Authors: Martin Duberman
When Essex confronted Wilson with the absence of publicity, he replied that notices had been sent out to the black press. Not good enough, Essex felt. Since the appearance of
Brother to Brother
(and
Tongues Untied
as well), he’d been drawing “very diverse audiences” to his public offerings. His primary commitment
was
to black audiences, but “when it comes to moving products and building coalitions,” Essex expected his sponsors to make “general outreach efforts” to draw in audiences.
He also expected a reasonably accessible site. But Phill Wilson and BGLLF had selected a facility that had no running water or working bathroom (should nature call, patrons had to go across the street to use the bathroom in a restaurant—and deposit a coin to get access to a stall). Essex himself had to piss outside against the wall of the building minutes before he was to go onstage. In his protest to Wilson, Essex drew a devastating comparison between his receptions in San Francisco and in L.A. In San Francisco he spoke to nearly seven hundred people and sold more than 250 books. In L.A. he spoke to thirty-six people and sold “maybe thirty books.” Though the San Francisco/ Oakland programs were organized by individuals, without “the luxury of an organization or a board of directors to help in the planning,” they succeeded in drawing large crowds because they sent notices to the newspapers and generally circulated the flyers, photographs, and bios that Essex had sent them in advance.
As far as Essex was concerned, his one bad experience with BGLLF was enough to warrant an overall condemnation of the organization. He held Phill Wilson, fairly or not, directly responsible: “You are quite
accountable for this travesty and unfortunately your board has to suffer my loss of faith through an unknowing complicity, though they are not totally to blame.” (Essex copied each member of the board and told Barbara Smith that two of the members had called to thank him “for raising the issues that they have been trying to raise with Phill regarding the structure and running of the organization.”) To Phill Wilson himself, Essex wrote how tired he was “of seeing us fail to do the simple things that convey our respect for one another.” Then he acidly added: “I don’t want my name or my image associated with any of your future activities. NONE.” Nor would he attend the group’s upcoming retreat—not, that is, “unless I was coming wearing a hockey mask and carrying a chain saw.”
A year later, Essex was still reporting to Barbara Smith that his health was “good.” It was typical of him to provide no further details: he wasn’t a complainer and would rarely if ever elaborate about whatever symptoms he may have been suffering. He did tell Barbara that during the year he’d been hospitalized while in Chicago, but rather than explaining why, he wrote instead about his battle with Medicaid for denying him any financial assistance because he was a visitor from out of state. Essex’s lifelong motto—and the way in which he closed nearly every letter he wrote—was to “take care of your blessings.” Obversely, one did not itemize or dwell on disabilities and distress.
On November 7, 1991, Earvin (“Magic”) Johnson announced his retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team because he’d tested HIV-positive. To forestall any speculation that he’d contracted the disease through drug use or homosexual contact, Johnson appeared the following night on the
Arsenio Hall Show
and declared “I’m far from being homosexual. You know that. Everybody else who’s close to me understands that.” The reassurance produced wild cheering from the studio audience. Just in case “far from” left room for interpretation, Johnson removed the ambiguity a week later in
Sports Illustrated
: “I have never had a homosexual encounter. Never.” In all likelihood, he speculated, he’d contracted the virus before his marriage when, as a freewheeling star/stud, he’d “truly lived the bachelor’s life,” doing his best “to accommodate as many women as I could—most of them through unprotected sex.”
8
“Accommodate” made it sound as if Johnson had had no say in the matter, that he was the passive plaything of female lust. It
had
been brave of him to acknowledge explicitly his HIV status, but the gay community was less than enamored with his commentary about it. As Randy Boyd, a young African American writer, put it in the publication
Frontiers
: “To the world, Magic Johnson is one of the innocent victims, like babies. . . . From Rome, George Bush called him a hero. . . . Remember—he [Magic] didn’t get it the wrong way; it was some dirty woman’s fault, just like Eve.”
In a letter to
Frontiers
praising Boyd’s piece, Mike Callen reminded everyone that although the government lists “some 4,000 American men . . . as having gotten AIDS from sex with an HIV-infected woman,” the facts were a bit more complicated. Two thousand of the four thousand were Haitian men who’d simply been dumped into the heterosexual category. And who were the remaining two thousand? One widespread assumption was that they’d gotten the disease from prostitutes. But in New York City, the epicenter of the epidemic, where many female prostitutes work to support their drug habits, the city’s AIDS surveillance unit listed exactly
six
men as having gotten AIDS from commercial sex with a woman (the figure had been eight, but two were discovered to have lied). The point was that the sexual transmission of HIV to men from women was rare.
Mike praised Magic Johnson for his courage, and had little doubt that his revelation “will have a major, positive impact on America’s response to AIDS, particularly in the black and teenage communities.” There was indeed a flood of media coverage following Magic’s announcement, though his recommendation of abstinence probably had little effect on horny teenagers, and though the media coverage of Magic continued largely to ignore the disproportionate number of cases among black gay men. The limited media coverage of AIDS in black or Latin communities continued to focus on its “innocent victims”—women and children—while repeatedly publishing stories about the threat of AIDS spreading to the general population.
