The Legacy of Essex Hemphill
In 2000, I wrote an introduction for a new edition of Essex Hemphill’s magnificent collection "Ceremonies." I pointed out what I believed to be that work’s purpose: remembrance as the only way to begin the process of healing the wound that white supremacy, poverty, homophobia, heterosexism, and most recently HIV/AIDS had inflicted upon us as Black Gay Men. In “Ceremonies,” Hemphill recorded what it is and was like to be a Black Gay Man, sexually active and desiring, with the skill of an anthropologist, while insisting that we remember this life before AIDS and the people who lived it.
For instance, the 1989 film "Tongues Untied" included an excerpt from Hemphill’s essay “Without Comment.” Many may recall Larry Duckette’s vivid performance of this story about two Black Gay Men engaged in an uproarious argument while riding the bus through a black neighborhood in Washington, D.C. One man tells another, “I’m a 45-year-old Black man who enjoys taking dick in his rectum! SNAP! I’m not your bitch! SNAP! Your bitch is at home with your kids! SNAP! SNAP!
In the remainder of that essay, which was not included in the film, Hemphill goes on to tell us that ten years ago this place where the argument took place was a “sexual crossroads,” a home to nude clubs, movie galleries, and porn shops. “The raunchy Black gay club, the Brass Rail, was bulging out if its jockstrap. Drag queens ruled, B-boys chased giddy government workers, fast-talking hustlers worked the floors, while sugar daddies panted for attention in the shadows.” Now, this ravaged area resembled “brutal knife wounds that have become keloids,” wrote Hemphill.
This image of Black communities under assault sometimes appears in Hemphill’s work as loneliness in an erotic, but ravaged, landscape. “Under Certain Circumstances” is a good example from his 1986 collection "Conditions."
Hemphill writes:
I am lonely for past kisses,
for wild lips certain streets
breed for pleasure.
Romance is a foxhole.
This kind of war frightens me.
I don’t want to die
sleeping with soldiers
I don’t love
It is worth remembering the toll of HIV/AIDS in Black communities at this point. African Americans, non-Hispanic, were twelve percent of the population, but over twenty-five percent of those diagnosed with HIV.
The precarity of Black life made Hemphill a fierce defender of our right to dignity as Black Gay Men. He was a staunch critic of white supremacist depictions that reduced Black men to sexual stereotypes. He blasted Robert Mapplethorpe, a darling of the leftist avant-garde, for his infamous photo "Man in a Polyester Suit" that focused on a Black man’s large, dark-skinned penis dangling out of an unzipped trouser. Hemphill addressed his concern about the photo in the Introduction to “Brother to Brother.” To Hemphill, Mapplethorpe’s photo, the collection in which it appeared, and the critical accolades that accompanied it were “insulting and endangering to Black men” because they represented a “conscious determination that the faces, the heads, and by extension, the minds and experiences of some of his black subjects are not as important as close-up shots of their cocks.”
Hemphill could also turn his critical insight upon African Americans who endangered the lives of Black Gay Men. In “If Freud Had Been a Neurotic Colored Woman: Reading Dr. Frances Cress Welsing," Hemphill was especially correct to call out Welsing, a renowned psychiatrist, for her viewpoint that homosexuality among African Americans was a dysfunctional behavioral adaptation to white supremacy. Hemphill noted that precisely what was wrong with her view was that it led to the intellectually fraudulent belief that “racism causes homosexuality” and that “Black liberation will somehow eradicate Black homosexuality.”
“What is insulting and endangering to Black men is Mapplethorpe’s conscious determination that the faces, the heads, and by extension, the minds and experiences of some of his Black subjects are not as important as close-up shots of their cocks.”
Hemphill castigated Welsing and other cultural Black nationalists who turned Black queer people into a convenient “other.” Their work was dangerous because it reinforces, he said, “the belief that gay and lesbian lives are expendable,” which is one of the reasons “why the Black community has failed to intelligently and coherently address critical, life-threatening issues such as AIDS.”
Hemphill did political organizing across gender lines. He was one of the founders of the National Coalition of Black Lesbian and Gays. Identifying as a feminist, Hemphill called out straight Black men for their harassment of women. In the poem “To Some Supposed Brother,” Hemphill wrote:
You judge a woman
by the length of her skirt,
by the way she walks,
talks, looks, and acts;
by the color of her skin, you judge
and will call her “Bitch”
“Black Bitch!”
if she doesn’t answer your:
“Hey baby, whatcha gonna say
to a man.”
