Hold Tight Gently (21 page)

                        
means nothing to you,

                        
and the dreams you suffer

                        
may be my only revenge.

Despite Essex’s best efforts to bring him some solace, Joe’s dejection remained deep-seated. He could only briefly shake the sense that to the extent he was loved at all, it was “for what one does as opposed to who one is. . . . No-one wants to touch this baby. He writes well and does wonderful things, but don’t touch him.” Though he’d been motivated to do
In The Life
, he wrote Essex, “in an effort to create community, yet I’ve alienated much of the community in which I wish to belong. The book isn’t even out and I’ve been transferred to this league of folks who are idolized but not dealt with.” So sensitive was he that “a single shard from a cutting remark is enough to wound deeply, so I keep myself safe, at home: the door locked, phone off the hook. . . . Rejections like mercury accumulate in the body, in the heart. I have had more than my share. Initially I could dodge the rebuffs, discount individual reactions, but the cumulative effect is shattering.”

Joe was fortunate in that at least his immediate family, his parents, Sun and Dorothy Beam, supported, if warily, his lifestyle and his literary efforts. His father, born in Barbados, was (in Joe’s words) “kind and gentle . . . but we are not friends. . . . We are silent when alone together. I do not ask him about his island childhood or his twelve years as a janitor or about the restaurant he once owned where he met my mother. He does not ask me about being gay or why I wish to write about it. Yet we are connected. . . . His thick calloused hands have led me this far and given me options he never dreamed of.”

With his mother, Dorothy, Joe had a much deeper connection. He showed her everything he wrote, though he felt that “somewhere along the line she has either stopped reading it or simply doesn’t comment upon it.” Yet in one letter to him, Dorothy Beam warned him that “the world is a cruel place to live,” and she worried that his open acknowledgment of his homosexuality would bring him harm. “Joe,”
she wrote, “gay people have a long way to go before society will truly accept them.” Over lunch one day, Joe kidded his mother about starting a meeting of parents of black gay activists, where they “could sit around exchanging horror stories about their crazed children.” Dorothy laughed but seemed as if she might actually be interested. “We are putting them through changes,” Joe wrote Essex, “forcing them to grow as we are doing.”
⁴

Joe also felt lucky in his job at Giovanni’s Room. He considered the bookstore “a warm, supportive, nurturing place to work.” The money wasn’t great, but he felt he was making “a contribution to the gay community, and the community at large.” To him, Giovanni’s Room was a wonderful “vestige of the 1960s.” The store used a toolbox for a cash register, let people sit as long as they liked on the sofa to read books they might not be able to afford, and posted free of charge a wide variety of community announcements and flyers. In many ways, Giovanni’s Room functioned more like a community center than a business.

Yet the time came when Joe felt he had to devote himself full-time to the anthology, and on July 12, 1985, he left his job at the bookstore. Ed Hermance, its co-owner, knowing about Joe’s project, had all along been generous about letting him take time off, and Hermance now gave him a large enough severance check to free him to work solely on the anthology till at least the end of the summer.

All of which gave Joe a needed boost of confidence: “I am more sure each day,” he wrote a friend, “that this is precisely what I should be doing. Everything that has needed to happen for this book to become a reality has happened.” He was nearing a final decision about which essays and poems to include and he’d lined up a group of strong contributors. They included many of the prominent and promising black gay male writers of the day—the poet and novelist Melvin Dixon; Gil Gerald, the executive director of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays (which was headquartered in D.C.); Essex (four poems); the essayist and poet Craig Harris; the Haitian-born poet Assotto Saint, who also wrote musical theater pieces; the well-known science fiction writer Samuel Delany; and Sidney Brinkley, the founder of
Blacklight
—and Joe had left space as well for a significant number of unknown newcomers.

