Hold Tight Gently (15 page)

He went on to reveal in the article that when, at age nineteen, he told his parents he was gay, “they had trouble accepting the news.” His mother (as is often the case) blamed herself, though Essex assured her that no blame was involved and that homosexuality was entirely “natural,” as was “sensitivity”—it wasn’t a “sissy” thing. “I have yet to understand,” he wrote, “why emotional expression by men”—emotion other than anger, that is—“must be understated or under control
when the process of living requires the capacity to feel and express.” Essex claimed that he got some encouragement from his family “to aggressively pursue my human rights,” though given his father’s emotionally distant and at times violent temperament and his mother’s ambivalence (at best) about his homosexuality, the human rights in question may well have been black, not gay.

Homosexuality
was
often accepted within the confines of a black family, or even within the black community as a whole (“everyone knew that the choir master at church was queer”)—but what was not widely accepted was for the individual in question to “go public.” It would have been highly atypical in the heterosexual black world to have urged a son or daughter to become active in openly fighting for the acceptance of gay people. The black gay essayist and poet Craig G. Harris, who died of AIDS in 1992 at age thirty-three, put it this way: “The strong tradition of the extended family holds a highly esteemed position for the bachelor uncle or spinster aunt. These are often the family members who, because they have lesser financial responsibilities, can assist in the rearing of their siblings’ offspring. Afro-American families relate well to homosexuality—as long as they can turn their backs on the issue. But often when the homosexual family member decides to be political, or obvious in other ways, the family becomes confused, frightened, or disgusted by the display.”
⁶

In his
Essence
article, Essex withheld any specific details about his private life and instead spoke generally of not having “found loving a man easy,” (while also saying that he didn’t feel loving a woman would be any easier). His
Essence
piece was also noteworthy for the sharpness of its attack on the gay rights movement as “racist and sexist.” It was a view common among black gays and lesbians. As Craig Harris put it: “The feelings of violation experienced by many gay white men when encountering heterosexist discrimination are largely due to an innate belief that, as white men, their civil liberties are a guaranteed birthright. This unconscious illusion of supremacy promotes racism and misogyny, rather than eliciting empathy for victims of discrimination based on race or sex.” This sense of exclusion from the white gay inner sanctum had led to a number of separate black political formations, ranging from the consciousness-raising groups sponsored by the Committee of Black Gay Men to Salsa Soul Sisters/Third World Women, to the 1985 National Coalition of Black Gays (NCBG), whose
letterhead slogan read: “As proud of our gayness as we are of our Blackness.”

Among those who served on NCBG’s board were Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Michelle Parkerson, and the Reverend Renee McCoy. Like most gay organizations at the time, NCBG was understaffed and underfunded. Yet it managed to convene a national gathering in St. Louis late in 1985. Both Joe Beam and Essex attended, though the convention was so hectic, they saw little of each other there. But both of them found the conference a pivotal experience. During the workshop on organizing, Joe was especially taken with Betty Powell’s view that black lesbians and gays “are the current, forward-moving crest of the Black liberation struggle.” He felt “more and more committed to that struggle each day,” and he recognized that it would be a long one; but “if Nelson Mandela can spend a quarter of a century in prison then certainly I can learn to work when I am weary, but free to move as I please.” For his part, Essex started negotiations with a D.C. club, the Brass Rail, to do a benefit performance for NCBG—and that wasn’t the sole extent of his involvement. As Renee McCoy has put it, “he provided significant support and guidance when we were building the Coalition.”

The essential accuracy of the indictment of the white gay movement as indifferently sexist and racist is, in broad outline, inarguable. Yet Essex’s severe characterization of it “as an insincere human rights struggle” can be contested partially. In the 1970s and early 1980s the organized LGBT movement was small, fragmented, and largely middle-class and white. As someone involved in forming the National Gay Task Force and the Gay Academic Union of those years, I know that serious efforts were made to include women and people of color. These efforts were somewhat successful in regard to women but largely ineffective in regard to people of color. Obviously more, much more, outreach was needed before blacks and Hispanics could comfortably feel ownership in those organizations. Yet some effort is different from none.

Essex’s indictment of the white gay movement and community was encompassing. “When I first came to the life,” he wrote, “I would go to these gay clubs here [D.C.], like the Lost & Found, and those white sissies would give me fever for not having thousands of pieces of I.D. before they’d let me in. I watched white queens sail through the door with barely a nod, and they weren’t asked for I.D. but I had to fish
around in my pockets for numerous pieces. . . . Now, none of those white sissies sailing through the door would ever stop on my behalf or on the behalf of any other brother being hassled at the door and ask, ‘Why are you demanding I.D. of him, but not of me?’ Your only chance of avoiding those ugly scenes was to show up at the door with a white boy on your arm or in a racially mixed group. . . . I was humiliated constantly.” Yet he found that at the baths, “undressed and in my towel, white boys would chase me around and around the place, wanting to suck my dick, wanting me to fuck them, and basically being goddamn nuisances.”

Essex was speaking for many black gay men (and women, for that matter), and his indictment was unquestionably on the mark, if perhaps too totalizing,
too
sweeping to acknowledge the effort, both pre-Stonewall and in the mid-1980s, of some white gays—though certainly nothing close to a majority—to confront their own racism and that of the organizations to which they belonged. The pioneering (and tiny) D.C. Mattachine had attempted to recruit members at Nob Hill, the popular African American gay bar, and even devoted one of its evening discussions to “How Can We Bring the Negro into the Homophile Movement?” Such efforts were undoubtedly minor, and the inability to enlist more than a very few blacks may well have been due to a lack of understanding that sexual orientation can often be concealed, but skin color only rarely—which made the black struggle, not the gay one, of necessity the primary emergency for most blacks.

