Coming Home With Our Heads Held High
In the 1980s, a group of Black gay male artists built a community of their own, only to have it torn apart by AIDS.
Welcome back to Angelic Troublemakers and happy Black History Month. This issue will be hitting your inboxes on Monday, February 1 and I am excited because this not only marks the one-month anniversary of the newsletter but also takes it back to where it started.
After the 2016 election, I threw myself into the history of movements for social justice like never before, reading and watching everything I could get my hands on about the Civil Rights Movement, the gay liberation movement, the various womens’ movements throughout history, and more. That February, I started sharing posts on Instagram about some of my favorite figures from Black history, posting a photo of them with a short bio. Later, I would do the same for Women’s History Month in March and Pride Month in June.
But as the project grew, I found myself constrained by the format and Instagram’s character limit, which is what led to this newsletter. Now, with space to expand and a few issues under my belt, I’m embarking on an ambitious new project to mark this Back History Month.
Instead of focusing on a single figure or event, as the past issues have, each of the next four issues will focus on a community. In particular, a community of Black queer artists, writers, and intellectuals. Instead of looking at individuals in isolation, we will look at them as part of a particular cultural moment and artistic community. These are communities built by people out of necessity, as the intersecting oppressions of their multifaceted identities put them at the margins of the margins. We will see how the members of these communities influenced each other, supported each other, sometimes fought with each other, and mourned together. We will also look at the extraordinary way in which these four small communities, made up of some of society’s most marginalized people, managed to change the larger world.
And we will also look at how these communities influenced each other. We will start this week with Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, and Marlon Riggs, three Black gay male artists who, along with others, managed to build a vibrant artistic community in the 1980s in the face of homophobia in the Black community, racism in the gay community, and the plague of AIDS, which disproportionately ravaged queer communities of color back then as it still does today.
Hemphill, Beam, and Riggs were influenced by a parallel movement of Black women and other women of color, the large majority of whom were also queer, who built a community in the 1970s and 1980s in opposition to the primarily white and straight feminist movement, which we will discuss next week. Starting with the Combahee River Collective Statement and continuing with the founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, this group -- which includes Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, and Demita Frazier -- would theorize a groundbreaking view of “identity politics” (a term they coined) which recognized the intersecting and interlocking oppressions faced by women of color and queer women of color in particular. Now known by the term “intersectionality,” this set of ideas has become central to modern feminism and other movements for social justice.
At the same time the Combahee River Collective was building space for themselves outside the white feminist movement, a performer named Crystal LaBeija was doing something similar in the insular world of the New York drag scene. Frustrated by racism in the white-dominated drag pageants, she built her own “house” and began throwing balls for other Black and Latinx performers. This underground culture would hit the mainstream in 1990 thanks to Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning and its stars, including Willi Ninja. Paris is Burning would go on to become a central text for queer communities and a generation later, ballroom culture would enter the mainstream again through the TV series Pose, which has made mainstream stars of ballroom figures such as Indya Moore of House of Xtravaganza. We will discuss the history and enduring power of ballroom through the careers of Crystal LaBeija, Willi Ninja, and Indya Moore two weeks from now on Feb. 15.
And then on Feb. 22, we will wrap up this series by taking it way back to the Harlem Renaissance. We will talk about such classic Black History Month staples as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, as well as the less well-known but incredibly influential Alain Locke, but we will do so with a decidedly queer lens, discussing how the closeted queerness of many of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance impacted their work, and how the erasure of their queerness in popular memory today still does them injustice. And we will look at how the hidden queerness of the Harlem Renaissance also influenced the other three communities we are discussing.
And guiding us through this all will be someone whose voracious intellect and talent managed to connect them all together, Essex Hemphill.
Joseph Beam: In the Life
“If I had read a book like In the Life when I was fifteen or sixteen,” Essex Hemphill wrote in 1990, “there might have been one less mask for me to put on later in life.” Hemphill was referring to the groundbreaking anthology of writing by Black gay men published in 1986 by his friend Joseph Beam. Beam’s anthology was the first major document of a fertile community of Black gay writers that had started to find each other and create revolutionary work in the 1980s. Like Alain Locke, whose 1925 anthology The New Negro had documented the Harlem Renaissance, Beam was proclaiming a new renaissance of work by unapologetically Black and queer artists.
Joseph Beam was born in Philadelphia in 1954, the same year as the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision. He came of age with the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and early 70s. Raised Catholic and an only child, he attended mostly-white parochial schools where he was typically the only Black kid in class and had a lonely, isolated childhood. In college, he became involved in Black Power groups and, after returning to Philadelphia in 1979, began hanging around the gay bookstore Giovanni’s Room and writing for local gay newspapers and magazines.
