Hold Tight Gently (51 page)

At that point Doug and Tim arrived in the room. When the acquaintance told Doug about what she characterized as “a miraculous reconciliation” between Mike and his parents, Doug angrily responded that she’d “violated Michael’s very being—because Michael didn’t want to have anything to do with his family.”

Mike began to fade in and out. Since no notary was available on Christmas Day, the lawyer told Richard to get as many witnesses as possible. So he started calling people and explaining that they were needed for Mike’s will to be legal. Quite a few showed up, including Richard’s brother, Andy. Though he mostly dozed, Mike managed to say hello to everyone who arrived, thanking them for turning out on Christmas. He even started doing his yenta routine on Andy—“Have I got a girl for you!”—extracting a promise from Andy to call her. With the lawyer present, the gathered friends witnessed Mike sign his will. That done, Mike said he wanted to increase the morphine right away.
¹⁸

As the drug took over, Richard rehearsed some last-second details with him—what kind of a memorial service did he want?; should anyone sing, and if so, what?; should the service be in L.A. or New York, or both? Somewhere in there, Mike turned to Richard and said, “No regrets. No regrets.” Richard would come to remember “that as the most extraordinary thing to give me to carry forward for the rest of my life.” Mike slipped out of consciousness, and Richard had the
excruciating task of saying good-bye to each person as they left the hospital room.

Richard spent the night, with Mike off and on aware of his surroundings. Then, on the afternoon of December 27, he became agitated; the nurses took him off the bed, cleaned him up, changed his sheets, and smoothed the covers down. He then became calm again. Richard took a quick break to stretch his legs. When he got back to the room, the nurse told him that Mike had suddenly sat up, looked to the window—and then died. He was thirty-eight years old. It had been seventeen days since Patrick’s death. Tim Miller showed up and went off with Richard to the stairwell, let him scream and cry, and gave him big, big hugs.

Thanks to Richard,
Legacy
was released posthumously.

10

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T
hough Essex had earlier publicly revealed that he had AIDS, he kept the details of the progress of his illness from even his friends. Yet as one of them has put it, “I don’t think Essex or anyone else was doing a good job of hiding his illness. Everyone knew he had AIDS.” But after his emergency hospitalization and near death while in Chicago in 1994, he talked more openly with close friends like Ron Simmons about his condition. He went into few details about symptoms or treatments but simply revealed the basic facts. It was typical of how Essex handled AIDS: he went about his business as long as he was able, neither clarifying nor lamenting—and certainly never exaggerating—his condition. And throughout 1993, he did manage to keep to most of his routine. While still on the West Coast finishing up the Getty fellowship, he continued to put in a number of appearances elsewhere.
¹

At one of them, the University of Oregon, the local branch of the NAACP called the university and protested his presence, presumably because he was gay, though the exact reason given isn’t known. The event went on as scheduled, but the audience of mostly straight, black students proved unusually hostile. Quoting the Afrocentrist Molefi Asante, they attacked Essex’s homosexuality and accused him of “not doing anything for the race.” Essex did his best to be understanding: “they’re trying to protect the little bit of masculinity that’s been
constructed . . . an assimilated masculinity—in other words, ‘I want to be like what oppresses me.’ ” It helped to make him realize “that just because one comes from the realm of discrimination and prejudice does not necessarily guarantee that your consciousness is going to open up and you’ll understand the connectedness that exists all around. Colin Powell proves that point again for me, just as some members of our own community have proven that point to me, as I’ve lived and breathed.”

Essex extended those thoughts in a prose-poem he called “Loyalty”: “We constitute the invisible brothers in our communities, those of us who live ‘in the life,’ the choir boys harboring secrets, the uncle living in an impeccable flat with a roommate who sleeps down the hall when family visits; men of power and humble peasantry, reduced to silence and invisibility for the safety they procure from these constructions.”
²

