Hold Tight Gently (53 page)

                        
My witnesses

                        
will have to answer

                        
to go-go music.

                        
Dancing and sweat

                        
will be required

                        
at my funeral.

                        
Someone will have to answer

                        
the mail I leave,

                        
the messages

                        
on my phone service;

                        
someone else

                        
will have to tend

                        
to the aching that drove me

                        
to seek soul . . .

Essex’s friends discussed whether or not to attend the funeral service scheduled to be held in his mother’s A.M.E. Zion church. They recalled what had happened at the funeral of another black gay writer, Donald Woods; there had been no mention in the service that he’d been gay, which had led an outraged Assotto Saint, who also later succumbed to AIDS, to commandeer the microphone and to say that he was there to honor Woods as an openly proud black gay man. He asked that if anyone else had come to the funeral for that same reason, to please stand up. Half the church stood up, and the Woods family had been horrified.

Barbara Smith, the pioneering black lesbian publisher and writer, told Ron Simmons that in her opinion the funeral belonged to the family and that Essex’s gay friends should not attend but should hold a separate event of their own to honor Essex. Wayson agreed with Barbara that it would be inappropriate to “hijack” the family service; indeed, at the request of Essex’s mother, Wayson, though uncomfortable, agreed to deliver the eulogy (which was in fact written by the family), and both he and Michelle Parkerson were among the six pallbearers. Ron (and also Phill Wilson of the AIDS Project Los Angeles) also decided to attend. His friends reported back that during the service no mention was made of Essex being a gay man, and that his mother, Mantelene, had spoken of him in his last days as accepting Christ as his Savior. In the program for the services (“Victory Celebration for Essex Charles Hemphill,” November 9, 1995, Full Gospel A.M.E. Zion Church), one of the six printed paragraphs of his biography reads: “On September 17, 1995, Essex made the most important decision of his life. He accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior at Full Gospel A.M.E. Zion Church.”
¹⁴

Ron’s report of the funeral service outraged most of Essex’s friends, who refused to accept the family’s account of his last days—even though such an outcome was hinted at as at least possible in Essex’s final poetry, “Vital Signs” and
Domestic Life
(which in all likelihood only Wayson had seen). His friends held an alternate ceremony at the Hine Junior High School in D.C., which, to their considerable surprise, Essex’s mother and one of his three sisters attended. There were choral ensemble readings from Essex’s writings, and various people shared anecdotes about their friendships with him, Ron Simmons among them. He spoke frankly about Essex’s “perfectionism”—so akin to Mike Callen’s—which made working with him sometimes “difficult, sometimes painful. But if you too were willing to accept nothing less than the best in what you brought to that creative process, it would be a joyful thrill unlike any other.”
¹⁵

Ron also spoke about the impact of Essex’s work on the black gay community:

It was utterly profound. His work gave us a voice we had never heard before. So many of us were living as marginalized souls of internalized guilt and shame, despite our suits and ties, and suddenly there was a writer whose work captured our fears, anger, confusion, frustration, passion and desire as no artist had done before. . . . He encouraged us to celebrate. Imagine that. We who were told that our God despised us . . . And [Essex] dared all of us to envision a new community beyond gay and straight, black and white, male and female.

When the ceremony was over, Essex’s mother and sister quietly came up to Ron and thanked him for his remarks. They were apparently as torn between love and unease as Essex himself had been toward them.

Three organizations, Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD), Other Countries, and Black Nations/Queer Nations?, declared December 10, 1995, a National Day of Remembrance for Essex at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York City. They urged all those around the country who “knew, loved or were inspired by Essex and his work to join us by staging memorials in your city on that
day.” We know that at the least, Philadelphia and Detroit, as well as New York City, held such remembrances.
¹⁶

That same month and year, December 1995, the FDA approved the release of saquinavir, the first of a new class of drugs called protease inhibitors, which for many would convert AIDS from a death sentence to a manageable disease.

The FDA announcement came one month after Essex’s death.

Acknowledgments

Many people helped to bring this book into being. I’ll start my thanks with its publisher, The New Press. This is the fifth book I’ve published with TNP in the last six years, which is itself a measure of the deep satisfaction I feel about our relationship. Everyone on the staff at The New Press has been consistently kind and helpful, though for this book I want to single out the special contributions of Ellen Adler, Julie Enszer, and Ben Woodward. They’ve greatly eased my path even as they offered smart, candid suggestions for improving the manuscript. As well, Maury Botton directed all aspects of production for this book and did his usual sterling job.

The two major manuscript depositories for writing this book were the extensive Michael Callen Papers, housed at the Gay History Archives of the Gay Community Center (New York, NY), and a variety of collections (the Joseph F. Beam Papers being central) at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a branch of the New York Public Library. At the former, Rich Wandel was a cordial, tireless guide, and at the latter, Steven Fullwood was particularly helpful in locating materials. For a full listing of manuscript collections used, see the list that heads the notes at the back of the book.

