Hold Tight Gently (30 page)

In one of the essays he wrote for
Surviving and Thriving
, Mike revealed that he’d recently been diagnosed with a KS lesion on his leg and as a result was taking naltrexone—which at low levels some believed stimulated the production of endorphins, which in turn might have a beneficial effect on T cells. Mike had also become convinced “that there is a bi-directional mind-body connection” and as a result—despite his scorn for Louise Hay—had taken the “AIDS Mastery” course. He also “religiously” prophylaxed with aerosol pentamidine and, less religiously, experimented with acyclovir and Antabuse. He’d even been plasmapheresed—that is, had “a sort of blood cleansing, where they hook you up to these huge centrifuges and spin pints of your blood” to remove “viral debris.”

But he championed none of those treatments. In his experience, as he’d argued earlier, one factor stood out as characteristic of long-term survivors: political involvement—putting up “one hell of a fight”—which he felt could be sustained only “if it comes from a loving place; anger has its place but it burns up quickly and can burn your spirit up with it.” He applauded groups like ACT UP, but given what he called his “limited energy”—after all, in 1988, he’d turned out an album and a book, not to mention multiple speeches and appearances—he preferred to concentrate on his work with CRI “on doing drug trials faster, cheaper and better than the feds are doing.” Despite his “limited energy,” Mike managed to get arrested at a civil disobedience protest on the steps of the Supreme Court in October 1988.
¹³

Passing by the bulletin board at the New York City Gay Community Center on Thirteenth Street one day, Richard spotted a tacked-up note soliciting responses for forming a gay a capella group. “Perfect!” he thought. “Perfect for Mike,” whose relentless superego was always watching and judging when he performed (or indeed did anything). In an a capella (“without accompaniment”) group, the lead often shifts; it’s atypical for someone to keep it through an entire song—and that would help dilute Mike’s guilt-inducing perfectionism.

And thus it was that the Flirtations (the “Flirts”) was born and would over time develop a strong fan base. Jon Arterton and Elliot Pilshaw had originated the idea and put up the note on the bulletin board. When Mike went to talk to them, he was excited to discover that Aurelio Font was also involved; he and Aurelio had been in the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus and he much admired the quality of Aurelio’s voice. (Though a founding member of the Gay Men’s Chorus, Mike later referred to it as “loathsome”—“they’re so FULL of themselves; they think they’re the best in the world; so pretentious.”) T.J. Myers, who in 1990 would die of AIDS, also joined the Flirtations; he was “a gotta-sing, gotta-dance kinda guy” who for a while had been in the dance company of Rachel Squires, the manager for a time of the Flirts. Soon after the group formed, Elliot Pilshaw, whose voice wasn’t deep enough to carry the low end, gave way to Cliff Townsend, an African American with a trained bass voice.

A capella singing has its roots in a variety of religious traditions—Gregorian chant being one—and in the early twentieth century doo-wop and barbershop became well-known variants in the United States. The most popular groups by midcentury were probably the Hi-Lo’s, the Four Freshmen, and the King’s Singers. A new wave of popularity had been inaugurated when Bernice Johnson Reagon founded the all-woman African American ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock in 1973. By the late eighties a significant number of well-known artists performed a cappella music, including the Persuasions, Bobby McFerrin (whose innovations probably did more than anyone else to produce the a cappella renaissance), and the Nylons, who many thought had a gay sensibility. The number of professional a cappella groups grew in the country from about one hundred in 1985 to more than seven hundred a dozen years later. By the 1990s many contemporary vocal “bands”—but not the Flirtations—would use electronic assistance to produce a range of startling effects with their voices.

Everyone in the Flirtations was on the left politically; the Flirts in fact billed themselves as “the world’s only politically correct gay male a capella group.” All five were not only involved in the gay movement, but also supported other liberation movements, including feminism and the black struggle; one of the songs they performed was “Biko,” as well as the antiapartheid anthem “Something Inside So Strong.” The
group’s first album wouldn’t appear until 1990, but they started performing on the streets of Greenwich Village soon after first meeting in 1988.

When Joe Beam died from AIDS on December 27, the printed obituary simply announced that “the exact cause of his death was not immediately clear,” though friends said that he’d “been in ill health recently and had been extremely depressed for several months.” Essex, of course, knew better and provided a far more ample tribute. “The work Joe did,” Essex wrote, “enriched the community in ways that have yet to manifest themselves. His life was a light for many of us.” Essex also memorialized his friend in the poem “When My Brother Fell”:

                        
When my brother fell

                        
I picked up his weapons

                        
And never once questioned

                        
Whether I could carry

                        
The weight and grief,

                        
The responsibility

                        
He shouldered

                        
… … … … … … … … … …

                        
When I stand

                        
On the front lines now,

                        
Cussing the lack of truth,

                        
The absence of willful change

                        
And strategic coalitions,

                        
I realize sewing quilts

                        
Will not bring you back

                        
Nor save us . . .

“Sewing quilts” was a reference to the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, displayed on the Washington Mall for the first time during the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Seeing the vast patchwork of panels that family members and friends had sewn together was an overwhelming experience for many—a visual counterpart of the desperate toll in lives already lost. But to Essex, the quilt primarily memorialized white lives, and perhaps he also objected (as did others) to the project’s lack of politics.

At the time of his death, Joe Beam had begun work on a sequel volume to
In The Life
of black gay male poetry and prose. It had been slow going, and Joe had frequently and gently been trying to cajole people into sending contributions. With Joe’s death, his mother, Dorothy, became determined to fulfill her son’s contract with Alyson Publications for the second volume. She’d come a long way from the hesitant, uncertain mother who’d first heard her son tell her that he was gay. “There is some kind of fear in the black population,” she now felt, “that says they have to hide their gay sons. . . . They say to pray for the gay sons. I don’t have to pray for God to change my son because that’s how he made him.”

