Black Gay Identity and the Poetry of Essex Hemphill

Robert W. Anderson

English 289: Genres

Dr. Axelrod

08 December 1999

Issues of identity are crucial in today's society. Thinking back over the last two years, two events stand out as critically important. The first is the death by dragging of James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper, Texas. The second is the death by beating of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. Each of these men was slain for who they were perceived to be, for how society constructed them racially and sexually. Both serve as reminders to our communities that hatred is still alive and well, and that the discourses of hatred have material effects upon living persons. Also, each of these events has served to crystallize the African-American and gay communities, respectively, in solidarity--and, in part, in solidarity with one another. The gay community has expressed both its outrage and its grief at the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, but outrage and grief are nothing new to either the Black community or to the gay community. The history of anger and grief over AIDS has been significant in the gay community for almost two decades. Furthermore, each of these men were killed due to their perceived identities--they were chosen by their assailants for who they were, identified by their attackers as "Other."

The poetry of Essex Hemphill addresses many of these themes, along with others. His poetry deftly manages the feelings of anger and grief at an uncaring society. Essex Hemphill is a Black gay male poet whose writing spans from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. He died in 1995 due to AIDS-related illnesses. He wrote three books of poetry: Earth Life, Conditions, and Ceremonies: Poetry and Prose. He also edited Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men after Joseph Beam's death. His poetry has been anthologized in a number of publications, including In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, and Gay and Lesbian Poetry In Our Time. Furthermore, his essays and poetry have appeared in a number of journal publications.

"Brotherhood" is a significant theme that runs through many of Hemphill's poems. Primarily, he discusses the shared brotherhood of black gay men, although sometimes this is expanded outward towards all black men. In a move towards solidarity in "When My Brother Fell", Hemphill writes

Standing at the front lines

flanked by able brothers

who miss his eloquent courage,

his insistent voice

urging us to rebel,

urging us not to fear embracing

for more than sex,

for more than kisses

and notches in our belts. (Ceremonies 31)

Hemphill is calling for solidarity here beyond that of homosexual relations, urging to go beyond coming together merely to get laid. He argues that men needed to embrace one another for political as well as sexual actions.

This, however, is no easy concept for Hemphill. Relations between men in Hemphill's poetry are fraught with problems. In "Fixin' Things", he writes "Of the many issues that concern me, / how to speak to my brother is a mystery" (Ceremonies 35). Here, he is speaking both of his literal brother, his "blood brother," as well as his Black brotherhood. In "To Some Supposed Brothers", Hemphill critiques the sexism of other Black men, men who "judge a woman / by the job she holds" and who "will call her 'Bitch!'" (Ceremonies 131). He undercuts the term "brothers" in the final stanza of the poem, writing

But we so-called men

we so-called brothers

wonder why it's so hard

to love our women

when we're about loving them

the way america

loves us. (Ceremonies 132)

Here, "brothers" signify all Black men, not Black gay men, but he undercuts the notions of "brotherhood" and "manhood" by placing the modifying phrase "so-called" in front of both "men" and "brothers," contesting claims to masculinity on the part of sexist men. Even among gay men, masculinity is a serious issue requiring contemplation. Leo Bersani writes In his desires, the gay man always runs the risk of identifying with culturally dominant images of misogynist maleness. For the sexual drives of gay men do, after all, extend beyond the rather narrow circle of other politically correct gay men. A more or less secret sympathy with heterosexual male misogyny carries with it the narcissistically gratifying reward of confirming our membership in (and not simply our erotic appetite for) the privileged male society. (63-64) In Bersani's argument, gay men run the risk of identifying with male privilege, often invoking it themselves. Hemphill's poetry, especially "To Some Supposed Brothers," fights this urge, although in his attempt to fight the misogyny of other Black men, he establishes an identification with them, as can be seen in his use of the first person plural. Bersani notes that "our feminist sympathies (perhaps nourished, as Silverman claims, by our desiring from the same 'position' as women) can't help being complicated by an inevitable narcisstic [sic] investment in the objects of our desire", and this investment complicates Hemphill's poetry (63). The use of "we" tends to obscure his own homosexuality, invoking a "secret sympathy" with heterosexist privilege. Admittedly, this is a difficult issue: the use of "you" would put distance between himself and his heterosexual "brothers," but his use of "we" renders his own homosexual difference invisible. Dwight A. McBride makes this argument, although less convincingly, about Hemphill's "If Freud Were a Neurotic Colored Woman: Reading Dr. Frances Cress Welsing," arguing that Hemphill places his status as a Black person over his difference as a Black gay man.

