Hold Tight Gently (43 page)

                        
of the voodoo ghetto,

                        
the murmurs of believers

                        
rise and fall, exhaled

                        
from a single spotted lung.

                        
The congregation sings

                        
to an out-of-tune piano

                        
while death is rioting,

                        
splashing blood about

                        
like gasoline.

Most of the essays in
Ceremonies
had appeared elsewhere. In them, Essex spoke as a man caught and torn between the homophobia of the black world and the racism of the white gay one. In “Does Your Mama Know About Me?” he summarized the post-Stonewall white gay community of the 1980s as “not seriously concerned with the existence of Black gay men except as sexual objects. In media and art the Black male was given little representation except as a big, Black dick”—as revealed most strikingly, as he’d earlier argued, in the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.

“Coming out of the closet to confront sexual oppression,” Essex wrote, “has not necessarily given white males the motivation or insight to transcend their racist conditioning. This failure (or reluctance) to transcend,” he continued, “is costing the gay and lesbian community the opportunity to become a powerful force for creating real social changes that reach beyond issues of sexuality.” In 1992, this last comment was prescient. Essex’s analysis and complaint falls on still more fertile ground in 2014, particularly among younger gays who join older left-wingers in deploring the mainstream assimilationism of the contemporary gay movement.

Though
more
comfortable in the black world than in the gay one, Essex continued to disparage “the middle-class aspirations of a people trying hard to forget the shame and cruelties of slavery and ghettos.” His poem “American Wedding” seems designed to mock the traditional rituals of marriage:

                                    
In America,

                        
I place my ring

                        
On your cock

                        
Where it belongs . . .

And in his brief essay “Loyalty,” he deplores, “through denials and abbreviated histories riddled with omissions”—he had Langston Hughes, among others, in mind—“the middle class sets about whitewashing and fixing up the race to impress each other
and
the racists
who don’t give a damn . . . I can’t become a whole man simply on what is fed to me: watered-down versions of Black life in America. I need the ass-splitting truth to be told, so I will have something pure to emulate, a reason to remain loyal.” This was the same indictment Essex had leveled at the white gay community:
don’t
distort your own culture in the attempt to win acceptance and appease through assimilation.

Ceremonies
reached the gay bestseller lists—and won the National Library Association’s New Authors in Poetry Award—but was largely ignored by both white and black mainstream media outlets. The reviews and interviews carried in the gay press were always appreciative, sometimes glowing. Despite Essex’s warranted distrust of the white gay movement, it
did
have a left-wing cohort, and one of its reviewers characterized
Ceremonies
as “harsh, stark, and unyieldingly honest.” Another smartly caught the book’s tone: it’s “marked by an acuity of insight and an ironic, often sarcastic, exposing of the bigotry, hypocrisy and ignorance that plague black gays.” Alternatively, the collection was characterized as “replete with battle cries, wounded warriors, and soldiers who will not die. The inner struggle with self-identity and acceptance is turned outward and made public.” The only complaint I found was in a review that preferred Essex’s poetry to his prose, finding “too much venom” in the latter and complaining that “his dogmatism does not invite intellectual elasticity.” The reviewer used Essex’s attack on Mapplethorpe as a case in point, claiming that it failed to consider the possibility—remote, in my view—that his photographs can be read as
critical
of the distorted view of black men that they simultaneously display.
¹¹

In one of the interviews Essex did after
Ceremonies
came out, he responded to the question “How is your health?” with the circumspect “It’s pretty good. I’ve had mild disturbances, but I’ve been fortunate so far, and that is the qualifier: so far.” He proved as much by accepting most of the invitations that now came his way, traveling widely to read and speak. Over the next eighteen months, he appeared at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, UCLA, the Folger Library, and the National Black Arts Festival (the first openly gay writer invited to read from his work). He also began to get a number of awards.
Brother to Brother
had already received the Lambda Literary Award for the best gay men’s anthology, and now additional prizes
began to arrive for
Ceremonies
, including the American Library Association’s Gay and Lesbian Literary Award and a Pew Charitable Trust Fellowship in the Arts.

