Essex Hemphill was one of the most important American cultural activists of the later twentieth century. Born in Chicago in 1957 – premature, with a heart murmur he later described as ‘the only jazz station / with a 24-hour signal’ – he died in Philadelphia in 1995 from AIDS-related illnesses. He was 38 years old. By the time of his death, his poems and essays, editorial projects and film collaborations had helped to consolidate a public presence for Black gay men in the United States. During his lifetime, Hemphill published a handful of chapbooks and one full-length book of poetry and prose, Ceremonies (1992). Despite a second edition in 2002, Ceremonies has long been impossible to find. Beyond a few anthology pieces, his poetry has been out of print for decades. There are numerous reasons why a book might fall off a publisher’s list. But that a writer of Hemphill’s stature has been allowed to languish in this way is evidence in itself of the homophobia and racism – familial, institutional, structural – that shaped his work and its reception.
Still, being out of print doesn’t always mean being out of circulation. Hemphill’s poetry has long been passed from hand to digital hand via illicit scans of Ceremonies and the vernacular scholarship of social media. His contributions to Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989) and Marlon T. Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989), which raised his profile at the time, have continued to secure him a place in art writing and film studies. Martin Duberman’s excellent biography Hold Tight Gently (2016) provided new information – including tracking down the manuscript of Hemphill’s unpublished novel – and dealt elegantly with a complex and incomplete archive.
This means that Love is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems, edited by Robert Reid-Pharr and John Keene, arrives as a necessary and long-awaited book. It includes all the poems from Ceremonies (some 100 pages) and expands the selection from the self-published chapbooks that Ceremonies itself drew on. There are a further 40 pages of poems from manuscripts and stray magazine appearances. The book is light on editorial apparatus: minor textual variations aren’t accounted for, the composition dates of the poems aren’t given, and the structure of the book is actually a little hard to figure out unless you have a copy of Ceremonies to hand. But these are, by and large, technical complaints: the book is intended for as wide an audience as possible, and most readers will be able to set them aside.
Hemphill’s first poems were published while he was studying in Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s. According to Duberman, he came out publicly at a reading at Howard University in 1980, and quickly threw himself into organising events, editing the journal Nethula (whose name came to him in a dream), and collaborating with other writers and artists. He and his contemporaries built on the foundations of Black lesbian feminist activism of the prior decade, where poetry played a crucial role, particularly the work of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker. This involved the practical tasks of self-definition, community-building, and consciousness-raising. He remained a committed feminist, indicting misogyny, sexual violence, and militarism time and time again in his poetry.
Among the earliest poems collected here, ‘“U.S. Planning to Wage War in Space”’ – printed in Obsidian: Black Literature Review in 1977 – begins:
We have yet
to correctly name
all the wreckage.
This may be taken as a kind of credo for the work to come, where Hemphill will survey the dispossession and deprivation of his community between the twin public health epidemics of AIDS and crack cocaine. The poem is not directly queer in content, responding, as it does, to a newspaper headline about a precursor to the Reagan-era ‘Star Wars’ programme. But Hemphill is, I think, searching for a queer tradition when he writes: ‘We have yet to bear sons / in the gaps / and in the silences of misplaced fathers’. Absence, naming, wreckage and creation: his themes are all present from the beginning.
Much of Hemphill’s early work involved performance. He established a group with Wayson Jones and Larry Duckette called Cinque, after the hero of the Amistad Uprising, and would stage multimedia work throughout the 1980s. One Cinque piece, ‘The Brass Rail’, works via call and response, and alludes to a spate of murders local to the D.C. gay bar that gave the poem its title. Disjunctive, fragmentary, the central refrain is eerie: ‘Many canoes overturn . . . Many occupants are never found’. It’s a community poem, written for a specific audience in a specific location. In his influential essay ‘The History of the Voice’, Kamau Brathwaite argues that call and response – and the oral tradition more broadly – are a way of working towards ‘total expression’, because the audience – the people – are feeding back in real time, collectively. This is, for Brathwaite, ‘the creation of a continuum where meaning truly resides’. You can hear something like this in a recording of Hemphill’s ‘What Will Be Bombed Today’ – composed in response to the MOVE building bombing in Philadelphia, where police dropped incendiaries on the Black liberation group’s headquarters, killing 11 people, including five children – performed at DC Space in 1987. Hemphill and Jones chant in harmony ‘What will be-be-be-be-bomb-bomb-bombed’ while Michelle Parkerson asks in counterpoint: ‘The A uptown? / Another funeral in Soweto? / An abortion clinic?’. The audience applauds, whoops, intensifies, falls silent.