McBride argues that Hemphill identifies more as a Black man, at least in this essay, than as a gay man. McBride compares him to bell hooks, Frances Cress Welsing, and James Baldwin. His argument about hooks is not unique: he argues that she apologizes for Black homophobia, stating that the "rhetorical strategy which she employs here is a very old one, indeed, wherein blacks are blameless because 'powerless'" (367). He compares her logic to that of Welsing, who is overtly homophobic, and who Hemphill responds to in his own essay. He successfully argues that Baldwin obscured his homosexuality in interviews, writing, "when Baldwin affects the position of race man, part of the performance includes the masking of his specificity, his sexuality, his difference" (376). Yet McBride finds Hemphill's argument with Welsing unsatisfying, writing that

One of the most noteworthy things about Hemphill's anecdotal testimony is that while it insists, and rightly so, upon the integration of what Welsing has established as the dichotomous identities of race and homosexuality, it also participates in a familiar structural convention of race-discourse in its necessity to claim the racial identification as a position from which even the black homosexual speaks. In other words, part of the rhetorical strategy enacted by Hemphill in this moment is that of claiming the category of racial authenticity for himself as part of what legitimized and authorizes the articulation on his corrective to Welsing's homophobic race logic. (373) It appears that McBride wants it both ways: he wants Baldwin to be forthcoming about his specificity as a Black gay man, but he does not want Hemphill to be forthcoming about his specificity as a Black gay man. Or rather, he does not want Hemphill to be forthcoming about his specificity as a Black man. Unlike Baldwin, he does not render his identities as Black and as gay invisible, nor does he, as hooks does, apologize for Black homophobia. In fact, Hemphill's criticism of Black homophobia is sharp. In "If Freud Were a Neurotic Colored Woman: Reading Dr. Frances Cress Welsing", he writes of Welsing's theories that "at best, her views reinforce the rampant homophobia and heterosexism that have paralyzed the Black liberation struggle. She widens the existing breach between Black gays and lesbians and their heterosexual counterparts, offering no bridges for joining our differences" (Ceremonies 61). Hemphill's response, in this essay, is to Welsing's argument that homosexual, bisexual, and effeminate men are detrimental to Black nationalism. In fact, much of Hemphill's work on racism, sexism, and homophobia echoes the work of Audre Lorde on the very same issues. In "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference", Lorde writes "Black women who once insisted that lesbianism was a white woman's problem now insist that Black lesbians are a threat to Black nationhood, are consorting with the enemy, are basically un-Black" (121). Hemphill and Lorde are critical of homophobia in the Black community, in some essays, and critical of racism in the gay community in others.

Much of Hemphill's work focuses on the lack of a Black gay subjectivity, or a Black gay subjectivity that has been compromised in some fashion. In discussing the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, Hemphill rightly contends that Mapplethorpe has reduced the Black man into the Black penis, the sexual object rather than the speaking subject. In "Does Your Mama Know About Me?" he writes