But Beam still struggled to find the community he was looking for. The Black Power groups he was a part of in college were often extremely homophobic, with leading Black intellectuals and political leaders such as Eldridge Cleaver, Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, and Louis Farrakhan arguing homosexuality was just another way of emasculating Black men and destroying Black families (The one exception to this was the Black Panther Party’s Huey P. Newton, who wrote an open letter arguing for collaboration between the Black, womens’ and gay liberation movements). At the same time, the gay community, dominated by white cisgender gay men, was no more open to Black members of the community. Despite the Giovanni’s Room bookstore being named for a work by the great Black gay writer James Baldwin, as Hemphill would later write, “The post-Stonewall white community of the 1980s was not seriously concerned with the existence of black gay men except as sexual objects.”
This carried over from politics to culture. Homophobia permeated much of the Black popular culture of the time, from Eddie Murphy’s standup to Spike Lee’s School Daze to wide swaths of hip-hop (“I don’t know if they f--- or what/Search a n---- down, and grabbin’ his nuts,” Ice Cube would say of the cops on “Fuck Tha Police”). Meanwhile, Black men’s status as nothing more than fetish objects in the gay community would be reinforced by the most acclaimed gay artist of the era, Robert Mapplethorpe, known for his eroticized and dehumanizing photographs of Black men, or more specifically of Black men’s dicks. As Hemphill would write of Mapplethorpe:
Mapplethorpe’s eye pays special attention to the penis at the expense of showing us the subject’s face, and thus, a whole person. The penis becomes the identity of the black male which is the classic racist stereotype re-created and presented as ‘art’ in the context of a gay vision.
And, of course, there were other reasons why the 1980s were a particularly bad time to be Black and gay. While we all know that the AIDS pandemic devastated gay communities, what is less well-known is that from the beginning, Black Americans, and gay Black Americans in particular, have been disproportionately affected by the disease, which continues to this day. And facing the barriers mentioned above -- homophobia in the Black community, racism in the gay community, homophobia and racism from the white hetero medical establishment -- Black gay men began building their own community, with organizations like the National Coalition of Black Gays (later the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays).
It was while a board member of this organization that Beam became the founding editor of Black/Out magazine, the first publication exclusively for Black gay readers. In the pages of Black/Out, Beam began publishing the work of a new generation of Black gay writers and artists. He also began gathering their work -- poetry, fiction, drama, autobiography, essays, academic criticism and more -- into the anthology In the Life, which was published in 1986 and became the primary document of this new artistic movement. As Beam would write in his essay “Brother to Brother: Words from the Heart,”
Black men loving Black men is a call to action, an acknowledgment of responsibility. We take care of our own kind when the night grows cold and silent. These days the nights are cold-blooded and the silence echoes with complicity.
“Black men loving Black men” would become Beam’s rallying cry, exhorting those in his community to not only love their fellow Black men romantically and sexually but also as family. He said that due to the silence about homosexuality in most of the Black community, Black gay men had to “create ourselves from scratch,” and was consciously building a legacy and body of work so that the next young Black gay kid might not have to do so:
As African Americans, we do not bequeath dazzling financial portfolios. We pass from generation to generation our tenacity. So I ask you: What is it that we are passing along to our cousin from North Carolina, the boy down the block, our nephew who is a year old, or our sons who may follow us in this life?...What is it that we pass along to them or do they, too, need to start from scratch?
After In the Life, Beam began working on a sequel entitled Brother to Brother. But before the book could be completed, he died of complications from AIDS on December 27, 1988, a few days shy of his 34th birthday.
Essex Hemphill: “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.
This poem, “When My Brother Fell,” is one of Essex Hemphill’s many contributions to the Brother to Brother anthology, and describes how Hemphill took over the project after Beam’s death and, working with Beam’s parents, published the volume in 1991 as a tribute to his fallen friend.
Hemphill was born in 1957 in Chicago and raised in Washington, D.C. Like Beam, he had a lonely, isolated upbringing as a Black gay man. After dropping out of college, he began hanging around the D.C. art scene and in 1979, he and a group of friends started a literary journal focusing on Black artists. In 1982, he formed the performance art group Cinque with his friends Larry Duckett and Wayson Jones, which performed spoken word poetry and became an early influence on the development of slam poetry.
He continued to build his reputation throughout the early 80s, publishing several chapbooks, meeting Beam, and contributing to In the Life. He would credit Beam with introducing him to poetry that was unapologetically Black and gay by giving him a copy of Adrian Stanford’s 1977 poetry collection Black and Queer, one of the very few works of literature, outside the work of the revered James Baldwin, by an out Black gay man.
Hemphill’s prominence continued to grow through the late 80s. In addition to In the Life, he was featured in two documentaries, Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied. He also became involved in ACT UP and AIDS activism.