Dorothy Beam was a fighter. In her own life, she’d worked during the day and gone to school at night to earn both a college degree and a master’s from Temple University. And once she became a teacher, she bucked school administrators and other teachers who treated students with learning or emotional disabilities as “throwaways,” making them her special protégés. She was, in other words, distinctly on the side of the underdog, the outsider—and on behalf of gay people, she was tough on the black community. It was guilty, she told an interviewer, “on two counts. First, forgetting that AIDS is taking its toll on the community, and secondly, for not facing the fact that this disease can be prevented by taking proper precautions. Safe sex is a duty, and AIDS can be anyone’s disease.”

Dorothy Beam was determined to take up her son’s projected anthology and make sure that it reached conclusion. Before his death, Joe hadn’t gotten very far with the new volume; he’d sent out some notices to the press, had begun to receive a few manuscripts, had chosen a title—
Brother to Brother
—and had left behind a list of possible contributors. Dorothy Beam set tirelessly to work contacting them. She also turned to Essex, Joe’s closest friend, for consultation and advice. As more and more manuscripts started to arrive, she photocopied each one and mailed it from Philadelphia to Essex in D.C.

As the material and the need to consult about it began to accumulate, Essex made the decision to move to Philadelphia in order to facilitate working with Dorothy on the project. She and her husband invited him to move into their home, where he could all at once work uninterrupted, save money, and feast on Dorothy Beam’s fried chicken. Essex himself sometimes cooked for the Beams—as well as cut the
lawn, trimmed the hedges, and shoveled snow. The anthology became something of a family affair.

Sometimes Dorothy Beam would come down into Essex’s work space in the basement to “get a hug,” and he even arranged a meeting between her and his own mother. Dorothy was “like an older aunt,” Essex said. “I don’t feel I am a surrogate by any means.” For her part, Dorothy told one interviewer that she noted similarities between Essex and her son; even her husband had noted that “Essex is a lot like Joe.” Both were “warm, sincere, and humane” personalities; both held “a great deal within”; both “want to do right.”
¹⁴

Unlike Essex’s own mother, Dorothy Beam became more and more of an activist; she even took a course in counseling relatives of gay people. Some of her friends were scandalized about her having “a gay person living in your house”—to which she characteristically replied, “my son’s gay friends are welcome at my house anytime. They hurt the same, they have the same problems. In fact they have more.” Several of her friends advised her to take the manuscript material and “throw it in the trash and forget it. . . . It is going to weigh heavy on your heart and you are not going to be able to get yourself together if you keep working with the book.” That advice made her angry, and she responded to it with variants of “I thought this gay business was a big problem. It is not a big problem. You made a problem out of it. I want other parents to see that it is no disgrace having a gay child. The disgrace is when you try to put it in the closet.”

Essex never hesitated in taking on the anthology, though 1988 hadn’t been the best of years for him. Guarded as always about his privacy, he obliquely referred to having had to cancel a performance “due to circumstances related to my health. It is very much my mental health. . . . I am slowly returning to myself. . . . Believing this period of my life to be a test, I can’t say I have survived it with the best qualities of my person.” No additional details have surfaced about whether Essex’s difficult year related to side effects from medication or from AIDS itself. But whatever the case, Essex accepted Dorothy Beam’s invitation to take over her son’s work without reservation.

Joe Beam had left behind few notes or editorial comments. This left Essex all at once without direction, yet entirely free to follow his own impulses. The black lesbian writer Barbara Smith gave him unstinting encouragement and coaching on everything (as Essex phrased
it) “from questions of copyright to questions of copyediting”; ultimately she advised him on the choice of manuscripts and even took on the onerous job of reading page proofs to provide Essex with another set of eyes for catching errors.

By August 1989, some ninety manuscripts had poured in, but in that early batch Essex was “still waiting,” as he wrote Barbara Smith, “for some ‘exciting’ poetry to come over the transom.” He was beginning to realize that poetry “is not taken very seriously by many,” and for him there was “the additional loneliness that sometimes comes from relating with Black gay men as writers.” He found that his “great respect for language and the transformational powers inherent in it” was rarely shared—and especially in regard to effective expression “in poetic form”—by other black men. At the risk of misinterpreting what Essex meant by “respect for language,” it seems worth pointing out that he doesn’t explicitly acknowledge—either in the letter cited or in the
Brother to Brother
anthology—the lively, inventive African American vernacular that differs markedly from standard English—what James Baldwin meant when in 1979 he wrote, “People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.”

Ultimately Essex gathered a pool of some 140 manuscripts. He knew that he didn’t want “a lot of coming out stories”;
In The Life
had already done that. Essex’s interest “was making the brothers speak more honestly about their experience—let’s get away from the surface froth, and really dig underneath the issues we talk about.” He ended up selecting nearly three dozen writers, several of whom appear more than once. The hefty finished volume came to nearly three hundred pages of closely printed text, with Essex including several of his own significant poems and essays. He also appended a long, vibrant, even fierce introduction, dating it “January 1990.”

In it, he not only provided a detailed history, dating back to the Harlem Renaissance, of black gay male literature, but also mounted an angry attack on the white gay world in general and one of its celebrities in particular—Robert Mapplethorpe, then known for his series of “erotic” (Essex called them “racist”) portraits of black men. He angrily denounced the post-Stonewall white gay community as having been basically unconcerned with the lives of black gay men and lesbians—and Mike Callen would have agreed with him. White gay men, Essex
pointed out, become “other” in this country only when and if they choose to come out of the closet. But all blacks “are treated as ‘other’ regardless of whether we sleep with men or women—our Black skin automatically marks us as ‘other.’ ”