In many of his [Mapplethorpe's] images, Black males are only shown as parts of the anatomy--genitals, chests, buttocks--close up and close cropped to elicit desire. 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 recreated and presented as Art in the context of a gay vision. (Ceremonies 38) Like the divisions between heterosexual and homosexual among the Black community, the divisions of race in the gay community are brought to the forefront in this essay. Hemphill points out how white men objectify not the Black male, but the Black penis, and how Mapplethorpe cuts off the heads of his subjects in favor of their anatomies. Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer note the racism and colonialism of Mapplethorpe's works, but also point out that While we recognize the oppressive dimension of these images of black men as Other, we are also attracted: We want to look but don't always find the images we want to see. This ambivalent mixture of attraction and repulsion goes for images of black gay men in porn generally, but the inscribed or preferred meanings of these images are not fixed; they can, at times, be pried apart into alternative readings when different experiences are brought to bear on their interpretation. ("True Confessions" 170). Julien and Mercer recognize that the Black gay man might be as much attracted to these images as he is repulsed by them, and that resistant readings of them can be produced, a topic to which I'll return later in the context of Hemphill's own resistant readings of heterosexist oppression. Stuart Hall notes The continuous circling around Mapplethorpe's work is not exhausted by being able to place him as the white fetishistic gay photographer; and this is because it is also marked by the surreptitious return of desire--that deep ambivalence of identification with makes the categories in which we have previously thought and argued about black cultural politics and the black cultural text extremely problematic. (168) In agreement with Julien and Mercer, Hall here finds that simply placing Mapplethorpe as a fetishistic photographer is too simple, that there are more complicated readings of his work. Ambivalence enters in, not only with regard to desiring the object pictured, but also with regard to identifying with him. The sexual objectification of the Black gay male by white men is not so simple, argue Julien, Mercer, and Hall, although it does definitely occur.

Hemphill often calls for not only solidarity of Black gay men, but for them to consider how they react to one another. Erotic relations between Black men, he notes, are even more taboo than homosexuality itself. In "Heavy Breathing", he writes

I wanted to give you

my sweet man pussy,

but you grunted me away

and all other Black men

who tried to be near you.

Our beautiful nigga lips and limbs

stirred no desire in you.

Instead you chose blonde,

milk-toned creatures to bed.

but you were still one of us,

dark like us, despised like us. (Ceremonies 13)

Here, Hemphill critiques the Black gay man who passes over other Black men in favor of white men--who refuses to even consider Hemphill or any other Black man as a partner. He further points out that, in spite of their choices, they still remain racially marked. In a later poem, "The Occupied Territories," he writes "You are not to touch / anyone of your own sex / or outside of your race", discussing how society forbids relations outside of race or inside of sex.

Hemphill's poetry and prose is very conscious of how people are interpellated into subject positions in our society. Judith Butler discusses what she terms "injurious interpellations," or speech designed to denigrate people, are sites of possible resistance. Althusser writes

I shall then suggest that ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it 'recruits' subjects from among individuals (it recruits them all), or 'transforms' the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: 'Hey, you there!' (174) Both Althusser and Butler argue that there is a chance of misrecognition, that the individual hailed will not answer or will refuse. In what might be a classic Althusserian example, Hemphill writes of being stopped by a police officer in Union Station in Washington, D.C. while on his way to a public forum. Hemphill writes that he "came face-to-face with the dangerous consequences of misrepresentation" ("In Living Color" 389). Because he was "dressed in jeans, a down jacket, and a Raiders baseball cap--the standard attire of what we will call the 'butch queen' look, the home-boy look, the look of the ghetto", the police officer assumed he was running drugs or weapons ("In Living Color 389). Butler notes that "the one who is hailed may fail to hear, misread the call, turn the other way, answer to another name, insist on not being addressed in that way", which is what Hemphill did (Psychic Life 95). Hemphill writes "I refused to cooperate with the officer because I knew it was my look that made him feel he could single me out to receive his intimidating tactics" ("In Living Color" 389). From there, he insisted that the officer search the white women and men in suits on the train as well. Eventually, he writes, "I really kicked into my resistance by raising my voice and generally drawing attention to the harassment that I was being subjected to" ("In Living Color" 389-390), which led to a white man in a suit handing him his business card. Finally, Hemphill asked, "How many have had to endure this because they are black and male and wearing a Raiders baseball cap?" (In Living Color" 390) Because he was black, male, and wearing a Raider's baseball cap, the police officer attempted to interpellate him into the subject position of criminal, a position Hemphill vociferously refused. This interpellation was due to a misrecognition on the officer's part: Hemphill's clothing, in his words, was "the butch queen" look. Butler notes that "if one misrecognizes the effort to produce the subject, the production itself falters" which is exactly what happened in this case (Psychic Life 95).

