Hold Tight Gently (32 page)

At its completion late in 1990, the manuscript for
Brother to Brother
ran to more than 550 pages; as a result of further cutting, it was reduced to
490 pages—with Essex having to inform five contributors that he’d had to pull their work. By December 1990, the manuscript of
Brother to Brother
was at the typesetters. Audre Lorde and Samuel Delaney both agreed to blurb the book, which was published in 1991. Essex hoped that
Brother to Brother
would both demonstrate and consolidate how much had been achieved in black gay literature, as well as inspire future accomplishments. His dearest wish was to end the emasculation of “not speaking out,” of remaining mute in the name of preserving the possibility of “middle-class aspirations.” He understood those aspirations as a hoped-for compensation for “the shame and cruelties of slavery and ghettos.” But in his opinion it wouldn’t work. “Whitewashing” the black experience would neither help the race nor impress “the racists, who don’t give a damn.”

To help promote the anthology, Essex traveled the country and also did a number of interviews on TV and radio. He felt the effort—a considerable challenge given the ups and downs of his health—was well worth it. Not only did the book sell well (it started out as number nine on national gay bookstore bestseller lists), but by extension, he felt, it could open up dialogue within the general African American community. During many of the engagements he undertook, Essex talked often and openly about what he called “the dysfunction” of the black intelligentsia, and in particular assimilationist black academics who kept their posts, he argued, by toeing the greater society’s party line. “To my mind,” he said during one interview, “they’re no better than Jerry Falwell.”

Essex also lambasted “other consciences of the black community,” with Spike Lee a particular target: “He’s been hostile to the black gay experience, and reinforces the homophobia found in the black community.” Essex singled out Lee’s film
Jungle Fever
and the scene in which a group of black women complain that black men are either addicts, or in jail, or homosexual. It was a bracketing Essex detested: “I’m just sick of being lumped in with those categories!” “All of what his films have done,” Essex added, “is breed more factionalism.” Which made Essex all the more grateful, he said, for younger black filmmakers like Michelle Parkerson, Isaac Julien, and Marlon Riggs: “There’s a sincere hope there that dialogue from the marginalized and disempowered will be handled by people who don’t have a commercial interest but a humanistic one.”

But as one reviewer of
Brother to Brother
put it, currently black gay men “have historically occupied the untenable position of being part of two communities and fully acceptable to neither.” As if in confirmation of that view, the one “white” review I was able to find—in
Publishers Weekly
—was largely negative, characterizing the anthology as “offerings of dubious literary merit.” Black reviewers were mostly more appreciative. The writer Don Belton, for example, proclaimed
Brother to Brother
“every bit as fine a work as its predecessor, and it brings up to date much of the dialogue begun by the earlier collection.”
¹⁶

But there were dissents. When the black gay writer Donald Suggs reviewed
Brother to Brother
in the
Village Voice
(October 1, 1991), he offered an unusual criticism of the section on AIDS: “I needed to know less about how these men experienced AIDS in their daily lives and more about the ways in which their own responses to AIDS were shaped by the attitudes of those around them. Even Black PWAs who can afford health care suffer the poverty of the Black community’s resources in dealing with AIDS.” Suggs did praise Essex’s “outstanding selection of poetry” but further objected to his choice of “a cheerleading quote” from Joe Beam as a preface to the anthology, namely, “Black men loving black men is a call to action, an acknowledgement of responsibility.” Suggs thought that Charles Harpe, another contributor to the anthology, “better identifies the root of our creativity, both as writers and as black gay men. It is, he [Harpe] says, the ‘beginning of [the] feeling that the word
faggot
did not accurately name the man I was or the man I was aspiring to become.’ ”

In a comparable vein, the
New Republic
review raised the question of “whether we can have a gay literature that is not merely about its own gayness, but is true to the variety of ways in which gays relate to each other and to the world.” The reviewer apparently preferred gay writers like Samuel Delany, Michael Nava, and Joe Keenan, who placed gay characters in settings where homosexuality was “simply taken for granted” and the characters were shown “exploring worlds, solving murders, getting laughs” that required their authors to employ “the advantages of indirection” in discussing sexuality. But for many readers of
Brother to Brother
, the subtle virtues of “indirection” paled, became something of a literary luxury, when placed in the context of a community devastated by AIDS and desperate for succor.

The section in
Brother to Brother
devoted entirely to AIDS was given the overall title “Hold Tight Gently.” Its searing content consisted of seven poems and seven prose pieces. One of the longer essays, by Walter Rico Burrell, a journalist with a master’s degree from UCLA, consisted of excerpts from his AIDS diary. Burrell had submitted the piece by mail and when Essex initially read it he wasn’t prepared for the scorching honesty of the diary entries—and burst into tears. He called Burrell on the phone and their shared pain reduced them both to crying. In the excerpts, Burrell revealed that he’d decided to give AZT a try, but when he took the doctor’s prescription, along with his Blue Shield medical insurance card, to a pharmacist, it was handed right back to him; “this prescription,” he was told, “is going to cost more than two hundred dollars and we aren’t allowed to make any third-party transactions on a sum that large.”

“Jesus!” Burrell wrote in his diary, “I was going to have to fight to get the very medicine I needed to hold the disease at bay. I immediately thought of all those street people, poor people, people who didn’t have the resources I had, the job I had, the insurance I had. Christ! What would happen to them? Were they doomed to death simply because they’re not middle-class enough to afford to fight AIDS?” The answer was yes, though some state and federal subsidy programs would subsequently kick in. The answer is still yes for many in the United States and also for the millions afflicted in developing countries.

When the anthology was published, Essex sent a copy of the book to Burrell. It was returned—marked “deceased.” Burrell had died of AIDS—as would nearly all of the fourteen authors represented in that part of the book.

