Hold Tight Gently (26 page)

But as the mortality figures for AIDS mounted, black gays and lesbians increasingly formed their own organizations to deal with the heavy toll on their communities. The CDC reported that by 1987 the incidence of HIV in African Americans was twice that in whites. Across the country, but particularly on the two coasts, a number of new groups started to emerge—the Black Coalition on AIDS in San Francisco, the Kupona Network in Chicago, GMAD (Gay Men of African Descent) in New York City, Black Gay Men United in Oakland, Unity and ADODI in Philadelphia, the multiple chapters of the Minority Task Force on AIDS, the National Coalition of Black Lesbian and Gays, and so forth.

GMAD in New York stood out for the rapid growth in its ranks. Founded in the summer of 1986, it initially met in private homes, but as membership swelled the group began meeting in the LGBT Center on Thirteenth Street in Manhattan. It remained a volunteer organization that provided both social space and public advocacy. By the late 1980s GMAD had developed into a structured organization, replete with officers and a board of directors, centered on providing information and consciousness raising to its members. It did not, unlike the Community Research Initiative, enter directly into medical research and trials.

In some cases, white gay activists lent information and support—more often, it should be said, than did traditional heterosexual black leaders and organizations. As late as 1988, for example, the Reverend Calvin Butts, executive minister of Abyssinian Baptist Church—the most prestigious church in Harlem—publicly denounced drugs and homosexuality as “against the will of God.” On the other hand, Manhattan Borough President (and later Mayor) David Dinkins fought to get more money allotted from the city budget for AIDS programs.
²²

In Washington, D.C., a good deal less activity was apparent. A group called Best Friends was formed in 1986 to help provide social services to PWAs; Howard University sponsored a forum on “AIDS and the Black Population”; and the organization Spectrum came into existence to spread information about AIDS to the black community. By 1987, the Whitman-Walker clinic had considerably expanded its
operations, but the Reagan administration—though the president had finally managed to say the word “AIDS” out loud in 1986, five full years after the epidemic began—kept budgeting only modest sums for research (which Congress several times raised, as did Mayor Marion Barry for D.C.). Yet Chief of Police Maurice T. Turner was unashamed to say publicly that he wouldn’t want to be in a room with a person who had AIDS, and D.C. police continued to wear surgical masks and yellow gloves when dealing with AIDS patients—leading to the creative ACT UP chant: “Your gloves don’t match your shoes / they’ll see it on the news!”

Essex was entirely aware, as he put it, that “a mysterious agent was invading our bodies, hiding traps and explosions in our sweet cum and virile blood.” And the agent was continuing to spread. “A generation,” Essex wrote, “passes before my worn out, grieving eyes. An outlaw community is being decimated without remorse. The scythe swings back and forth, back and forth, random, wild, unpredictable.” He himself still felt relatively well, but he did confide to Wayson Jones that he’d experienced some of the symptoms—fevers and night sweats—typically associated with the onset of AIDS. Wayson felt uneasy about how committed Essex was to using safe-sex practices; Essex had told him about “a night of fucking and, almost bragging, had said, ‘and we didn’t have no safe sex!’ ”

The black artistic community had continued its vibrant expansion at venues like d.c. space and the Painted Bride Art Center. The latter awarded a two-week New Works Residency grant from July 28 to August 9, 1987, to Essex, Michelle and Wayson, and the product was
Voicescapes: An Urban Mouthpiece
, staged for one night and reviewed favorably in the prestigious
High Performance
magazine. In essence, the piece was an extension of the performance style that they’d previously worked on in
Cinque
and
Murder on Glass
, continuing the exploration of oral traditions, especially the techniques of call-and-response and recitation in unison. Essex described
Voicescapes
as “choral arrangements . . . chants and music were employed to express new meanings from the poetry.” Or as Chris Prince, one member of the cast of seven, put it, “a layering of the spoken word, the same way you would layer singing voices. . . . One would speak in a regular speaking voice, another person would talk in a higher range, and a third in a lower one—and you would get this choral effect.” (
Voicescapes II
, with just
Essex, Wayson, and Michelle, followed later.) The evening was a success, and in the mayor’s prestigious Arts Awards of that year, Essex was nominated in the category of Outstanding Emerging Artist. He then began work on what he hoped would be his third collection of poetry,
Soft Targets
, and he and Wayson continued a collaboration that they hoped would eventuate in the release of their first cassette recording.
²³

They were very conscious, as the number of experimental events accelerated, that the black gay community was involved in a wave of creativity, a much-talked-about “Second Harlem Renaissance.” D.C. “was just bubbling,” as Chris Prince put it, “politically, artistically, and socially. . . . [It was] an amazing, amazing time in Washington.” Following
Voicescapes
, they did a piece called
Dear Motherfuckin’ Dreams
at the Kitchen, the well-known experimental venue in New York City. No director was used. When needed, Essex or Michelle came up with the blocking, which Chris Prince, at least, felt was “one of our flaws,” since an “outside” perspective might have been helpful at certain points and could have served as a “filter.”