Ron Simmons had himself tested HIV-positive in 1989, and in 1991 he had joined a black gay male support group, Us Helping Us. At the time, he’d been teaching for twelve years at Howard University while working on completing his doctoral dissertation. But in 1992 the university had failed to renew his contract. They gave as a reason his insufficient record of publications, though several of his essays were in print, including his seminal “Some Thoughts on the Challenges Facing Black Gay Intellectuals” in
Brother to Brother
, in which he candidly addressed the homophobia that characterized the work of such black leaders and scholars as Amiri Baraka, Nathan Hare, Louis Farrakhan, and Molefi Asante. It seems unlikely that Ron’s closing admonition in that essay—“We [black gay people] have been blessed with gifts to share in a society that views love and tenderness between men as a weakness”—did anything to advance his bid for tenure.
³

When Essex broke the news of his AIDS status, Ron had been seeing an herbalist named Prem Deben for four years in an effort to control his own condition through holistic methods. It was Deben who’d told Ron about Us Helping Us. Ron has stayed with the group down to the present day, and it was only in 2003 that he started taking medication of any kind. Us Helping Us featured internal cleansing, fasting, meditation, the intake of oxygen, and the harnessing of sexual energy (having orgasms without releasing sperm) to aid in the healing process. Ron became executive director of the group, and in 1993 Us
Helping Us got a $20,000 grant—its first—from the Washington AIDS Partnership, a local foundation.

Ron had first met Essex back in 1982, at a benefit for
Blacklight
magazine, but for a number of years they’d known each other only in passing. After Ron became involved in Us Helping Us, he tried to interest Essex in joining but got nowhere. Essex told Ron that he didn’t think he could beat “this thing” and had become fatalistic about it. Something the gifted black gay writer Craig Harris, who had died of AIDS in 1991, wrote about his own medical condition is suggestive of Essex’s attitude as well: “My quality of life is a control issue. I refuse to be controlled by a daily regimen of oral medications and radiation therapy, controlled by weekly chemotherapy treatments, controlled by the increasing number of side-effects, fatigue or depression, medical bills or reimbursement checks. I refuse to be controlled by limitations imposed upon me by my race/ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and health. I have made a commitment to relinquish control only as a last resort.”

When Ron tried to get Essex to at least give up cigarettes and pot, Essex stopped returning his calls for a while. “That was Hemphill,” Ron says philosophically, “sometimes he would get just stuck on . . . [something] that you really couldn’t shake.” When Ron talked to him about his own Afrocentric views regarding body, mind, and spirit, and the importance of affirming and tending to all three, Essex would vaguely reply “uh-huh,” the equivalent of a yawn.

Essex had much more of a falling out with Larry Duckett, with whom he’d performed many times and who’d gone out to the Getty in 1993 to help Essex collect his things for the move back East. What Larry called “our explosion” came while they were still in California—it apparently centered on Essex feeling that Larry had failed to come to his defense when a store clerk had “disrespected” him. But that may have been merely a surface excuse for breaking away from a relationship that had become untenable.

In any case, they had no contact for the last two years of Essex’s life. In an unpublished and largely incoherent three-page account of their relationship that Larry later wrote, he wobbles between describing Essex as his lover, his “partner in the arts,” and his intimate brother, implying, somewhat bizarrely, that he “allowed” himself “to be distanced from Essex” by certain unnamed brothers who “saw Essex as a
sexual boy-toy” and saw Larry “as being in their way.” But several of Essex’s intimates have described Larry Duckett as being unrequitedly in love with Essex. In any case, Essex was uninterested in repairing the friendship; when he lay ill in the hospital toward the end of his life, Larry asked Chris Prince, a mutual friend, to ask Essex if he could call or visit. Essex said no. Chris tried coaxing him, vaguely suggesting that there might not be another chance to patch things up, but Essex refused to reconsider.
⁴

“He was a fierce boy,” Chris said by way of explanation. “He was a diva. Humility was not one of his assets . . . [but] he was a warm man . . . and sensitive, not arrogant, not a showoff . . . smoke and mirrors wouldn’t fool him.” Essex himself referred to his “basic tenaciousness” and as having been, earlier in life, “demanding of attention.” He was also, Chris added—as if afraid that his portrait of Essex might come across as stern—“so much fun to be around . . . and that body, child. Ooh, that boy had a fierce body. Before boys were workin’ out . . . he was
so
sexy.”