‘Heavy Breathing’, the longest poem here, is ambitious in a different way. With an epigraph from Aimé Cesaire, Hemphill attempts a queer reprise of the great Martinican poet’s Return to My Native Land. It’s energetic, uneven, brilliant. Near the start he asks: ‘. . . what kind of mutants are we now? / Why is some destruction so beautiful? / Do you think I could walk pleasantly / and well-suited towards annihilation?’. The italicised lines are from Whitman, Hemphill flanked by what was, by the 1980s, an established lineage of white gay American poetry as he searches for a Black counterpart.
Over fifteen pages, Hemphill rides the X2 bus route (‘the bus I call a slave ship’), details and condemns the 1984 sexual assault and murder of Catherine Fuller, despairs of streets ‘sick with blood, / sick with drugs’. He quotes James Baldwin (perhaps his most immediate ‘misplaced father’), the ‘SILENCE=DEATH’ slogan later associated with ACT-UP, and heads to the bathhouse where ‘I cruise a black maze, / my white sail blowing full’. The economy of that last image – a hard-on in a towel – exemplifies Hemphill’s erotic grace. The poem ends with a surging critique of the racism of the gay community, the ineffectiveness of the Church, and the failures of prior generations of Black liberation: ‘Who has the guts / to come forward / and testify?’ he asks, ‘Who will save / our sweet world?’.
In his best work – and there are at least half-a-dozen poems here that are modern classics – Hemphill is at once confessional and secretive, vulnerable and tough. Many of his most powerful poems are elegies: ‘Homocide’ is dedicated to a murdered trans sex worker, where grief ‘is a white dress / that covers my body’; ‘Heavy Corners’, for his friend and collaborator Joseph Beam, begins ‘Don’t let it be loneliness / that kills us. / If we must die / on the front line / let us die men / loved by both sexes’. Here, again, Hemphill glancingly cites a queer predecessor: Claude McKay’s famous ‘If We Must Die’, written in protest during ‘Red Summer’, the campaign of white supremacist violence in 1919 (anyone who has been to a Palestine solidarity rally in the past year will catch the echo in Refaat Alareer’s widely shared ‘If I Must Die’).
In ‘The Tomb of Sorrow’ – a particularly gothic poem about cruising D.C.’s Meridian Hill Park – Hemphill elegises himself in advance: ‘When I die / honey chil’ / my angels / will be tall / Black drag queens’. Julien stages something proximate to this at the start of Looking for Langston, where angels in S&M harnesses hold funeral portraits of Hughes and Baldwin in dramatic chiaroscuro tableaux. The Hughes Estate, notoriously, refused to co-operate with the film. Likewise, Riggs’s NEA-funded Tongues Untied was targeted by the right-wing pressure group the American Family Association. Hemphill’s own work was threatened with censorship by the DC arts commission – afraid that Hemphill would utter the word ‘corruption’ in a reading attended by the Mayor – and was once edited by controllers at WPFM-FM radio to minimise its queer content. Hemphill refused to shy from controversy. His critique of Robert Mapplethorpe’s fetishizing images of Black men for instance came during Mapplethorpe’s own battles over NEA grants. Yet Hemphill refused to suspend his critique in the name of an unreciprocated solidarity. As he wrote, with clarity and anger: ‘The post-Stonewall white gay community of the 1980s was not seriously concerned with the existence of Black gay men except as sexual objects.’