I’m heavily indebted to those who sat with me, often for many hours, to share their memories of the two figures whose lives are the centerpiece
of this book: Michael Callen and Essex Hemphill. In this regard I owe a great deal to Richard Berkowitz, Richard Dworkin, Wayson Jones, E. Ethelbert Miller, Michelle Parkerson, Chris Prince, Ron Simmons, Sean Strub, Joseph Sonnabend, and Abby Tallmer. Others have sent me documents or correspondence in their private possession; Barbara Smith’s letters from Essex were especially significant. Still other people talked with me on the phone or responded to my request for additional information with e-mails, letters, and documents; of special value was the material from Jim Bredesen, Frances Goldin, Jennifer Jackson, Wayson Jones, Jim W. Marks, Tim Miller, Doug Sadownick, and Joseph Sonnabend. Above all, I’m indebted to Richard Dworkin; in multiple interviews, he not only shared with me his intimate memories of Mike Callen, but also provided a significant number of documents and photos from his private storehouse. For photos of Essex Hemphill, I’m comparably indebted to Sharon Farmer. Both she and Richard Dworkin spent countless hours combing arduously through their back files to come up with the unique, vital images that illustrate this book. I’m enormously grateful to them.

Notes

The abbreviations used in the notes are as follows:

For Individuals

For Manuscript Collections in Public Depositories

       
ASSC: Assotto Saint (Yves Lubin) Papers at SC

       
AVSC: Alexis de Veaux Papers at SC

       
EH/WJSC: The Essex Hemphill/Wayson Jones Collection, 1981–2008, at SC, plus two boxes of material donated by Wayson Jones in 2010

       
GCGW: Grace Cavalieri Papers, George Washington University

       
JBSC: Joseph F. Beam Papers at SC

       
JSNYPL: Joseph Sonnabend Papers at the New York Public Library at Forty-Second Street, Manuscript and Archives Division

       
MCP: Michael Callen Papers, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, National History Archive, New York City

       
NYPL: New York Public Library

       
SC: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library

For Manuscript Collections Privately Held

       
BSP: Barbara Smith Papers (EH correspondence)

       
DS: Doug Sadownick (correspondence)

       
FGAF: Frances Goldin Agency Files (EH unpublished novel, plus fifty unpublished early poems)

       
MP: Michelle Parkerson (flyers, posters, autographed EH material)

       
RBP: The Richard Berkowitz Archives (documents, correspondence)

       
RDP: Richard Dworkin (tapes, photos, documents, correspondence)

       
SSJS: Sean Strub (transcribed interviews with Sonnabend)

       
TM: Tim Miller (correspondence)

       
WJ: Wayson Jones (photos;
Domestic Life
)

For the many individual interviews I conducted, as well as secondary sources, see the notes.

Chapter 1: Before the Storm

Each note cites the material for the paragraph in which it appears and the paragraphs that follow until the subsequent note appears.

1
. Multiple interviews with Richard Dworkin; the first two paragraphs are derived from MC to Jon [?], 9 pp., n.d., and the transcript of a microcassette recording between MC and RB, 1982, both MCP. MC was born and spent the first five years of his life in Rising Sun, Indiana, population 550.

2
. The family background: MC, “Birth Announcement,” 4-p. ms.; MC, “Leave It to Beaver,” 26-p. ms.; Barbara Ann Callen to MC, October 4, 1974, October 23, 1977;
MC to “Barbie” [?], August 9, 1977; MC to Jon [?], 10 pp., [1978?]; Dr. David Schmidt, 9-p. typed interview with MC, November 12, 1987; MC to Mary Bemesderfer-McCleary, July 22, 1993, all MCP. MC to Sarah Squires, May 23, 1993 (college), MCP. Three DVDs: “Mike at Home at 29 Jones Street,” 1982 (mirrors); “O Boys with Mike on Franklin,” October 16, 1993; “Callen on O Boys Video/CDC Part 2” [1993], all RDP; multiple conversations with Abby Tallmer, Jennifer A. Jackson, e-mails to me, March 18, 19, 2013.

3
. JS to me, April 1, 2013; JS, interviews with Sean Strub, SSJS; Sean Strub, “The Good Doctor,”
POZ
, July 1998; Anne-Christine D’Adesky, “The Man Who Invented Safer Sex Returns,”
Out
, Summer 1992; “Callen on OBoys video/CDC Part 2.” [1993], courtesy Dworkin. For a survey of the bars, back rooms, and baths from 1969 to 1982, see Arthur Bell, “Where Gays Are Going,”
Village Voice
, June 29, 1982. As a result of his reputation as an interferon scientist, JS came to know the cancer researcher Dr. Mathilde Krim, who, as co-chair of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR—earlier known as AIDS Medical Foundation), would soon become a key figure in AIDS research. James Kinsella,
Covering the Plague: AIDS and the American Media
(Rutgers University Press, 1989); Ronald Bayer and Gerald M. Oppenheimer,
AIDS Doctors: Voices from the Epidemic
(Oxford University Press, 2000);
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
, June 5, 1981; Steven Epstein,
Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge
(University of California Press, 1996); Jacques Pepin,
The Origins of AIDS
(Cambridge University Press, 2011).

4
. Milton Coleman, “Marion Barry,”
Washington Post
, January 2, 1979; David K. Johnson,
The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
(University of Chicago Press, 2004), 193–94, 211–14.

5
. Sidney Brinkley, “Making History,” in
Smash the Church, Smash the State
, ed. Tommi Avicolli Mecca (City Lights, 2009). The
Blacklight
archive is online at
www.blacklightonline.com/archive.html
. See, esp., Thomas B. Romney, “Homophobia in the Black Community”; James S. Tinney, “Baldwin Comes Out”; Chasen Gaver, “Interracial Intentions”; the Adrian Stanford poem “Yeah Baby”; and EH’s “Homocide: For Ronald Gibson.”