With so much encouragement, Essex decided to try his hand at writing a novel. His agent, Frances Goldin, “adored” him, and when Essex was in New York she’d put him up in her own apartment and cook for him. On one such visit he told her an anecdote about his mother: During a sermon in her fundamentalist church, the minister had railed on and on against homosexuality. Finally Mantalene Hemphill stood up in the middle of the congregation and angrily said, “ ‘You’re talking about my son! And if you don’t stop, I’m never coming back to this church!’ ” And with that, she’d stormed out.

The episode is confirmed and amplified in the manuscript of Essex’s novel in progress, “Standing in the Gap,” which I recently discovered in the Frances Goldin Agency’s files. The section is long but, because it tells us a great deal about the relationship of mother and son, is, in condensed form, worth quoting:

For a long time she had kept her silence in the face of often blatant condescension, but one Sunday, nearly two years ago, her minister began preaching a sermon about how AIDS is “the just punishment” of homosexuals. Right in the middle of his sermon she stood up, mad enough to start cussing in the church and shouted, “Excuse me Reverend Jenkins! Excuse me! If AIDS is the punishment of homosexuals then it must be the punishment of adulterers, murderers, and thieves, too, and all other manner of criminals and deviates you could want to name! Now, I don’t mean to challenge your cloth this morning, but you know my son is a homosexual. He’s one of those ‘gay’ people you trying to condemn to hell, but in my eyes he has committed no crime. Some of these people sitting up in here have sons who would rape them if they were pretty enough. Some of them can barely leave their homes and come here to hear you preach because they fear that when they return home those same sons will have sold everything that isn’t nailed down to get some of that crack, and whatever other drugs they got out there. . . .

“Up to this point,” she continued, “I’ve been praying for a wisdom to visit you that would cause you to see we are
all
God’s children and no mere man can stand in judgment of another. That’s God’s privilege,
not man’s. I’ve been praying for you to preach love, but you keep preaching hate from your pulpit. And you ain’t nothing but a man yourself, strutting around here with the pennies
I
put in your collection plate jingling in your pockets. But let me tell you, Reverend, as surely as the candle of
my
Lord does not blow out in any wind, I’m not going to sit here and listen to you preach my son into damnation. . . .

“Before I listen to you blasphemy my son, my love, and the dear Lord I trust, I’ll leave this church this very day, Reverend. I don’t know why our young men and women are dying like they are, and you don’t know why, either, but I know in my heart that the God
I
worship does not carelessly take life in order to terrorize us into righteousness!
My
God doesn’t punish love! Men do! And you ain’t nothing but a man! But my pennies won’t be jingling in your pockets no more. I work too hard to be giving my money to a fool. I believe in God too sincerely to trust you to handle my prayers. If you don’t know tolerance, Reverend, then how can you possibly recognize a prayer?”

And with that, Mantalene (“Mary” in the novel) gathers up her things, walks out “with her head held high, and she never looked back.” Her son—called “Eddie” in the novel—tells her that he’s “proud of you for leaving there and joining a church that isn’t homophobic and woman hating.” But Mary, like Essex’s mother, Mantalene, continues to feel “her loyalties torn between her religious beliefs and her son. In this howling gap, her fears for Eddie proliferate. They seep into her dreams long before they’re articulated in her prayers. . . . ‘I’m angry and sad, and my fears for you have increased tremendously. . . . I want you to survive America. I don’t want you fighting to stay alive with handicaps. Homosexuality is a handicap, Eddie. That’s how society sees it, son . . .’

“But when she finally came to terms with Eddie’s dilemma, and she did see it as that—
his
dilemma, but
hers
as well—she established a delicate balance between suspending all judgment and maintaining all loyalty.” She tells her son, “I may never fully understand your sexuality, Eddie, but I don’t want to judge you or condemn you for it. I’d love you then. That has always been real clear to me, even as I’ve struggled to understand. The thought of losing you frightened me into acceptance.” Eddie, in turn, “knew he would always have her God-fearing love and she would have his, that was their mutual commitment, but
accepting every part of him was not guaranteed, and he knew this, too, as clearly as he knew he was homosexual.”