Butler asks us to "consider the force of this dynamic of interpellation and misrecognition when the name is not a proper name but a social category, and hence the signifier capable of being interpreted in a number of divergent and conflictual ways" (Psychic Life 96). Althusser's police officer's "Hey, you!" becomes more specific, which accounts for police officers' basing judgments on "profiles," as is surely what happened to Hemphill. She goes on to write "to be hailed as a 'woman' or 'Jew' or 'queer' or 'Black' or 'Chicana' may be heard and interpreted as an affirmation or an insult, depending on the context in which the hailing occurs (where context is the effective historicity and spatiality of the sign)" (Psychic Life 96). Many of us are familiar with how these terms, and others, can both be used to injure another individual and in ways they can be reclaimed to lessen the injury. These interpellations into social categories such as "Black" or "gay" or "man" rather than into proper names is something I'd like to focus on in Hemphill's poetry. I'd also like to focus on the significance of the use of "or" rather than "and" in these interpellations into subject positions--as Hemphill's poetry indicates, an individual often cannot be recognized as being in multiple subject positions.

The discourses on AIDS, which Hemphill's poetry and prose are very conscious of, require that one person be recognized in one, and only one, subject position, subject here in its sense of subject to power. The Center for Disease Control's statistics place an individual with HIV or AIDS into one of many categories, including for race/ethnicity, age, sex, and exposure category. The term "exposure category" equates "men who sleep with men" with "intravenous drug users", "heterosexual conduct", and "hemophilia/coagulation disorders." While the CDC statistics do open a space for African-American men who sleep with men, it is in order to medicalize and control them, as is the purpose of many taxonomic enterprises, but it is one that leaves out certain persons. The possibility of Black men who are bisexual is not a possibility here, for example. Furthermore, the Center for Disease Control does not even factor in the possibility of a Black female homosexual behavior--"women who sleep with women" are not an "exposure category," and therefore not an identity for the purposes of HIV and AIDS discourses. In "Cordon Negro," Hemphill writes "I'm sick of being an endangered species, / sick of being a goddamn statistic" (Ceremonies 125). The very title of this poem, "Cordon Negro", signifies a black line that cannot be crossed, or a line that cannot be crossed by Blacks, one that boxes one in. Furthermore, "cordon" carries the connotation of a police action--a state-imposed line that cannot be crossed. Judith Butler writes "what we call identity politics is produced by a state which can only allocate recognition and rights to subjects totalized by the particularity that constitutes their plaintiff status" (Psychic Life 100). In the discourses of AIDS, there are clearly demarcated lines of sexuality, gender, and race that cannot be crossed, lines drawn by the state that close off certain possibilities while producing others.

As I noted, some of his essays and poetry are critical of the gay community as well as the Black community, for a number of reasons. Hemphill himself questions love between gay men in the poem "Now We Think". He writes

Now we think

as we fuck

this nut

might kill us.

There might be

a pin-sized hole

in the condom.

A lethal leak. (Ceremonies 155)

Love between men becomes dangerous, even potentially lethal. A barrier must be erected between men, and even this barrier, this cordon, is not an entirely safe barrier. The methods of loving change, and "We return to pictures. / Telephones. / Toys. / Recent lovers. / Private lives" (Ceremonies 155). This poem speaks of a certain nostalgia for the ways gay men organized, loved, and had sex before AIDS, while at the same time making direct the link between love and death. It is interesting that Hemphill uses the phrase "returned to" in this poem, particularly with regard to telephones, as phone sex is a relatively new, post-AIDS phenomenon. Men are dangerous to one another in Hemphill's writing; not only might the other man be a potential basher, but even if he returns one's affections, this could be just as deadly. Pleasure is equated with danger, but in new ways. We have always had to worry that "this nut / might kill us." That he might kill us due to "a pin-sized hole / in the condom" never occurred to gay men prior to AIDS.

Hemphill's poetry and prose expresses a strong dissatisfaction with AIDS activism, particularly the Names Project Quilt and red ribbons. In "When My Brother Fell", he writes

When my brother fell

I picked up his weapons.

I didn't question

whether I could aim

or be as precise as he.