The AIDS section of the anthology also included a piece by Assotto Saint—who worked in an office where co-workers would wipe the phones with alcohol after he used them—about the death of his long-term lover. The account began with his lover developing a small spot on his right foot, “purple with the stain of a crushed grape.” Soon after, the spot “multiplied like buds on a tree in early spring. It multiplied all over his feet, his legs, up his ass, inside his intestines, all over his face, his neck, down his throat, inside his brains. For nine months of fever and wracking coughs, nine months of sweat and shaking chills, nine months of diarrhea and jerking spasms, it multiplied, and wrenched him skinny like a spider.” And all through it, Assotto held him when
he “gagged, choked, and vomited,” helped him sit up and cough, “changed his diapers, washed him, massaged his back, smoothed the bed sheets, caressed him until he’d fall asleep, then awaken from a nightmare struggling for air.” When the doctor said he was near death, Assotto called his lover’s mother. She arrived cursing, “huffing and puffing, waving her righteous finger” in Assotto’s face, telling him “You done perverted my son, you low-down immoral—” Interrupting, Assotto sat her down hard and told her he didn’t give a damn about getting her blessing. He was thoroughly tired of the heterosexual version of caring.

The poem “Hope Against Hope,” by Craig G. Harris (who died of AIDS in November 1991 at age thirty-two), in
Brother to Brother
exemplified one gay version of caring:

                        
he swore no virus would beat him

                        
armed with rose quartz

                        
and amethyst, homeopathic remedies,

                        
Louise Hay tapes

                        
and the best doctors

                        
at San Francisco General

                        
he fought it

                        
like a copperhead going

                        
against a mongoose

                        
when he lost

                        
we all wore purple,

                        
tucked him in white satin

                        
with his crystal shields,

                        
and thought of Icarus

                        
soaring toward the sun . . .

Though Essex felt that “home” for black gays was far more likely to be found in the black community as a whole than in the white gay one,
Brother to Brother
contained a number of strong pieces that showed his open-eyed awareness that many leading black intellectuals and academicians continued to denounce homosexuality. He printed parts of a 1989 interview that he’d done with Isaac Julien, which detailed how the Langston Hughes estate had “disrupted the original version”
of Julien’s film
Looking for Langston
by forcing the deletion of several of Hughes’ more homoerotic poems. The estate’s reaction to Julien’s decision to “take a black cultural icon and basically undress him” was, in Essex’s view, “based on the black middle class’s belief that it’s important to project the
right
image.” It was part and parcel, he felt, of “the manifest determination of major black publications such as
Jet, Ebony, Ebony Man, Black Scholar, Emerge, Callaloo
, and many other black periodicals and journals” to perpetuate “the lack of visibility and forthright discussion of gays and lesbians.”

That line of argument was continued in
Brother to Brother
in Ron Simmons’ interview with the black filmmaker Marlon Riggs. (His award-winning
Ethnic Notions
was soon followed by the stunning and controversial
Tongues Untied
.) Simmons, a good friend of Essex’s, pointed out in the interview that homosexuality had “been ridiculed and spoken of with absolute scorn by some of our most brilliant writers, scholars, and leaders—Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, Nathan Hare, Robert Staples, Molefi Asante and Minister Louis Farrakhan—most of whom view homosexuality as one more pathology resulting from white racist oppression.” To that list one can easily append additional names: Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, and Eldridge Cleaver.
¹⁷

Essex himself would devote an entire essay (in his collection
Ceremonies
) to Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, one of the lesser-known, yet influential, advocates of the “homosexuality as pathology” theory. At a 1987 London conference on AIDS, Welsing had declared that the U.S. government had deliberately created HIV in order to rid the nation of undesirable blacks. She had also written several attention-grabbing articles that in 1990 were collected in her book
The Isis Papers
, which enjoyed considerable prestige among black cultural nationalists. Essex found Welsing’s views more dangerous than those of better-known figures because she grounded her homophobia in African American history, explaining it “as evidence of Black Males
adapting
to oppression.” But not everything, Essex insisted, can be ascribed to racism. Homosexuality, he declared, was a
natural
variant; nature, not white racism, had created sexual diversity. Anthropological studies would later conclusively show that homosexuality was an indigenous phenomenon in certain African cultures.

In her book, Welsing also advocated the traditional patriarchal
family structure—dominant male, submissive female—and this further offended Essex’s feminist perspective. Her views, in his opinion, widened “the existing breach between Black gays and lesbians and their heterosexual counterparts, offering no bridges for joining our differences.” Instead of fostering an appreciation of diversity, Welsing offered a brand of heterosexism that, in Essex’s opinion, would continue to fracture and disable the black community.

In the Simmons interview in
Brother to Brother
, Marlon Riggs struck a note that was soon to become a mantra (“intersectionality”) of queer theory and can also be read as moving in a somewhat different direction from Essex in regard to race. “The way to break loose of the schizophrenia in trying to define identity,” Riggs said, “is to realize that you are many things within one person. Don’t try to arrange a hierarchy of things that are virtuous in your character and say, ‘This is more important than that.’ Realize that both are equally important; they both inform your character. Both are nurturing and nourishing of your spirit. You can embrace all of that lovingly and equally.”

In a powerful essay of his own (“Black Macho Revisited: Reflections of a Snap! Queen”) in
Brother to Brother
, Riggs expressed his belief that at the heart of black America’s “pervasive cultural homophobia is the desperate need for a convenient Other
within
the community, yet not truly
of
the community, an Other to which blame for the chronic identity crises afflicting the black male psyche can be readily displaced.” For black men struggling with discrimination and ostracism, poverty and powerlessness, self-doubt and self-disgust, the “faggot,” Riggs suggests, is an
essential
Other, a despised Other not to be helped even during as desperate a trial as AIDS.