Authors: Martin Duberman
it is there that the names were thought . . .
By age twenty, encouraged by the prominent African American children’s writer Sharon Bell Mathis, Essex would start trying to get some of his poems published. Though little literary merit can be claimed for most of them, an occasional fragment provides some foretaste of the powerful poet he’d later become:
The radio plays syncopated rhythms
To soothe and relax
Black bodies in the quiet of night
that have met
and come/together/apart
from one another
saying something to each other
that words weren’t made for
and these same
syncopated rhythms
raise the hand
that will slap a face
and crack, what could’ve been
but now isn’t
while she walks the streets
syncopated rhythmically
to do her thing
with whoever is willing to/for a couple of sheets
of green stuff
moving her body to a beat
that will feed the baby
and pay the rent
for an apartment
which creaks too/to
syncopated/sad rhythms
and a baby breathes
to the rhythms
and cries syncope tears
of want/inquiet
during a very Black night . . .
If Essex began writing seriously at seventeen, his sexual explorations had begun some years earlier. By age fourteen, he’d had his first sexual encounter that went beyond the usual “messing around” among neighborhood youngsters. At a convenience store near his home, a white male clerk in his midforties named George had been whispering in his ear for weeks about how much he wanted to suck his dick, how good he was at it, how many others in the neighborhood had let him, and so on. Essex later recalled that he knew from the start that his answer would be yes, and finally he said it. Then the sucking led to fucking and soon Essex would regularly mount George early in the morning before the store opened or at George’s house after it closed—George’s mongrel dog watching the action nonchalantly. The sex between them went on for nearly two years, with Essex finally ending it out of fear that it was only a matter of time before they’d be caught.
9
In D.C., Essex attended Ballou Senior High School, just a few blocks from his home, and had a part-time job downtown as a file clerk. He was by then well aware of his sexual attraction to men but realized, “as a way of protecting myself from being identified as a faggot around the school,” that he needed always to have a girlfriend. “It would be my luck,” he’d later write, “to date girls who were ‘good,’ girls who were not going to experiment with sex beyond kissing and fondling, and even that was often only tolerated at a minimum if tolerated at all.”
During his senior year in Ballou High School in 1975, a more resonant encounter took place when his journalism instructor assigned him to interview the local Episcopal minister of a church known for providing daily meals for the down-and-out. Essex called the church for an appointment, but the man who answered the phone told him that the minister was out. He then chatted pleasantly with Essex, asking him why he wanted to see the minister. Essex found the man’s voice, a cadenced, leathery baritone, enticing, and when he boldly suggested that Essex “come on up here and meet
me
,” a startled—and turned-on—Essex required little coaxing.
10
The voice on the phone turned out to be attached to a tall, broad-shouldered man in his late forties with salt-and-pepper hair. He’d once
been a promising professional boxer, but an automobile accident had cut short his career. His jacket, Essex later wrote, “constrained obvious arm muscles and an expansive chest,” and “his hands were thick and strong.” The man, as it turned out, was a volunteer at the church in one of its community programs, and he gave Essex a courtly, unhurried tour.
Perhaps too unhurried; like most seventeen-year-old boys, Essex had (in his words), “raging hormones and an embarrassing erection.” When the older man finally closed and locked a heavy wooden door in one of the unoccupied rooms and suddenly said, “Take down your pants . . . I want to suck your dick,” Essex eagerly complied. “Orgasm and high-spirited ecstasy” followed, and the two continued to see each other for nearly two years. Essex would borrow his mother’s royal blue Dodge sedan “to study at the library” and the two would rendezvous. And more than sex was involved, though that continued to be passionate.
The older man turned out to be “the most well-read adult black male” Essex had known, other than for some of his teachers, and he had a “beautiful, stimulating” mind. In adulthood Essex credited his older friend’s counsel with diverting him from making some “foolish choices”—he would never, for example, feel the need “to strike cool poses on the corner and father numerous children to prove my manhood.” His older friend pointed him toward the only acceptance that matters: “acceptance of myself.” It was an uncommonly lucky coming-out for any day and age, but especially for that one.
Following high school, Essex in 1975 enrolled at the University of Maryland. He was assigned to room with another black gay man, Wayson Jones—probably a deliberate racial slight since they were the only blacks on the entire floor of the dormitory and the room was designed for one person. Wayson came from a military family and, having grown up in a more integrated environment than Essex, recalls no noticeable friction with white students in the dorm—one of his good friends was in fact “a real hippie type.” In any case, Essex decided to leave the University of Maryland after one year—not because of endemic racism or because he was in any sort of academic trouble, but rather, as Wayson has put it, because he “needed to ‘reinvent’ himself.” Essex spent some time in Los Angeles in 1976 and then returned
to D.C. and completed his degree at the University of the District of Columbia.
During the year that they roomed together, Essex and Wayson “clicked,” bonding particularly around music—and smoking pot. Essex favored female jazz vocalists but was also into progressive jazz performers like Bennie Maupin and George Duke. Wayson leaned more toward rock—they both loved the groupies—and more dissonant jazz like that of John Coltrane. In general they (in Wayson’s words) had “a great time” together as roommates. Essex had a hot plate and after getting the munchies from smoking pot, they’d devour batch after batch of pancakes. They also shared a small TV set, their special favorites being
Monty Python
and
Saturday Night Live
. Essex showed Wayson some of his early writing, and though not a fan of poetry, Wayson to this day remembers the telling image in one of Essex’s poems: returning home in the evening to “count the brown pennies of this day.” Wayson, in turn, invited Essex to hear him play saxophone in a jam session and took to heart his opinion that Wayson held back too much when improvising. They were, as Wayson puts it, “very much in tune emotionally and spiritually.”