And after Beam’s death in 1988, he took over the editing of Brother to Brother, working with Beam’s parents, Dorothy and Sun, and even moving in with them for several months during the final editing and production of the volume. One frequent theme of Beam and Hemphill’s work is the importance of home and family. Both would argue that, unlike white gay men, Black gay men could not so easily disconnect from their families of origin, and both would come back again and again to this central dilemma. It is the theme of my favorite of Hemphill’s poems, “Commitments.” And in his introduction to Brother to Brother, Hemphill noted the symbiosis of the book being completed in Beam’s childhood home, with the help of his parents:
Their participation in this project makes it a very special ‘family affair,’ and significant in the context of black gay men and our relationships to our families. Brother to Brother is evidence that we can love, accept, and support one another in our constructions of family.
Brother to Brother, like its predecessor, is a formal mashup, mixing poetry with fiction, memoir, interviews, and academic essays. Its intention is to show the fullness and complexity of the community and the people within it, who have so often been reduced to dehumanizing stereotypes.
Marlon Riggs: Tongues Untied
By 1990, Beam, Hemphill, and their contemporaries had built a name for themselves in the gay community, for both their art and activism, but were still largely unknown to the heterosexual work. Mainstream Black publications, for example, had generally ignored the existence of In the Life when it was published. But that would change in 1991 when PBS stations aired Marlon Riggs’ experimental documentary Tongues Untied.
Born in 1957 to an Army sergeant and a civilian military employee, Riggs had the typical nomadic upbringing of a military brat, spending time in Texas, Georgia, and West Germany. After a mostly happy upbringing in Texas, he would have a harder time when the family moved to Georgia when he was 10. He would later write of being ostracized in Georgia from his white peers by his race and and Black peers by his effeminacy and presumed pretensions: “I was caught between these two worlds where the whites hated me and the blacks disparaged me. It was so painful.”
He came to accept his sexuality while a student at Harvard and, not finding any classes with specific gay content in the course catalog, he petitioned the history department to complete an independent study in “male homosexuality in American fiction and poetry.” In 1979, he moved to Oakland and pursued a master’s degree in documentary filmmaking and began a career producing documentaries for public television.
Riggs’ first major film, Ethnic Notions, was an exploration of the history of racist caricature tracing the recurrence of Black stereotypes (Jim Crow, Mammy, Sambo, etc) from minstrel shows and antebellum fiction through to twentieth century film and pop culture. The film has become a classic and a classroom mainstay and was obviously a major influence on Spike Lee’s notorious blackface satire Bamboozled.
Ethnic Notions won Riggs critical acclaim and an Emmy Award after it aired on PBS, and he seemed poised for a successful career producing respectable, socially conscious documentaries for public television. But instead, Riggs took a huge risk, in terms of both form and content, with his next film, Tongues Untied. An uncategorizable mix of documentary, poetry, and memoir dealing with the experience of being a Black gay man, Tongues Untied is the film companion to In the Life and Brother to Brother and all three works bleed into each other in very visible ways. Hemphill is featured prominently in the film, reading poetry featured in In the Life, and Brother to Brother includes two poems by Riggs that are performed in Tongues Untied, as well as an interview with Riggs about the film.
Riggs had originally planned to just make a short film of Beam, Riggs, and other Black gay poets reading their work, hoping it would be screened at local gay bars in the Bay Area. But then, Riggs got sick and discovered he was HIV positive. This motivated him to connect the poetry segments with a highly personal story of his own life and meditation on his own identity. In the Brother to Brother interview, Riggs talks about the subjective nature of the film, which violated documentary conventions of detached objectivity:
Tongues Untied is explicitly a point-of-view work. It does not attempt to address questions of so-called “balance” or “objectivity.” I am a black gay man. I made the work from that perspective. There is no debate about whether my life is right or wrong. It is right--period! It is right. It is good. It is affirming. It is life-sustaining. My life is of value and so is the life of my community.
The sexual content of the film is mild at best: a few brief flashes of nudity and a shot of two men kissing. The closest thing to inappropriate content is the litany of racist and homophobic slurs hurled at Riggs by an off-camera voice -- representing the bullies of his youth -- during his performance of the title poem. But of course, the mere suggestion that gay sex -- and sex between gay Black men at that -- not only exists but is good was enough to drag Riggs into the Culture Wars of the late 80s and early 90s. When the film was set to air on PBS in 1991, conservative groups blasted PBS for airing “pornography” and used it as part of their broader attack on publicly-financed cultural institutions such as PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts, which had partially funded the film with a small grant. White evangelical lobbying group The Christian Coalition sent a selectively edited 7-minute video of Tongues Untied’s most “salacious” moments to members of Congress to call for defunding the NEA and PBS.