Marlon Riggs was more generous toward Johnson than Essex, calling his efforts to educate about AIDS “heroic.” But the following year, Marlon Riggs and Essex did see eye to eye about the reluctant disclosure by the tennis star Arthur Ashe of his own HIV-positive status—the result, he claimed, of a tainted blood transfusion when he’d had
heart surgery. Ashe had kept quiet about his status until
USA Today
published a story about his gaunt appearance and rumored health, which forced Ashe’s hand. Unlike Johnson, Ashe deteriorated quickly—he died in early February 1993—but in the year left to him he did do much to call attention to the disease. Still, as Riggs put it, “many people remain indifferent to, or even contemptuous of, black gay men with AIDS. . . . To the degree that one feels sympathy at all, [it] is extended only to people like Magic or Arthur Ashe who got it ‘innocently.’ That is, not through homosexual sex or IV drug use.”
9
Marlon and Essex also shared the same judgment on the kind of black representation that mainstream TV featured (when it treated the subject at all). Marlon’s new film,
Color Adjustment
, which aired in June 1992 as one of the
POV
series, contained a sharp critique of the hugely popular miniseries about African American history,
Roots
. He jolted “liberal” whites with the accusation that
Roots
actually minimized the evils of slavery while promulgating the myth that “traditional values were all it took . . . to triumph in America”—though Marlon did acknowledge that
Roots
was “a powerful breakthrough against the historic denial of slavery in American popular culture.”
Essex also agreed with Marlon’s negative judgment of the wildly successful
The Cosby Show.
Yes, Marlon argued, Bill Cosby’s show was preferable to previous sitcoms about black people, just as, in the evolutionary hierarchy,
Good Times
was better than its predecessor
Julia,
which in turn was preferable to
Amos ’n’ Andy
.
The Cosby Show did
(mostly) avoid “slapstick, buffoonish, eye-rolling, insulting humor,” but at the same time it was wholly apolitical. It insultingly avoided most of the issues that afflicted most black families, opting instead for a format that “would be acceptable to the myths of the majority . . . this family could be looked at as, in many ways, no different from any other ethnic immigrant group that had finally reached the pinnacle of success in American society through hard work, family values, integrity, discipline, education.” In other words,
The Cosby Show
advanced the pernicious myth that no racial barriers existed to black advancement that wouldn’t yield to the traditional virtue of putting one’s nose to the grindstone.
Marlon and Essex continued to work together on projects that revealed rather than erased additional dimensions of black life—and especially black gay male life. The first Riggs film to follow immediately on
Color Adjustment
was
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien
, a thirty-eight-minute
profile of five HIV-positive black men, which premiered in 1992 at the New Festival, New York City’s annual showcase of gay film and video. Riggs then turned to work on
Black Is, Black Ain’t
a feature-length documentary about competing versions of what was considered within the black world itself an acceptably “authentic” identity.
Essex worked along steadily with Marlon, but most of his attention was centered on gathering together a collection of his own writing. It appeared, under the title
Ceremonies
, in 1992. To handle its publication, Essex turned to the agent Frances Goldin, who was a housing activist and also represented a considerable number of authors with left-wing politics (I’d been one of them for a long time and in fact recommended her to Essex). Frances did her usual devoted, obstinate job for him, writing him long letters commenting on his work and sending it out to those publishing houses most likely to be receptive. She and Essex grew fond of each other and forged a bond of genuine trust.
Ceremonies
was a selected collection of Essex’s poetry to date, including a number from his early chapbooks
Earth Life
(1985) and
Conditions
(1986), and containing as well some half dozen of his short essays. Thematically the collection centered on his life as a black gay man, belittled or condemned by the straight black world (even as he shared its racial indignities) and ignored or patronized by the white gay world. His voice throughout was anguished and angry in equal parts, intensely proud and independent while forlornly in search of sustained connection. He pulled no punches in either his essays or his poetry, bluntly describing his lust and voicing his deep-seated contempt toward those who would censor him.
10
In his long, blistering poem “Heavy Breathing,” he asks an unnamed antagonist:
And you want me to sing
“We Shall Overcome”?
Do you daddy daddy
do you want me to coo
for your approval?
Do you want me
to squeeze my lips together
and suck you in?
Will I be a “brother” then?
Rejected by black men who only want to fuck blondes, he masturbates:
Occasionally I long
to fuck a dead man
I never slept with.
I pump up my temperature
imagining his touch
as I stroke my wishbone,
wanting to raise him up alive,
wanting my fallen seed
to produce him full-grown
and breathing heavy
when it shoots
across my chest;
wanting him upon me,
alive and aggressive,
intent on his sweet buggery
even if my eyes do
lack a trace of blue.
He finds the human landscape bleak and ominous; disenchantment haunts his imagination:
I plunder every bit of love
in my possession.
I am looking for an answer
to drugs and corruption.
I enter the diminishing
circumstance of prayer.
Inside a homemade Baptist church
perched on the edge