Wayson was already “out” as a gay man, both sexually and politically, had already told his parents—and told Essex, too, the very first time they met. According to Wayson, Essex wasn’t at that point really open yet about being gay; he still dated girls and rarely talked about his private life. (Essex’s first public declaration of his homosexuality would come during a poetry reading at the library of Howard University in 1980.) Though Essex and Wayson tended to have separate friends, they did some occasional gay socializing together. Wayson took him to Pier 9, D.C.’s first “superdisco,” and at another time to a party—at which Essex was “visibly uncomfortable”—at the home of his former high school band director, Doug Hinkle, who’d been really helpful to Wayson when he was coming out during senior year in high school, and who went on to become a photographer for D.C.’s gay paper, the
Washington Blade
. Wayson belonged to the Maryland chapter of the Gay Student Alliance, and unlike Essex at that point was already “very much a gay activist,” even giving talks and holding Q and A sessions in front of university classes—a rare act of bravery at this relatively early stage of the gay rights movement. When Essex left the University of Maryland after his freshman year, he and Wayson stayed in
touch and within a few years, after Essex’s return to D.C., reconnected as part of the city’s black artistic circle.
By then Essex was fully out of the closet and eager to explore black gay life. The District’s gay history went back at least to the nineteenth-century annual drag balls and up to the ongoing cruising area in Lafayette Square across from the White House. But it wasn’t until the cultural revolution of the 1960s that segregated gay life slowly began to give way to interracial contact—a process still far from complete. Even when white gays and their bars didn’t adopt exclusionary policies—and many did—their frequent condescension, or worse, made black gays uncomfortable and angry.
By the mid-1970s, an independent parallel movement by and for black gays was starting to form and coalesce in D.C. Concerned about the fact that “black gays were not getting a fair share of the political, social and economic advances of the gay community,” in the fall of 1976 a group called the Association of Black Gays formed and for a brief time published the newsletter
Rafiki.
Then, in 1978, the D.C. Coalition of Black Gays emerged—one of the first black gay organizations in the country—which subsequently became the still-active D.C. Coalition. It was determined to take legal action against bars that “carded”—the polite euphemism for denying admission to blacks—and it also intended to expose the racism that characterized white-dominated gay organizations.
The feminist movement in D.C. had also done little to encourage the participation of women of color, heterosexual or homosexual. As a result—expecting neither white women nor black men to address their specific issues—a Washington, D.C., chapter of the National Black Feminist Organization came into being at Howard University in 1974. That same year, Salsa Soul Sisters emerged, and then in 1980 a group of black lesbians formed Sapphire Sapphos; their primary sympathies lay not with the feminist movement but with their black gay brothers and with the struggle in general for black liberation. Some D.C. black lesbians may have read the white feminist journal
Quest
(founded in 1974 and including Charlotte Bunch and Rita Mae Brown among its guiding spirits) for its strong positions against oppression of any kind, and of apartheid in particular. As well, many African American lesbians embraced feminist issues of reproductive rights, day care, ERA, and equal opportunities in the workplace, while rejecting male
definitions of what it meant to be a woman. Nonetheless, many black lesbians also believed—as did many black gay men—that racial solidarity took clear and necessary priority over gender oppression.
Essex would later frame the issue this way: “I always tell people I can be gay in only a few cities in this country, but I’m Black everywhere I go. . . . That’s going to always be the case, at least within my lifetime. I don’t see any major changes happening in the consciousness of this country around issues of race.” In saying this, Essex wasn’t prescribing for others; it was up to each individual, he felt, to establish his or her priorities among the multiple strands that make up one’s “identity.” Even for himself, he acknowledged that varied strands made up his personhood—“it’s all hand-in-hand, it comes as one package. I can’t just be Black and then just be gay. I’m all of these things.” Further, he acknowledged that it would take him “a very long time to arrive at a love of myself that allows the integration to work. Each thing plays off of the other. Each part of me empowers me. So I can’t say, well my left hand is gay and my right hand is Black.”
11
Washington, D.C., in 1973 became the first large U.S. city officially to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation in housing, employment, and public accommodations. The catch, of course, was that black and Latino/a gay men and lesbians still remained subject to the prevailing racist mind-set among whites—and the prevailing homophobia among heterosexual people of color. It’s possible to argue—though the argument is far from conclusive—that within gay circles discrimination against blacks and Latinos was less pronounced in D.C. than within straight ones. During a three-day conference at the University of Houston to plan for the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, for example, the organizers set aside 25 percent of all leadership and policy positions for Third World delegates, and the black D.C. Coalition, led by Billy Jones, actively participated. The day before the march, the conference agenda included three panels on racial issues, and both Marion Barry and the well-known writer Audre Lorde spoke at the event itself. Judging by numbers alone—estimates vary but are generally upwards of 150,000 attendees—the march was counted a great success.