By mid-September, though, he was so low on finances that he couldn’t afford the bus fare from Philadelphia to D.C. to pay Essex a surprise
visit. Not that Essex was doing much better; at one point his phone service was cut off for lack of payment. Both men were living the lives they wanted to, and they treated financial hardship as an inescapable aspect of the choices they’d made. Essex self-published his latest chapbook of poetry,
Earth Life
, in 1985, and then turned it into a performance piece with Wayson—who in Essex’s view was “becoming such a fine musician and a willing adventurer.” Joe, too, was nearing completion of the manuscript for
In The Life
, though toward the end he gave in to necessity and took a part-time sales job at a Barnes and Noble bookstore, while also moonlighting as a part-time restaurant waiter to make ends meet. He finished the manuscript in early November 1985, and the prominent gay press Alyson accepted it for publication.

By way of celebration, he and seven others, including Essex, drove out to St. Louis in a rented fifteen-passenger van for the NCBLG weekend-long convention. For Joe it was an “absolutely fantastic” event. He renewed old friendships with people like Pat Parker and for the first time met face-to-face with people he’d talked with on the phone countless times, thus initiating new friendships. To top off the excitement, he was elected to the NCBLG board of directors and asked to edit its new newsmagazine,
Black/Out
(
Blackheart
, Brinkley’s earlier journal of writing and graphics by black gay men, had ceased publishing after its third issue); Essex, Barbara Smith, and Audre Lorde all joined
Black/Out
’s publications committee. Essex, too, had been stirred by the convention. The NCBLG’s “Statement of Purpose” tied in closely with his own values. Its emphasis on “Black Pride and Solidarity” concurred with his own primary commitment to creating “positive attitudes between and among Black non-Gays and Black Gays.”
⁵

But if racial solidarity took primacy over gay liberation for Essex, the former didn’t invalidate or cancel out the latter. Multiple ingredients based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, education, income, and so forth contribute to forming an individual “identity,” rising and falling in comparative importance depending on immediate circumstances. Just as the NCBLG statement declared the need “to work cooperatively with other national and local lesbian/gay organizations in the pursuit of human/civil rights,” so Essex the individual would himself acknowledge a few years later that “a lot of my recognition is attributable to support from the gay and lesbian community,” particularly but not exclusively from the black gay community.

The St. Louis convention also set in motion plans for holding the first National Black AIDS Conference for “some time late in 1986.” Essex also planned what he called “the Membership Cabaret,” a series of performances that included his friends Wayson and Michelle and was designed to extend the rolls of NCBLG’s membership. Joe Beam knew the owners of the Allegro café in Philadelphia and organized one of the events there.

Unexpectedly, Essex had to cancel the performance at the last minute, a cancellation that he mysteriously and somewhat ominously attributed to “circumstances related to my health.” He went into no detail, nor was Joe Beam forthcoming about some of his own proliferating physical symptoms. In a letter to Joe, Essex made an oblique reference to “believing this period of my life to be a test,” and Joe similarly acknowledged in a letter to his parents that “I am so tired and troubled all the time.” But beyond that, both men seemed to keep matters relating to their health primarily though not entirely to themselves.

When asked by an interviewer for the publication
Network
, “What’s your sense of the toll that AIDS has been taking on the Black gay creative community?” Essex bluntly answered, “It’s just been cutting it to shreds.” He thought “a fundamental mistake” had been made in the early 1980s: because the initial AIDS deaths seemed to be largely of gay white men, black gay men had felt they had little to worry about—“and that had been crazy.” It had led, Essex felt, to a dangerous passivity in regard to the epidemic. The myth of AIDS as a white disease, Essex believed, continued in 1986 to encourage inactivity within the gay people of color community. The writer Craig Harris was among those who broke through the barriers erected within and without the black gay community to emphasize publicly the havoc that AIDS was wreaking on their lives.

Harris had been a classmate of Abby Tallmer’s (Sonnabend’s assistant) at Vassar, and she describes him as “whip smart, witty, a sweetheart and while bold had a very, very shy side. He also had no tolerance for stupidity or bigotry of any kind.” Soon after graduating, Harris had become active with Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD) and was one of the organizers (others included Gil Gerald, the Reverend Carl Bean, Suki Ports, and Amanda Houston-Hamilton) of the July 18, 1986, National Conference on AIDS in the Black Community held
in Washington, D.C. Some four hundred educators, health care providers, and activists attended.

