A Quest to Hear the Late (Great) Voice of Essex Hemphill

Essex Hemphill was the voice of the black, gay community in Washington D.C. before the AIDS crisis took hold. The Washington Post delves deeper into the story of Hemphill's writing career and his legacy in this article by Sarah Kaplan.

When Essex Hemphill spoke, people listened.

Back in the 1980s, the poet and activist would fill the District’s coffeehouses and artsy theaters for his readings. He was the unofficial voice of the city’s black gay community — lyrical, charismatic and fiercely political.

“He had this intensity,” his friend and performance partner Wayson Jones recalls. “And the audiences, he really had not just their attention but their whole energy.”

From 1981 till his death from AIDS in 1995, Hemphill captivated the D.C. arts scene. He was a focal point for what people were calling a second Harlem Renaissance, and one of the sole writers to articulate what it meant to be both black and gay during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Today, Hemphill’s impact is largely invisible, obscured by the passage of time and, his supporters say, the biases that have left black LGBT authors out of the literary canon.

But to Hemphill’s proponents, he remains a giant — arguably America’s most important black gay poet, and certainly D.C.’s. Among them are scholar and activist Martin Duberman, who met Hemphill only once but was drawn to write a book about him two decades later, published this May; New York literary agent Francis Goldin, who cared for Hemphill when he was weakened by AIDS and now wants to republish his collected works. And of course, Hemphill’s friends in Washington, who can still recite whole stanzas of his poetry from memory and who speak of him with a mixture of affection and awe.

For this group, the “Speaking of Essex” tribute event at the D.C. Center for the LGBT Community this past Friday was something of a reunion. Duberman was there, discussing his book, as were several of Hemphill’s friends and admirers from the renaissance period of the 1980s. Older and bespectacled now, they greeted one another with long hugs and lots of cheek kissing, then settled into folding chairs facing a podium at the front of the unadorned room.

Twenty years after Essex Hemphill was silenced by AIDS, they’re hoping to once again get people listening to what he had to say. [...]

Continue to learn more about Hemphill's story and his impact on the D.C. arts scene at The Washington Post.