The most prominent gay organization in the immediate aftermath of the 1969 Stonewall riots had been the radical Gay Liberation Front (GLF). Its agenda was broader than gay rights; it wanted to fight against all forms of oppression and made overtures to both the Black Panthers and the Puerto Rican Young Lords. But the macho orientation of both groups militated against any combination of forces with “faggots”; only Huey Newton (so far as is known) responded sympathetically to the GLF initiative. One could also cite the fact that when Lost & Found opened in the fall of 1971 in D.C., the popular disco was immediately picketed by the newly formed and multiracial Committee for Open Gay Bars in protest over its racist and sexist carding policies. The well-known gay Regency Baths in D.C., which started in 1968 (and in 1985 was the first to close during the AIDS epidemic), had an entirely open membership policy. Similarly, the Black Panthers’
Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in 1970, held at the All Souls Unitarian Church in D.C., was an event staged with GLF’s strong support.

Those instances can arguably be dismissed as the marginal residue of the radical decade of the 1960s. In New York City, after all, the hugely popular disco the Ice Palace, despite a long-term campaign against its carding policy in the early eighties, never capitulated to the protesters—and few whites ever withdrew their patronage. Similar failed campaigns against racist door policies were tried without success against a number of prominent New York City gay and lesbian bars from the 1970s through the 1990s. After the early seventies, the gay movement pretty much shed its radical origins and impulses and started on a trajectory that has veered ever closer to the nonradical goal of mainstream assimilationism. Yet at least at the fringe of the movement, white gay radicalism has persisted down to the present day. When Essex wrote his 1983
Essence
piece, the organization Black and White Men Together did exist, as did the influential radical anti-racist publications
Gay Community News
,
Conditions,
and
Fag Rag
. But they were marginal to the mainstream gay movement. Essex’s allegiance, in any case, was clear-cut: his priorities understandably and overwhelmingly focused on the well-being of black gay people, not gays in general. Throughout his poetry the anger he felt about white bigotry often surfaced:

                        
I live in a town

                        
where pretense and bone structure

                        
prevail as credentials

                        
of status and beauty—

                        
a town bewitched

                        
by mirrors, horoscopes

                        
and corruption . . .

(“Family Jewels: For Washington D.C.”)

                        
I could leave with no intention

                        
of coming home tonight,

                        
go crazy downtown and raise hell

                        
on a rooftop with my rifle.

                        
I could live for a brief moment

                        
on the six o’clock news,

                        
or masquerade another day

                        
through the corridors of commerce

                        
and American dreams.

(“Cordon Negro”)

In the country as a whole, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election on a wave of white popular support had seen a host of mounting ills for the working class as unionization declined, technology replaced workers, and corporations moved increasingly overseas—where the Reagan administration backed regimes, especially in Central America, notorious for their dictatorial brutality. Yet in regard to wars at home against poverty, racism, and AIDS, the federal government managed to remain passive and indifferent. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 made massive cuts in social services and wiped out most of the gains won against poverty initiated by Lyndon B. Johnson two decades earlier. As the number of AIDS cases aggressively mounted, topping three thousand by the end of 1983, Congress began to vote larger, though still not adequate, budgets for research and assistance—only to have the administration fail to spend all the funds allotted.

The cities of San Francisco and New York suffered most. Washington, D.C., still had the comparatively low figure of eighty-nine cases, and the response there had been minimal. The gay STD clinic Whitman-Walker, in existence for a decade, was a comparative hub of activity, all but uniquely trying to do
something
. It had launched an Education Fund for AIDS, hired its first AIDS program director, and issued its first AIDS education pamphlet. Yet the candlelight march and memorial service that marked Gay Pride Day in D.C. on June 19, 1983, saw a turnout of fewer than a thousand people.

Essex would later describe the black men who availed themselves of Whitman-Walker’s services as usually requiring “more than medication. . . . [They had] an almost common set of symptoms that blatantly spell out the oppressive conditions black males endure in American society. Some of the men coming into the clinic need job training, marketable skills, improvements in their reading comprehension, pills, if there were such, for self-esteem and confidence, and surely, they desperately need to know they are loved. . . . By the time they walk through the doors of the clinic . . . keeping their bodies alive is often
in sharp contradiction to the suffering of their souls, the suffering they endure for simply being black and male regardless of sexuality. They need a healing requiring more than medicine, education, jobs, and T-cells.”

The racial division in the D.C. gay community was further heightened when the organizers of an AIDS vigil chose an office space above Badlands, a Dupont Circle gay bar that discriminated against blacks. Only after pressure from the recently formed group Black and White Men Together was the office location changed. In the early years of the epidemic, the Whitman-Walker clinic, with limited financial support, built a variety of services for its clients. But over the years blacks would come to regard it less favorably, accusing it of essentially serving a white clientele. Several small minority AIDS agencies arose to fill the gap, including the Abundant Life Clinic run by the notoriously homophobic Nation of Islam. By 1993, more than 60 percent of D.C.’s AIDS cases would be among blacks, but the bulk of D.C.’s AIDS funding had continued to go to Whitman-Walker, with only 20 percent earmarked for minority agencies. The disparity in wealth and services between white and minority organizations was true across the country, meaning that communities of color were generally underserved—and rightfully resentful of the fact.
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