When it came time for Harris to give his speech as conference coordinator, he spoke of the “need for culturally sensitive risk education in the Black community. We must consider how people at risk perceive themselves and address that. For example, black bisexual men tend not to identify themselves as bisexuals, so they may exclude themselves from information targeted to gay men.” Harris was well aware that as of 1986 the crisis of AIDS in the black community had reached staggering proportions. Although African Americans comprised 12 percent of the population, 25 percent of the diagnosed AIDS cases were among blacks—with only 30 percent of them self-identifying as gay and 42 percent as IV drug users. Moreover, the mean survival time for blacks after diagnosis was eight months—compared to eighteen to twenty-four months among whites: this differential reflected, among much else, that blacks avoided and/or couldn’t afford to seek health care until they’d reached the end stage of the disease. Later in the conference, a number of its organizers talked for more than two and a half hours—the meeting had been scheduled for fifteen minutes—with Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, then in the midst of preparing what would be a historically important report on AIDS.

Soon after, in October 1986, Harris daringly disrupted the American Public Health Association’s first session on AIDS. Not a single person of color had been invited to participate in the event, but Harris was determined to be heard. He stormed the stage, grabbed the microphone away from San Francisco health commissioner Dr. Mervyn Silverman, shouted, “I will be heard!” and proceeded to lecture the audience on the specific challenges AIDS posed in communities of color. The following year, Harris and other activists formed the National Minority AIDS Council “to build leadership within communities of color to address the challenges of HIV/AIDS”; Patti LaBelle became one of its spokespersons.

Neither Essex nor Joe Beam felt equipped to match Harris’ public activism. The two were intensely private people who disliked and avoided speaking about their own health issues, even with friends, preferring to focus on staying busy with their writing and with black gay cultural activism. In the 1990s Essex
would
occasionally speak out
openly, and eloquently, about “being a person with AIDS,” but in the mid- to late 1980s his poetry rarely referenced AIDS. “O Tell Me, Brutus,” published in 1986, was among the few:

                        
O tell me, Brutus,

                        
With corpses decomposing

                        
In the river,

                        
Loved ones keeping fevers

                        
Quiet in city hospitals,

                        
The backrooms, locked and chained,

                        
The police with new power to seize

                        
And search our hearts, our kisses,

                        
Our mutual consents around midnight . . .
⁶

Late that same year, Alyson published Joe Beam’s anthology
In The Life
, with an initial printing of 7,500 copies. Giovanni’s Room threw a book party for him, and within the first three weeks of publication the store sold 120 copies. Although the anthology was ignored in the straight black world, it garnered considerable attention in the gay community. Several black gay reviewers offered searching evaluations rather than perfunctory praise, though they differed with one another over the book’s strengths and weaknesses. If any of the contributors came off unscathed, it was Essex. One reviewer praised his “open dark, ruminating glimpses of the human condition” and his “deceptively plain, visceral use of language.” The somewhat well-known black gay novelist Larry Duplechan wrote in the national gay publication
The Advocate
that he found the anthology “an uneven reading experience”—yet he singled out Essex’s poems as “more finely wrought than the short stories” in the anthology.

Both Joe’s parents attended the book party, and he felt “so pleased and thrilled that my father had the courage to come out and support his gay son. Those few moments with me made up for so much in the past, so much.” Joe started to get letters almost every day from black gay men around the country telling him “how heartened they’ve become from reading the book.” Within a month, the glossy new thirty-six-page issue of
Black/Out
appeared, and a nonprofit foundation, the Chicago Resource Center, simultaneously renewed its annual $10,000 funding of the publication for another year. Alyson and Joe were soon
discussing a sequel to
In The Life
, tentatively titled “Brother to Brother.” Joe found all this “exciting but overwhelming.”
⁷