In portraying his mother’s conflicted loyalty, Essex had also found a title for his novel: “Standing in the Gap.” He spelled out its meaning: “Are you willing to stand in the gap for your loved ones? Can you go prepared for anything and be afraid of nothing? Are you willing to stand in the gap for your community? Are you willing to stand in the gap for the pregnant juvenile black girls? Are you willing to stand in the gap for the black males dying faster than eagles? Are you willing to stand in the gap for the crack addicts, the rape victims, the emotionally and physically abused, the criminally insane, the disenchanted, those stricken with AIDS?”

After Essex completed the first draft of the novel, he sent it to Frances Goldin for her opinion. She read it carefully and sent him back a frank assessment: “As it stands at this moment, it suffers both from structural problems and rhetorical overkill. . . . There is far too much unconvincing dialog and too much lecturing. . . . The book needs more story-telling.” Frances knew her comments would come as a blow to Essex and she urged him not to be “dashed” by the criticism, adding that she wouldn’t have spent so much time reading and writing about the draft if she “didn’t think you were up to great end products.”
¹²

Proving her commitment, Frances managed to secure a two-book contract for Essex from the conglomerate publishing house of NAL/Dutton/Penguin—which included an advance that allowed him to move into a somewhat nicer apartment. One contract was for a projected anthology of short fiction by black gay men, which Essex tentatively entitled “Bedside Companions,” describing it as aiming “to acknowledge and affirm the ways Black gay men support, sustain, and love one another through these critical times.” He wanted the collection to “chart territory beyond the coming-out stories and the political treatises on racism. . . . [It] intends to more closely examine home, friendship, family—immediate and extended—lovers, ‘brothers,’ and the impact life’s joys and sorrows have upon these relationships.” He appended to the announcement the warning that “No
gratuitous
sex, violence, misogyny, or sexism will be considered.”

The second book in the two-book contract was for the tentatively titled novel in progress, “Standing in the Gap.” The acquisitions
editor at Penguin was Peter Borland, and after he read Essex’s first draft of the novel, he sent him a long critique that essentially confirmed Goldin’s opinion. Borland reiterated her view that “Standing in the Gap” had the potential to become “a wonderful, literary, important novel,” but to reach that goal, he felt a considerable revision was essential. Most radically, he wanted Essex to change the novel’s point of view, shifting away from its current “floating third-person semi-omniscient P.O.V.,” which he didn’t find “particularly engaging.” Another large problem, Borland felt, was Essex’s “tendency to let the narrator or your characters editorialize or preach.”
¹³

My own reading of “Standing in the Gap” coincides pretty closely with the Goldin and Borland critiques, especially in regard to the novel’s tendency to engage in hectoring lectures that too often substitute for plot and character development. As well, lengthy and repetitive descriptions impede the narrative, and such dialogue as exists in the novel is often pitched at such an artificially inflated level that it’s difficult to associate it with the way people actually talk. There are occasional pleasures to be had in the novel’s inventive use of language, but they tend to be buried under a defective structure. The book basically alternates between scenes in a dying “Eddie’s” hospital room and those describing earlier experiences with his mother and his friends. But a subplot in the novel—the story of Eddie’s closest friend, “Tyrone”—gradually takes over the narrative, and it’s no longer clear who or what the novel is centrally about. The confusion is heightened by a final scene centered on Tyrone’s murder at the hands of a closeted hustler, an anachronistic close that diffuses still further a narrative that thematically had initially focused on the plight of a gay man with AIDS. “Standing in the Gap” has some deliciously sassy moments and more than one skillful scene of erotic encounter. Overall, however, it cannot be judged a success. Alas, Essex was never allowed the luxury of time to revise and work through the novel’s shortcomings.