Authors: Martin Duberman
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 blacks 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.”
A
t 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, sex 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.
Mike felt the same about rimming and fisting and called for their removal from the list of high-risk activities; both carried health risks, of course, but AIDS wasn’t one of them. He knew from painful past experience that “the safe sex circles will shout from the rocks that I’m a ‘murderer,’ that I’m complicit in the deaths of anyone who is ‘confused’ by my raising ‘irresponsible’ doubts about safe sex. Well, I mince, but I don’t mince words: fuck them. I had a hand in the
invention
of safe sex! I’ve paid my fucking dues! In the Spring of 1983 . . . Joe Sonnabend, Richard Berkowitz and I first officially proposed that cumbersome concept of ‘avoiding exchange of potentially infectious bodily fluids.’ Let’s just say that the AIDS establishment didn’t immediately embrace safe sex. In fact, we were initially attacked for ‘promoting promiscuity,’ which in fact we were happy to do, provided everyone rigorously avoided the exchange of bodily fluids. The best advice the AIDS establishment had been able to come up with was pathetically, perhaps murderously, useless: ‘try to reduce your number of sexual partners and try to limit your sex to people you ‘know.’ ”