But by the late eighties, an almost imperceptible lessening in energy could be detected. AIDS had begun to make significant inroads in the black gay artistic community, to ensnare a growing number of the creative spirits that Essex counted among his friends. The
Washington Post
published an appallingly callous article entitled “Black Gays Evade Reality”—appalling because it seemed ignorant of the horrors that the black gay community had been regularly enduring. Essex wrote a furious rebuttal. The
Post
article had suggested that afflicted blacks were relying medically and politically on the “charity” of the white gay community—meaning primarily the Whitman-Walker clinic. Essex knew there was some truth to that, but in fact he and his friends had participated in fund-raisers and performances to raise money for AIDS-related causes in the Washington area and had gathered artists together regardless of their sexual identity to benefit a homeless shelter.
²⁴

Besides, the
Post
article declared that “AIDS messages developed by white gays for white gays have not worked for the black gay community” because of “vast differences in language and culture.” In his response, Essex sharply asked, “We are speaking of English, aren’t we? I am writing this letter in English. Are we to believe that black
gay men speak another language? If so, what is that language? Does it have a set of symbols that can be learned for the sake of writing more effective AIDS alerts or newspaper columns?”

Essex had himself claimed on occasion that “a black gay identity is separate from a gay identity,” but he also hoped “to meld those identities into one being.” The irreducible element in his anger—at the
Post
in particular, at the white gay world in general—was the knowledge that “I can go anywhere in the country and I’m going to be dealt with as a black man—whether I’m flaunting my faggotry or being discreet. The first thing they see is a black male, and that is a constant and ongoing confrontation.” The term “gay” had for him “always implied white and middle-class,” and he applied it to himself simply because it was “expedient . . . it is what popular culture uses to identify a homosexual.” But he did wish that there was “another word that would more aptly affirm not only our sexual, but our racial identity and heritage. Maybe it is a word that we have to put into being.” He didn’t feel that his sexuality was “so big a thing that it’s going to overwhelm my desire to see us [blacks] live and survive.”

Long-standing white detachment from black suffering provided the subsoil of Essex’s anger, but it had probably been further aggravated by the recent news that Joe Beam had fallen seriously ill. The year 1987 had started out triumphantly for Joe. The D.C. gay newspaper the
Washington Blade
listed
In The Life
as the number one selling gay male book in the country, and he got a host of invitations to speak, including a short tour of California that included San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. He’d also gotten a prized letter from Audre Lorde telling him that the book “gives me a lot, the pieces themselves, and a lot of hope & satisfaction, too, that it exists. The ending of one kind of isolation. I think it represents an incredible piece of work.” As well, Joe began talks with the gay British filmmaker Isaac Julien about collaborating on a new work. On top of all that, Joe continued as editor of
Black/Out
, and the journal’s sponsoring organization, the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, got yet another $10,000 grant.
²⁵

So far as is known, Joe hadn’t told anyone that he was HIV-positive, not Essex, not even his mother, Dorothy. He’d fallen ill several times with respiratory and intestinal ailments during 1987 and 1988 but hadn’t put a public name on his assorted afflictions. When he died late
in 1988, three days before his thirty-fourth birthday, the obituary in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
read—as did so many AIDS obits then—that “he is believed to have died of natural causes.” Essex was quoted in the obit as saying that “he has to be remembered for helping to lead us out of our silence—and by us, I mean black gay men, who heretofore had not been speaking out through literature.”
²⁶

Essex put his deepest feelings about Joe into his poetry. One of those poems has never been published:

                        
There should have been

                        
More letters between us.

                        
In later years it will be difficult to ascertain

                        
The full meaning of our relations.

                        
Most of us will not be here

                        
To bear witness.

                        
There should have been

                        
more letters hastily written

                        
or carefully typed,

                        
long-winded scripts

                        
or short, cryptic messages.

                        
Volumes of letters

                        
should have gathered

                        
over time, but we leave

                        
hastily scrawled postcards,

                        
outrageous, long-distance

                        
phone bills,

                        
and in rare instances

                        
evidence that some of us

                        
were more than brothers,

                        
we were intimate,

                        
loyal, companions.
²⁷

5

The Toll Mounts

T
he number one killer of people with AIDS by the mid- to late eighties was Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP). As far back as 1977—before the AIDS epidemic began—Dr. Walter Hughes of Tennessee and his colleagues had conducted a placebo, double-blind study that definitively proved the effectiveness of Bactrim in preventing PCP, and they’d published their findings in the
New England Journal of Medicine
. Joe Sonnabend knew about the Hughes article, had corresponded with him, and shortly after Mike’s diagnosis in the summer of 1982 had put him on two double-strength Bactrim tablets a day. After AIDS proliferated, Dr. Michael Gottlieb of Los Angeles and his colleagues, in a 1984 article in
Lancet
, strongly recommended long-term prophylaxis for PCP, but their recommendation had been ignored.
¹

During the 1987 International Conference on AIDS in D.C., Mike and several other activists met with Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, a subsidiary of the National Institutes of Health) and ultimately the head of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG)—the AIDS czar in all but name. They tried to persuade Fauci to issue federal guidelines recommending Bactrim or, since some people couldn’t tolerate the drug, the lesser alternative, aerosol pentamidine, as preventatives against PCP. Fauci rejected both on the grounds that no controlled studies of their
efficacy and safety existed. Yet a year later, under oath before Congress, Fauci said, “If I were an individual patient [with AIDS], I would probably take aerosolized pentamidine if I already had had a bout of pneumocystis. In fact, I might try, even before then, taking prophylactic Bactrim. If I were unable to tolerate that, I might go to aerosolized pentamidine . . . be it available in the street or what have you.” Fauci the fantasy patient, in other words, would illegally buy a drug on the street that Fauci the head of NIAID refused to otherwise make available. In other words: “Do what I do, not what I say.” Some went further: governmental intransigence on approving Bactrim, they claimed, very nearly approached criminal neglect.