As Love is a Dangerous Word doesn’t reprint any of Hemphill’s prose, some of this context appears more remote than it should. I understand the logic – by nature a Selected Poems is an act of compromise and pragmatism – but I miss, in particular, his essay on free speech, ‘Miss Emily’s Grandson Won’t Hush His Mouth’ (1990), and the short vignette ‘If I Simply Wanted Status, I’d Wear Calvin Klein’ (1991). The latter recounts wearing ‘a fireball-red’ t-shirt that says ‘FAG CLUB’ to the grocery store. Hemphill writes, with pleasure, ‘I had never flaunted my sexuality so immediately to so many’. In the supermarket a child points at him, and Hemphill braces himself for homophobic abuse. But the child says, delightedly, ‘My cousin would like one of those’, and wants to know where to get one. It’s a moment of possibility and innocence that offsets the increasingly painful tone of the work as AIDS engulfs the horizon.
Hemphill’s health began to seriously decline in 1993, while he was on a research fellowship at the Getty Center in Santa Monica. He had written about AIDS, and dedicated a section of the anthology he edited, Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (1991), to essays, poems, and diaries by writers like Assotto Saint, Donald Woods, and Walter Rico Burrell, who died while the book was in production. He could be bold, as in the memorable opening lines ‘Now we think / as we fuck / this nut / might kill us’; he could be offhand, as when he declares ‘I struggle against / plagues’ almost in passing; and he could be allegorical, as in ‘Civil Servant’, which seems to draw a parallel between the Tuskegee Syphilis Study scandal and contemporary drug trials. But he rarely wrote in a sustained way about his own status.
The big missing piece in Love is a Dangerous Word is one of Hemphill’s last poems, ‘Vital Signs’, completed in August 1993 and published in the anthology Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, AIDS (1995). Robert Reid-Pharr refers to this text in his introduction, and there is a poem called ‘Vital Signs’ here, but it’s less than half the length of the Life Sentences version. The definitive ‘Vital Signs’ runs to 38 numbered sections and some 35 pages. It is one of the most important poems of the AIDS crisis, equal to Tim Dlugos’s G-9, or Kevin Killian’s recently reissued Argento Series, or anything by Thom Gunn.
The poem – ‘part testimony, part biography, the essential evidence of being’ it informs us – is too long to summarise adequately. But in the final section, after learning that his T cell count is down to 23, Hemphill shifts to prose:
Some of the T cells I am without are not here through my own fault. I didn’t lose all of them foolishly, and I didn’t lose all of them erotically. Some of the T cells were lost to racism, a well-known transmittable disease. Some were lost to poverty because there was no money to do something about the plumbing because the pipes burst and the room flooded. Homophobia killed quite a few, but so did my rage and my pointed furies, so did the wars at home and the wars within, so did the drugs I took to remain calm, cool, collected.
Here, Hemphill reaches similar conclusions to ACT-UP organiser Vito Russo in his speech ‘Why We Fight’: ‘…If I’m dying from anything, I’m dying from homophobia. If I’m dying from anything, I’m dying from racism… If I’m dying from anything, I’m dying from the President of the United States’. Hemphill is so personal he becomes choral, his voice joining with so many others trying to live.
To some extent, I think ‘Vital Signs’ revisits ‘Heavy Breathing’ – his first long poem – and attempts to complete what Édouard Glissant said Césaire did in Return to My Native Land: ‘…the poet enumerates what is his, and his alone. And he claims a place in the light of the world.’ In fact, the more I read it, the more I think Hemphill’s ‘Vital Signs’ is one of the more important long poems of the 20th century. It’s tempting, reading Love is a Dangerous Word, to imagine what Hemphill would have gone on to do had he lived. ‘Vital Signs’ is one answer to this: here we witness the poet’s full and devastating power, naming all the wreckage at last.
The final poem in the selection, ‘Considerations’, is – as far as I know – previously unpublished. It works as a series of advice poems, koans of wisdom and gratitude: ‘Be careful with your life / even when risk seems minimal’ he writes, ‘If you are not / taking care / of your blessings / it will be obvious’. At one point he states: ‘Consider hatred / to be this: / the absence of everything’. Love, then, would be fullness, presence, the condition Hemphill’s work struggles towards in a world hostile to his existence.
Read on: Luke Roberts, ‘Making Games’, Sidecar.