Ironically, this meant Riggs’ work was often discussed alongside Mapplethorpe’s, the subject of a similar NEA funding controversy at the time, even though the two artists’ depictions of Black gay male sexuality could not be more different. But the mostly white and straight journalists, politicians, and academics commenting on the controversy at the time were not equipped to parse these distinctions.
In 1992, right-wing crank Pat Buchanan launched a primary challenge against President George Bush grounded in white Culture War grievances. He ran an ad attacking Bush for allowing the NEA to fund Tongues Untied. In response, Riggs wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in which he compared Buchanan’s attack on him to the infamous “Willie Horton” ad run in support of Bush’s campaign four years earlier and presciently predicted the next 30 years of the Republican Party:
Presidential politics have thus been injected with a new poison: the persecution of racial and sexual difference is fast becoming the litmus test of true Republican leadership....We can nonetheless expect a steady spew of words, "facts" and images that have been ripped out of context, then deflated and distorted into vicious, provocative caricatures.
Willie Horton, in other words, will continue his metamorphosis into a militant, Jesus-blaspheming, psychopathic homosexual. What kind of monster will he become next?
Coming Home With Our Heads Held High
Through the early 90s, both Hemphill and Riggs continued reaching new heights in their careers. Hemphill published Brother to Brother, followed by a major collection of his own work, Ceremonies: Poetry and Prose, and received numerous prestigious fellowships and speaking invitations, including a visiting scholarship at the Getty Center. Riggs went on to produce a sequel to Ethnic Notions about the portrayal of race in primetime TV, the brilliant Color Adjustment, and became a tenured professor of journalism at Berkeley.
But while their careers were picking up, both men were also living with AIDS and their health was starting to fail. Riggs passed away on April 5, 1994, at the age of 37. Hemphill passed away the following year, on November 4, 1995, at the age of 38. When he died, Riggs had been working on a film titled Black Is…Black Ain’t, an experimental meditation on Black identity which again featured Hemphill, along with Angela Davis, bell hooks, Barbara Smith, and Cornel West. Filmed while his health was failing, and completed posthumously by his collaborators Nicole Atkinson and Christiane Badgely, the film became, among other things, a memoir of his last months and a story of his own attempt to find his place in the Black community as a Black gay man dying of AIDS.
Joseph Beam, Essex Hemphill, and Marlon Riggs had all established themselves as creative forces and also worked to carve out space and build a community for others like them: Black gay men who felt rejected everywhere else. All three produced enduring work that would inspire generations after them. All three were really only getting started in their careers and had so much more to give the world. But none of them lived to see 40.
They are but three examples of what AIDS robbed from the LGBTQ+ community, and the Black LGBTQ+ community in particular, in the plague years of the 80s and 90s. And it continues to this day. According to the CDC, if current rates do not change, a Black gay or bisexual man will have a one in two chance of contracting HIV in his lifetime.
Beam, Hemphill, and Riggs worked to build a space where Black gay men would take care of each other in the face of the interlocking oppressions they faced and a world that did not believe their lives mattered. As Beam wrote:
The bottom line is this. We are Black men who are proudly gay. What we offer is our lives, our love, our visions....We are coming home with our heads held high.
Further Exploration
I always hope these newsletters will be an entry point and an inspiration for further exploration for those of you reading it. But especially with this Black History Month series, I highly encourage you to explore the work of these artists, writers, and intellectuals we will be talking about all month. They gave so much amazing work to the world, even when their lives were so tragically short as were our subjects’ this week, and too much of it is still not widely known.
Much of Beam and Hemphill’s work, including Hemphill’s collection Ceremonies, is out of print, but In the Life and Brother to Brother are thankfully both still in print and available from RedBone Press, a fantastic independent publisher focused on the work of Black LGBTQ+ people. You can order them directly from RedBone or, if you must, find them on Amazon.
Riggs’ work has long been inaccessible outside of academic libraries (a used DVD of Tongues Untied is currently selling for $75 on Amazon), but right now you have a great opportunity to see it. My favorite streaming app, The Criterion Channel, currently has a full retrospective of Riggs’ career entitled Race, Sex, and Cinema: The World of Marlon Riggs, based on a 2019 retrospective of the same name that was held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Tongues Untied. The retrospective includes not only Tongues Untied and his other feature documentaries but several short films, including the delightful and fascinating Long Train Running: A History of the Oakland Blues, which was Riggs’ graduate school thesis project. Criterion also has a companion series titled Inspired by Marlon Riggs featuring short films by contemporary Black and queer artists. Both series are definitely worth the $10.99 for a month’s subscription.
Help fight HIV and AIDS in Black America by donating to The Black AIDS Institute.