Hold Tight Gently (41 page)

Hyde Street Studios, San Francisco, June 1993, rehearsing for the
Legacy
album—left to right: Michael Callen, Chris Williamson, and Holly Near (photo by Patrick Kelly)

“An Evening with Essex Hemphill,” The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS), CUNY Graduate Center, New York, 1993 (photo courtesy of CUNY)

Michael in a theater lobby surrounded by well-wishers, 1993 (photo courtesy of Richard Dworkin)

Essex the poet, 1985 (photo © Sharon Farmer/sfphotoworks)

As a result, it had become nearly impossible for the government to fill its clinical trials. Besides, it had become widely known that federal studies were being sabotaged by various forms of “cheating”—patients, for example, would have their pills tested by a lab to see if they were getting a placebo or the drug. At CRI Mike had found out just how “damned difficult” it was to run good clinical trials, but he continued to feel that, properly designed and regulated, they still held out the best hope for finding treatments that worked. He believed most people with AIDS would be more likely “to cooperate honestly and altruistically” with community-based trials than with federal ones.
⁵

Mike felt that he, too, bore some responsibility for the current lack of effective drug oversight; he had, after all, helped (in his own words) “to foster the atmosphere of rabid anti-expertism” that fueled the drive to put “any drug into any body.” What he’d intended was to open up the definition of “expert” to include the lived experiences of people with AIDS. That had gotten twisted, he felt, “into the absurd notion that all opinions are of equal value—that when, for example, one must evaluate some highly complex pharmacological and toxicological question, the opinion of a PWA who may or may not have finished high school is just as valid as someone who has studied these issues for 20 years.”

Despite all the buyers clubs and the ingestion of a wild assortment of untested drugs, the progress against AIDS had been agonizingly slight. By 1990 there had been modest increases in median survival—that is, for middle-class white men, 18 percent of whom were now living on average eighteen months after a diagnosis of full-blown AIDS—as opposed to one year for IV drug users and a mere six months for African Americans and Hispanics. Mike believed that the improved statistics for white men were primarily due to Bactrim and aerosol pentamidine as preventatives against PCP, as well as to a general improvement in patient management—but the prospects for effective treatment were no more promising than when he’d been diagnosed a decade earlier. He agreed with the activists of ACT UP that the failure could be assigned largely to the federal government’s slowness and lack of urgency in its response to the disease. But he didn’t think that the best antidote was widespread deregulation.

His reasons were multiple. Reliable “surrogate markers”—like CD4 counts—had not yet been established; in fact, a high-powered
meeting convened by the National Academy of Sciences had, in late 1989, failed to reach consensus on precisely that matter. It had been Mike’s personal experience, and that of many others he knew about, that T cells “bounce all over the place, varying from lab to lab and day to day.” He also disputed the common notion that an HIV-positive diagnosis was inevitably a death sentence, and pointed to his own decade-long survival as a case in point. He attributed his survival to having followed Sonnabend’s advice
not
to experiment with whatever drug was currently being touted. In this regard, Mike rejected the widespread assumption that a drug either worked or it didn’t work. He insisted on a third alternative: taking a given drug could actually
harm
you, could hasten your death. Mike believed that he and other long-term survivors had rightly taken “a wait-and-see attitude about experimental drugs.”

That conclusion was difficult for someone like Mike to reach, since his politics were libertarian (that is, he was against blindly obeying authority instead of relying on individual choice). But he’d come to the painful decision that “there are in fact experts better able to assess the risks and benefits of a particular course of action than I.” He might have reached a different conclusion if Joe Sonnabend—whom he’d long credited with keeping him alive—hadn’t been his doctor, and if all PWAs had access to disparate data and to physicians and scientists willing to take the time to explain the complex implications of any potential drug therapy.

Instead, a “carnival atmosphere,” in Mike’s opinion, currently prevailed, the result of the pharmaceutical companies’ outrageous promotion of their products for the sake of making money, and the unearned certainty of some doctors and scientists bent on promoting their own careers. “The order of the day,” Mike wrote, “is anarchy. . . . The stage is thus set for anybody to test any drug, regardless of its toxicity, based on any fucocta theory. . . . The AIDS activist movement has joined with the drug deregulation movement to score a knock-out victory. . . . Federally designed AIDS research has become irrelevant . . . thanks to a plethora of treatment newsletters and the relentless PR of groups such as Project Inform urging what is referred to as ‘early intervention,’ ” which in Mike’s view encouraged desperate PWAs to medicate themselves with useless drugs.