When publishers could not imagine an audience for Black gay literary expression, Hemphill embraced the African American tradition of self-help to get his work out to the public. He created Be-Bop Books and released five chapbooks of poetry: "Diamonds Was in the Kitty" and "Some of the People We Love Are Terrorists" (1982), "Plums" (1983), "Earth Life" (1985), and "Conditions" (1986).
Perhaps Hemphill’s greatest literary accomplishment was the pivotal role he played in editing and bringing "Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men" into existence. Joseph Beam imagined "Brother to Brother" as a sequel to the pioneering "In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology" (1986), but he succumbed to AIDS in 1988 and could not complete the project. Hemphill picked up the baton which he alluded to this in his 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.
I never questioned whether I could aim
Or be as precise as he.
He had fallen,
And the passing ceremonies
marking his death
did not stop the war.
Dorothy Beam, Joe’s mother, asked Essex if he could assist with the manuscript. Hemphill agreed without hesitation. Mrs. Beam invited Hemphill to live with them when photocopying and mailing became too cumbersome. Immediately Hemphill relocated from Washington D. C. to Philadelphia, where he grew close to Beam’s parents. Hemphill made a point of including the Beams in the editorial process as he worked to shape Brother to Brother into a manuscript. In a Washington Post story, Hemphill mentioned that he would speak to Mrs. Beam about “the ideas in difficult manuscripts” and about the fact that she “trusted him with her mission” to birth "Brother to Brother."
This overview is all too brief to do justice to Hemphill’s legacy. During the 1980s Essex did the hard work of creating a consciousness of us as Black Gay Men worthy of love, respect, and dignity. He started poetry performance groups in the District of Columbia that pioneered Black queer expression. He contributed his work to numerous literary and cultural journals, some created specifically by and for men of African descent. His commitment to writing allowed Black Gay Men to know that we existed. His work had an impact nationally and internationally, as when he and his poetry were used in the British filmmaker Isaac Julien’s acclaimed "Looking for Langston" (1989). His work was prominently featured in Marlon Riggs’ films "Tongues Untied" and "Black Is…Black Ain’t" (1994), both of which aired on national television and were sensations at film festivals.
Poet Essex Hemphill Playing Chess by Dr. Ron Simmons, 1981. © Ron Simmons. TA2019.38.1.1.1.8
Two ceremonies were given for Hemphill when he passed from AIDS complications on November 5, 1995. His biological family gave him a Christian one in which they claimed he had a deathbed religious conversion. His family of choice—his friends, allies, and the readers of his work—gave another. Some members of Essex’s family, including his mother and sister, came to the one given by his family of choice. In the second ceremony, Ron Simmons, one of the contributors to Brother to Brother, aptly and movingly summarized Hemphill’s accomplishments. Hemphill’s work, Simmons said, “gave us a voice we had never heard before. So many of us were living as marginalized souls of internalized guilt and shame,” then “suddenly there was a writer whose work captured our fears, anger, confusion, frustration, passion, and desire as no artist had done before.” Simmons continued, “He encouraged us to celebrate. Imagine that. We who were told that our God despised us…”
To those looking for more information about Essex Hemphill, I recommend Martin Duberman’s "Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS" (The New Press, 2014). Darius Bost includes a chapter “Black Gay Longing in the Work of Essex Hemphill” in his brilliant and moving "Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence" (U of Chicago Press, 2019). "Brother to Brother" is available in an edition from Redbone Press.
I’ll end this essay with the lovely valediction Essex always used to close his correspondence: “Take care of your blessings.”
(Cover image of Essex Hemphill by Barbara N. Kigozi, June 1994)
Charles I. Nero is an interdisciplinary scholar, cultural critic, and professor of Rhetoric, Film and Screen Studies at Bates College. Nero is a pioneer in the area of Black Queer Studies. He became intensely aware of the need for this area of study while studying for his PhD at Indiana University. His scholarship has been an important intervention into what typically had been unquestioned straightness in African American studies and an assumed whiteness in gay scholarship. The late poet Essex Hemphill contacted him personally to include the essay “Toward a Black Gay Aesthetic: Signifying in Contemporary Black Gay Literature” in the landmark 1991 anthology Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. That essay is considered to be the first scholarly treatment of Black gay literature. Nero was honored to write the introduction for the Cleis Press edition of Hemphill’s anthology Ceremonies.