson’s comment was that the black gay journey Riggs depicted in
Tongues Untied
was fraudulent, not credible, simply because his lover was white—a remarkably thin criterion, in Essex’s view, for evaluating cultural documents. Or, for that matter, lives. A few years later, in his unpublished novel, “Standing in the Gap,” Essex has one black gay man say to another,
Just because you’ve decided that there’s no place in your life for white men doesn’t mean the brothers who are dating white men aren’t being fulfilled in their relationships. And it doesn’t mean they are less black than you. . . . As far as I’m concerned your thinking isn’t any different than the thinking of black nationalists who believe our homosexuality is caused by white people, and that we aren’t really black because we’re homosexuals. You can’t tell how black a person is based on who he’s sleeping with or loving or his sexuality. What you really sound like is a bigot and a hypocrite when you suggest such a thing.
It reminded Essex of the reverse snobbism of those who located black “authenticity” in those who grew up in ghettos. In his view, “a ghetto childhood in and of itself does not make one ‘black’ nor define ‘black culture.’ ” Nor, obversely, should it be assumed that interracial lust and love were functions of self-hatred. To see such pairings as somehow aberrational was, Essex argued, to suggest “that the natural roles of white and black people are to be, for all time, adversarial and corrupt with cruelties and indignities.”
Riggs had his own reaction to the attack on his interracial relationship: “I didn’t want people to believe that black men loving black men,” he told an interviewer, “was a total kind of love that excluded any other, that it was a monolithic love. And I didn’t want people to think of that love solely in sexual-romantic terms. I still think that for African-American men, our learning to love ourselves and each other would be a paramount act of revolutionary sentiment and behavior, because the opposite so much prevails now. But by acknowledging the importance and place of interracial love, one also says that there are other kinds of loves that are part of our universe.”
Essex had found working on
Tongues Untied
—despite the Kennedy Center debacle—a “wonderful experience,” and he felt sure that his collaboration with Riggs would continue (he felt the same about working again with Isaac Julien). Within a year,
Tongues Untied
traveled to the Soviet Union, Scandinavia, New Zealand, Canada, and Germany and was also bought by the BBC. What that taught him, Riggs said, was that “when you speak from the heart, people understand, even when you speak in ways that are troublesome.” Within a short time of the release of
Tongues Untied
, he produced a new eight-minute work,
Anthem
, based on the Langston Hughes poem “I Too Sing America” but also including the words of black gay poets like Essex, Donald Woods, and Colin Robinson—to accompany the fast-paced screen images ranging from cock rings to ACT UP’s “Silence = Death” logo to a pink triangle superimposed on a map of Africa in African National Congress colors. About Essex’s poetry, Riggs said, it “moves me extremely just reading it, and it did so before I ever met or heard him.”
A few years later, Essex and Isaac Julien, in a conversation intended for publication, extended the issues relating to “identity” into a different sphere. Sympathetic as the two friends were, they strongly disagreed about whether black gay men should participate in Louis Farrakhan’s pending Million Man March. Julien considered the suggestion unthinkable. The Nation of Islam’s political base consisted primarily of lower-and working-class heterosexual black men, and the reigning discourse among them centered on “black macho.” Julien felt being excluded from that kind of “oppressive masculinity” was “a part of what it means to be queer. That’s what our work has been about.”
Essex agreed with Julien’s point but felt “the power of the possibility
of black men coming together” overwhelmed it in importance. Despite his aversion to Farrakhan and black nationalism, he felt drawn to gay participation in the march—“my blackness is the priority.” He didn’t believe that current macho notions of masculinity worked for anyone—and certainly not for black women. But whether many of Farrakhan’s followers saw patriarchy as a liability was of course the point of contention. The evidence suggests they did not. The March’s organizers and many of its participants took as a given that the male-dominated family was the essential building block of black unity—and that meant the exclusion of faggots.
Essex held out the hope that the organizers of the March might be pressed to include gay men as speakers, and even if not, that black gay participation in the March might help to end gay and lesbian invisibility. For the same reason, the National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum, while declining formally to endorse the March, encouraged black gays to participate. Keith Boykin, executive director of the Forum, led a contingent of some two hundred black gay and bisexual men in the March and subsequently wrote of it with sonorous awe: “We stood on the mall in the nation’s capital in all of our beautiful diversity. . . . There was hardly a whisper of criticism as we marched along that day. The crowd of men on the mall split like the parting of the Red Sea as we marched and chanted, and most of those who had any reaction at all simply clapped. . . . Almost all of us left with a sense of awe and wonder in the possibilities for the future.” Boykin neglected to mention in his account that Ben Chavis, national director of the March (and until recently executive director of the NAACP), had rejected the suggestion of a black gay speaker.
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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.”
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