Even if all PWAs had full access to the research literature, they
would have found it rife with contradictory conclusions and advice. This was true both for recommended drug therapies and for definitions of “safe sex.” Mike may have been the founding father (he preferred “Queen Mother”) of the latter subject, but not even Mike could evaluate with certainty recent all-over-the-map studies about cock sucking. One such study found that oral sex without a condom carried “significant risk” of contracting AIDS, while another concluded that any top in anal sex who failed to use a condom was at greater risk of getting AIDS than someone who sucked unsheathed cocks. It had reached the point where, depending on your preferred sexual activity, you could probably find a study that confirmed your favorite option as the safest one. Questionnaires about sexual behavior, moreover, were notoriously unreliable. Asking someone whether they played the top or bottom role in anal sex, for example, not only encouraged an either/ or answer but failed to control for ambiguity, role reversals, memory lapses, fear of discovery, and distorted self-images.

The unreliability of self-report data had been clearly revealed at least as far back as Masters and Johnson’s 1979 study
Homosexuality in Perspective
. The two researchers had studied the sexual fantasies of four groups: homosexual men and women, and heterosexual men and women. The heterosexual men during face-to-face discussions and interviews had described same-gender sex as “revolting” and “unthinkable.” They reported no incidence at all in their histories of homosexual experience. As a result, Masters and Johnson had understandably designated them Kinsey O’s—that is, exclusively heterosexual. Yet when the two researchers studied their subjects’ fantasies they discovered that the men had “a significant curiosity and anticipation about same-gender sex”—and even worried about how effectively they’d perform. (The men’s fantasies also revealed, incidentally, that they envisioned themselves more frequently as rapees than rapists—as victims of “groups of unidentified women.”) The moral, I suppose, is something like “you can’t believe people are who they say they are”—they may well be reporting a vision of their ideal selves rather than their actual ones.
⁶

Essex wasn’t naturally belligerent—that is, someone who invented slights in order to stir up trouble. But he was a person of intense feeling, and when he believed a genuine injury had been done to him, he
could be fierce in defending himself. Twice in the summer of 1991, on quite different fronts, he became militantly contentious. The merits of the first dispute seem clear; those of the second, somewhat less so.

Essex had a gift for meticulously detailed work and proved his own best publicist on
Brother to Brother
. Diligently, he sent press materials to some sixty review outlets and then made follow-up calls to make sure that the books and assorted press releases had arrived in the proper hands. When he contacted an assistant editor at
Book World
, the review section of the
Washington Post
, and was told no such material had arrived, Essex sent a second round to the same editor. When Essex again followed up, the editor again told him that no material had arrived. But Essex wasn’t easily put off. He had the UPS shipping bill pulled to verify that the book had been sent (twice), and he had firsthand testimony from another employee at
Book World
who’d overheard the editor telling someone that he wasn’t interested “in reviewing gay and lesbian literature.”
⁷

That did it for Essex. He accused the editor of homophobia, and the editor in turn insisted that “to suggest that we exclude books based solely on an author’s sexuality is not only absurd but personally insulting.” The lie heightened Essex’s anger. He sent the editor a blistering four-page letter in which he first made it clear that he’d never accused
Book World
itself of being homophobic—but rather the editor. Essex reiterated what he’d said from the first: he had a high regard for both the
Washington Post
and
Book World
and was not accusing either of being antigay. He had, moreover, checked again with his firsthand witness and she’d reconfirmed the editor’s homophobic words.

Secure in his position, Essex opened up with both barrels: “You should be accountable for your statements and your actions,” he wrote the editor. “That’s what I respect. Accountability . . . just because you don’t agree with a given sexuality it does not mean you have to trade in your integrity and credibility for lies and shabby denials in order to maintain a heterosexist hegemony that can easily find you expendable at any moment, and dismiss you as excess baggage or yesterday’s news.” Essex closed with this zinger: “I leave you with my best wishes that
you
will be able to manage in a changing world.” And he did his bit to ensure that the editor would
not
be able to manage: he sent a copy of his letter to the head of
Book World
. The bottom line? In general, Essex was a sweetheart, but on some issues you didn’t want to cross him.

At almost exactly the same point in time, August 1991, Essex took on Phill Wilson, the African American AIDS coordinator for the city of Los Angeles, and in 2014 still a prominent, well-regarded AIDS activist. Wilson invited Essex to come to L.A. under the auspices of the Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum (BGLLF). The visit did not go well. Essex had been invited to offer three public programs under BGLLF’s sponsorship. On arriving in L.A. he read, with his usual attention to detail, a number of the free newspapers available to the gay community—and found not a single mention of his upcoming appearances. When he stopped off at the gay bookstore A Different Light, in West Hollywood, the clerks on duty expressed surprise that he was in town.