Through the latter part of 1993, Essex worked now and then (along with Michelle Wallace, bell hooks, Cornel West, and Angela Davis) with Marlon Riggs on his last film,
Black Is . . . Black Ain’t
. But then Marlon’s health took a bad turn and he had to be hospitalized. According to Steven Fullwood, a curator at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture, “Much of the final text of
Black Is . . . Black Ain’t
was developed by Riggs one night in his hospital room: ‘It was as if the film were rolling before me,’ Riggs purportedly said, ‘and I was just transcribing; I almost couldn’t keep up.’ ” He’d known since December 1988 that he was HIV-positive, but he now became critically ill for months. As he later told an interviewer, “It was all-consuming. The agony of being weak, of vomiting, of nausea, of fever, of blood coming out of all of my orifices, of being disoriented, drugged, having nightmarish dreams because of the drugs. It was a feeling of utter loss of control . . . I wasn’t thinking about art: I was driven down too far into the basic consciousness of just staying alive.” He was finally able to leave the hospital, but his spirit was diminished, and his once inexhaustible energy reduced to a few hours of early morning work. Riggs never completed
Black Is . . . Black Ain’t
, succumbing to AIDS on April 5, 1994. Posthumously, co-producer Nicole Atkinson, co-director/coeditor Christiane Badgley, and Signifyin’ Works finished the film.
⁵

Eight months later, in December 1994, the writer Don Belton brought Isaac Julien and Essex together for a conversation about Riggs’ last film. Essex spoke with particular passion about the ending of
Black Is . . . Black Ain’t
, where bell hooks speaks about “communion,” which Essex defined as “a willingness to communicate with one another.” He and Julien then went on in their discussion to disagree about Louis Farrakhan and black nationalists in general. “I’m as black as anyone,” Essex insisted—“but not by the criteria the nationalists construct.” Still, he felt that some dialogue with those attracted to black nationalism was essential. Julien felt “the opposite,” felt that instead they “should be going back to the communities we are a part of and working on a grassroots level . . . to challenge hetero-normative assumptions.”

But the “grassroots level,” Essex countered, meant “mostly poor, heterosexual working-class men—the very same men drawn to Farrakhan”—who mocked and denigrated black gay men. And that was precisely the reason, Essex went on, why it was a mistake to ignore them. He believed, adamantly, that they could be reached, that gay men like himself and Isaac Julien should “bear witness,” should insist on demonstrating that black gay men had “always been crucial to our communities” and should claim their rightful membership. He believed that if they approached heterosexual black men in a “supportive, caring, trustworthy, and loyal” way that the possibility would open up “of a formidable brotherhood that reaches beyond our sexual desires and connects us to every black male on the planet.” It was a view that the Los Angeles–based Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum also shared; after an extended discussion, the group ended up encouraging black gay men to attend Farrakhan’s Million Man March.
⁶

But Julien remained skeptical. Where Essex argued that opportunities for intervention can unexpectedly appear, Julien discounted the possibility. To him Farrakhan’s assumption that black straight men “owned” blackness was impervious to discussion; in Julien’s view, moreover, “Black macho discourses of empowerment” inherently denigrated women as well as black gay men—after all, the year before, Ben Chavis had been fired from his position as CEO of the NAACP when it was revealed that, without notifying the board, he’d made a large payoff to keep allegations of sexual harassment from being aired publicly. Picking up on the reference to women, Essex pointed out that “the [negative]
things you’ve heard among gay brothers about women” weren’t any different from the disrespectful way straight black men talked about women. In both cases, it disgusted him. He felt passionately that black gay men had the obligation to work actively against sexism—which was exactly what Mike Callen had felt in regard to all gay men.
⁷

When Essex’s longtime friend Chris Prince asked him early in 1995 how work was going on his novel, Essex quietly told him that he wasn’t feeling much like writing anymore. His last spurt seems to have been during the summer of 1994, when he told Wayson, “It feels wonderful to be writing again. I have sorely missed putting pen to paper.” Nor was Essex any longer pursuing sex. He’d once thought that he and Chris might take their friendship “to another level” (Chris hadn’t been interested), but now, when Chris stayed over at Essex’s apartment one night, “he didn’t even try anything.” Essex had long been “a sexy man,” someone who pursued and enjoyed his assorted sexual encounters. He’d never boasted about any of his escapades, though he could be bold about them in his poetry: