The Ass-Splitting Truth

I’d intended to write this essay about Essex Hemphill in the elegiac tone you’d expect when the subject is a Black gay writer struck down by AIDS at age 38, in 1995. I supposed that I would lament the transgressive poet’s passing, and that of his peers—Joseph Beam, Assotto Saint, Donald Woods—and invoke the bygone days of struggle against the system while expressing horror that the enemy has not retreated but morphed into something worse, more Terminator-esque. I fully expected to have to wring my hands, metaphorically, over the generation of gay Black male (GBM) writers whose lives and mature work we have lost. To that end, I made a list of all the relatively prominent Black gay American male-identified writers of the last 80 years I could come up with in an hour or so of casual research (forgive me if I missed you), and I noticed something I didn’t expect: many of us who experienced the AIDS crisis are still alive. So, this ain’t gonna be 100 percent grief.

The roster of the currently living includes a number of brothers born before Hemphill’s 1957 birthday: novelists Samuel Delany, Darryl Pinckney, and Larry Duplechan; playwright George C. Wolfe; and poets Lamont Steptoe and Cyrus Cassells, the latter whom I include in that group since he’s only one month younger than Hemphill. Among those still walking the earth born just after that are Carl Phillips, Hilton Als, Thomas Glave, and Darieck Scott. I have no theory to explain our survival; from my own example, I’m guessing that there are many factors, mentors, and bullets dodged, some of them literal, especially if we consider the early years of HIV one such bullet. I do suspect that the slight dip in breakout GBM writers born between 1965 and 1969—James Earl Hardy, Brian Keith Jackson, John Keene, and li’l ol’ me—either means that the majority of Gen-X GBMs were cut down before we even got to know their names, or more hopefully, that like David Santos Donaldson and Robert Jones, Jr., who published first books at age 60 and 50 respectively, some of us have yet to emerge. You know who you are.

In the last years of his life, Hemphill—along with Saint and Woods—helped spearhead something of a GBM renaissance, or maybe just “naissance,” considering the unprecedented mainstream visibility that radiated from their off-center epicenter, despite the specter of death that presided over everything in those days. In 1989, Hemphill collaborated with filmmaker Marlon T. Riggs on Tongues Untied, a chain of visual vignettes on themes common to GBMs: silence, discrimination from both the Black community and the white gay community, the journey from self-hatred to self-love, and lessons in how to snap. With a postmodern, collage gestalt, its segments flowed from humor to pathos to anger to joy. As The New York Times put it in a largely favorable review:

the poetry and the parody, the put-ons and put-downs, the blues, ballads and rap, the dance and the newsreels, the enactments of violence and of gentleness somehow flow together here to produce the often troubled, occasionally exultant spirit of a minority within a minority.

Much of the text spoken in Tongues Untied consists of poetry written and read by Riggs and Hemphill, with cameras focused on their talking heads, as well as others we would lose by 1995. The film lit a fuse, shedding light on a community that had influenced so much—disco, fashion, politics—without having achieved the same visibility as the Black and the Gay Liberation movements. This time, though, the culture sat up: both Tongues and Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990) inspired Malcolm McLaren’s “Deep in Vogue,” which in turn inspired Madonna’s “Vogue;” meanwhile, Six Degrees of Separation, John Guare’s play about GBM conman David Hampton, enjoyed a lengthy run on Broadway. Let’s just say we saw a lot of Willi Ninja, the “Godfather of Vogue,” back then (RIP)—his double-jointed Shields-and-Yarnell style appears in the trifecta of Tongues, Paris, and “Deep in Vogue.”

As I graduated from the supposed queer hotbed Yale in May 1990, the unofficial Year of the Gay Black Man, “Vogue” soared to number 1 on the Hot 100 and stayed there for three weeks, its glamorous video of vogue superstars unavoidable—talk about visibility. I was fooled, like some delusional queen, into thinking that surely after such exposure there was no going back. After being so loud, we had stomped out silence forever. And while we pumped up the volume for sure, 1990 did not prove the everlasting juggernaut I’d hoped for.

While Tongues Untied gave voice to one way of thinking about gay Black visibility, it may have silenced other, less straightforward, even accidental lifelines that can also be important no matter how mordant they seem. “Visibility at any cost,” Harvey Fierstein famously rasped in The Celluloid Closet, “I’d rather have negative than nothing.” Riggs uses a homophobic clip from an Eddie Murphy routine to suggest the pain of being singled out for ridicule, but I can’t help noticing that the routine both acknowledges that Murphy has a gay audience in the first place and then low-key gets everyone, gay or straight, to surreptitiously check out his nicely rounded booty. (In 1997, Murphy’s law caught up to Murphy when he was stopped by police while in the company of Atisone Seiuli, a trans sex worker.) I doubt either of these effects would have been lost on Hemphill.

While the main concerns of Hemphill and Tongues were those of Black men coming out, living openly, and learning to love ourselves and one another, capturing him and other writers on film brought them immediate notoriety—at first “in a West 4th Street kind of way,” to paraphrase Quentin Crisp—and gradually immortalized them. At the time, though, immortality was the last thing on anyone’s mind. The film’s place in history was bolstered by controversy when some PBS affiliates declined to air it. Various rightwing politicians deemed it pornographic and a waste of tax dollars, since it was partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Eventually, in 2022, Tongues was entered into the national film registry by the Library of Congress. Furthering the move toward immortalizing Hemphill, New Directions has just released an anthology of his poetry, Love Is a Dangerous Word, edited by John Keene and NYU professor Robert Reid-Pharr. In May, Hemphill’s hometown of Washington, D.C., opened an exhibition centered on the poet and his circle of artist collaborators, including Sir Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and Lyle Ashton Harris (though bafflingly, Riggs and Tongues Untied are nowhere to be seen) called Take Care of Your Blessings, at the Phillips Collection.

Another thing I’m not going to do here is attempt to claim for Hemphill the kind of statesmanlike moral outrage and haughty high ground that writers of the last 60 years have capitalized on in the draught of dignified morality from politicians. I have always shied away from the vibe of Black Arts Movement righteous self-importance that can never laugh at itself and don’t you dare, either. Not because I disagreed with its politics—far from it—but because of the possibilities it tends to exclude. In fact, the aspects of life it excludes ironically turn out to be exactly the things most valuable to me about Hemphill’s poems: humor, fearless bawdiness, a critique of religion, and relentless trashiness. (Keep in mind that for me, trashiness is high praise: I’m the author of Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta.)

Even when Hemphill calls for political action and togetherness, his Ginsberg-ish—or, to reference Black writers, Iceberg Slim-like—observations rarely become conduits to transcendence. In “Commitments” he adopts the voice of a closeted gay Black son who smiles in photographs despite his inability to share the truth about his life with his family. There’s no revelation here, no anger, just resolute sadness: “I smile as I serve my duty.” He’s much more fatalistic than idealistic or even hopeful. He never moralizes and neither glorifies nor ennobles poverty, sickness, or the desperate circumstances of his life and work. James Baldwin is less his progenitor than Chester Himes, Richard Wright, Jean Genet, or some head cheese thereof; in his sensibility he’s as much a brother to David Wojnarowicz as he is to Riggs. There. I said it.

To say Hemphill did not give a fuck what you think is an understatement, and nearly every poem in Love Is a Dangerous Word testifies to his boldness. In “Visiting Hours,” he adopts the voice of a museum guard with an urge to run through the National Gallery “with a can of red enamel paint / and spray everything in sight / like a cat in heat,” end lines with the feeling of a manifesto. By this time—Love Is a Dangerous Word begins with later works like Ceremonies (1992) and fills the gaps with work from early chapbooks Plums (1983), Earth Life (1985), and Conditions (1986)—the man knew he didn’t have time to mince words, and it shows. “I wanted to give you / my sweet man pussy,” one speaker tells a brother he suspects of being a dairy queen in one section of Hemphill’s magnum opus, “Heavy Breathing,” “but you grunted me away / and all other Black men.” “Invitations All Around” is a 4-line invitation to group sex. Hemphill ends “Rights and Permissions” with an image of the poet dipping his lips into a handful of his own semen.

His poems frequently employ theatrical monologues rather than offering anything strictly confessional (another aspect that always appealed to me). It feels as if he means to chip away at collective trauma by inhabiting the minds of people marginalized even by folks who are themselves marginalized. “I’m not content / loving my Black life / without question,” he writes further along in “Heavy Breathing.”

The range of his empathetic channeling even extends, in one case, to the criminally insane. The proceedings can get gruesome and inappropriate, but my man could not care less. Most shockingly, his poem “Voices,” dedicated to the memory of William DeLoach, a five-year-old from Prince George’s County, Maryland, who was dismembered by his mother in 1986, is not a eulogy. Instead, Hemphill’s poem recounts (or perhaps imagines) a series of lurid details from the mother’s perspective as she pleads her case in court. “I open the refrigerator / and place your head / on the top shelf. / Blood streaks / the white-shelled eggs below.” While Sethe, the character in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) based on the enslaved Kentuckian Margaret Garner, tried to “save” her child from slavery by killing her, Hemphill has DeLoach’s mother cut her son to pieces to keep him safe from colorism. She’s like, Sethe, hold my beer. “The voices wanted me / to free my son / from his breed / and complexion. / “Too dark to live!” No wistful sadness here, just a ghoulish and blank final comment from the murderer: “. . . nothing about this alarmed me. / Nothing appeared unusual / Your Honor.”

Hemphill also doesn’t give a fuck what you think about his responses to typical irritants, like the fetishization of Black men. Instead of clapping back against those who would turn him into a sex object, the narrator of “Object Lessons” gives you exactly the opposite: “if I desire to be object . . .” he says, “it was my fantasy.” Hemphill mines the world for verities that can shock even marginalized people out of our complacency, “the ass-splitting truth,” I remember him calling it (I even quoted that phrase in an early piece I wrote for The Village Voice). Frequently he finds the ass-splitting truth in counterintuitive places—places we might now call inappropriate, though the mid to late ’80s was a massive cookout of transgressiveness, from Karen Finley’s yam-jamming performance art to Robert Mapplethorpe’s bullwhips. Hemphill dedicates the poem “The Perfect Moment” to Mapplethorpe, but his intention is not clear there.

For Hemphill, just being Black and queer turned him into something profane and unspeakable—an abomination, if you will—to numerous communities that should have celebrated him, so why did he need to revere anything they held sacred? And why not access power by trying on the costumes of the various devils they fear you are? At base, he needed to run through that museum spraying red paint like a cat in heat. Certainly, religion does not get a pass from brother Essex either. “I am looking / for signs of God / as I sodomize my prayers,” he writes in “Heavy Breathing,” and though the image is hard to parse—what does sodomizing a prayer look like?—it’s still deliciously blasphemous. So too is his mockery of religion’s futility; he sees it ignoring urgent problems in the community: “The congregation sings / to an out-of-tune piano / while death is rioting, / splashing blood about / like gasoline.”

And what of his legacy? There’s a whole post-Hemphill generation who were maybe 10 years old when he died and have come up in his shadow, including Jericho Brown, Brontez Purnell, and Danez Smith. We who Hemphill left behind in the world of the living—“navigating this deadly / sexual turbulence; / perhaps we are / the unlucky ones” (“Heavy Breathing” again)—obviously owe him a debt for the barrier-smashing in his own work, but nobody writes like this anymore—who among us has the chutzpah to start a poem, as Hemphill does in “Suga’ Suga’,” with the lines “A few nights ago / I was deep sucking your dick / sucking your dick deep / like a thirsty person / devouring nectar in a desert”? Okay, maybe Saeed Jones or Jeremy O. Harris, but would we tell our agent to send that one to The New Yorker?

I hesitate to blame our contemporary reticence about sex and boundary-busting on self-censorship; after all, Hemphill’s generation set a high bar for sexual openness and shock value, they were not self-conscious about triggering people’s trauma, and they knew not the dance of career, capital, mindfulness, and fame that everyone who has ever used the internet to promote their work has at least jumped into for a round or two. We weren’t going to outdo the gay Black boomers in that respect.

In one of his best-known poems, “When My Brother Fell,” Hemphill both eulogizes Joseph Beam, who passed away in the midst of editing the seminal GBM anthology Brother to Brother (1991), and turns his overtaking of the manuscript (and moving into Beam’s mother’s house to do so) into a war metaphor. “When my brother fell / I picked up his weapons.” In the spirit of ass-splitting truth, perhaps we jettison that noble, respectable view of death, brotherhood, and struggle and pick up his other weapon (and perhaps his writing instrument)—his dick. I’d like to see us salute the funny, sex positive, transgressive side of Hemphill equally, to remember him the way the narrator of “Confessions of a Mask” requests: “when they ask, later on, / tell them I was a hot fuck, / a freaky fuck, a delightful fuck.” In bed, and on the page.