A needle and thread

were not among

his things

I found. (Ceremonies 33)

The "needle and thread" in this poem are metonyms for the Names Project Quilt. Hemphill discounts these as "weapons" in the war against AIDS, homophobia, and racism. Arguing that Joseph Beam, to whom this poem is dedicated, did not count these among his weapons, Hemphill also refuses to. In "Vital Signs xxxii", he writes "I have no quilt for my bed, / no red ribbons for your hair" (9). Again, this is an oblique reference to the various campaigns to raise awareness of AIDS, the red ribbon campaign and the Quilt, campaigns he finds himself dissatisfied with and excluded from. In his essay "Does Your Mama Know About Me?" Hemphill writes Some of the best minds of my generation believe AIDS has made the gay community a more responsible social construction, but what AIDS really manages to do is clearly point out how significant are the cultural and economic differences between us; differences so extreme that Black men suffer a disproportionate number of AIDS deaths in communities with very sophisticated gay health care services. (Ceremonies 41) AIDS in the Black gay community, he argues, is unrecognized and the memorials and health care services function for the white gay community, not the Black gay community. Hemphill is not alone in his critique of the Names Project. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes The quilt wrings me out, as it does any viewer, in a way I don't always want to be available to be wrung out; it was a time when somebody I loved very much was barely hanging on and wasn't sure he wanted to; and just then I was very angry with the project, with its nostalgic ideology and no politics, with its big, ever-growing, and sometimes obstructive niche in the ecology of gay organizing and self-formation. (265) Both Hemphill and Sedgwick are critical of the Quilt's lack of politics, and both are "angry with the project," although for different reasons. Hemphill sees it as an example of the racism within the white gay community; Sedgwick sees it as being obstructing organizing. Unlike Hemphill, however, Sedgwick finds herself emotionally affected by the Quilt, in spite of herself.

Hemphill's awareness of how the state controls the body and its pleasures, in a Foucauldian sense, comes through in much of his poetry. Foucault argues that the body is rendered docile to the disciplining discourses of the state, and includes discourses of sexuality to be one of these disciplining discourses. In "The Occupied Territories", Hemphill writes

You are not to touch other flesh

without a police permit.

You have not privacy--

the State wants to seize your bed

and sleep with you.

The State wants to control

your sexuality, your birth rate,

your passion.

The message is clear;

your penis, your vagina,

your testicles, your womb,

your anus, your orgasm,

these belong to the State.

You are not to touch yourself

or be familiar with ecstasy.

The erogenous zones

are not demilitarized. (Ceremonies 72-73)

Hemphill uses imagery of the state, control, the military, and police in this poem in a sense that resonates very clearly with Foucauldian notions of the body rendered docile to state discipline. In Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the body is rendered completely docile to a totalizing state without room for resistance. However, Hemphill's poem qualifies this totalizing control by qualifying that it's the desire of the state--"the State wants to control," it "wants to seize your bed", but it has not necessarily succeeded in these desires. The state, in Hemphill's poem, eroticizes the subject of power in much the same way Foucault argues the subject eroticizes the discipline he or she is subjected to. That "the erogenous zones" here "are not demilitarized" implies an erotics of conflict.

In "American Wedding," Hemphill mocks the traditional marriage vows, opening with "In america, / I place my ring / on your cock / where it belongs" (Ceremonies 170). Hemphill twists the standard marriage vow, "with this ring, I thee wed," and places the ring not on the finger of the beloved/betrothed, but on his cock, "where it belongs." This brings to the fore the notion that the marriage ceremony is really a sexual contract with implications of bondage and submission; after all, cockrings are often used in gay sex as signifiers of sadomasochistic play. Furthermore, Hemphill writes, "I give you promises other than milk, honey, liberty. / I assume you will always / be a free man with a dream" (Ceremonies 170-171). Rather than America's empty promises of milk, honey, and liberty, and running counter to the connotations of bondage traditional marriage holds, Hemphill assumes his beloved with remain a free man. This poem contains a doubled critique; the first being a critique of heterosexual marriage and its inherent inequalities, the second being a critique of "america" and its empty promises.

This poem uses a kind of speech Judith Butler, citing J.L. Austin, terms illocutionary, or speech which claims to do what it says. Butler opposes this kind of speech to perlocutionary speech, or speech which is merely a saying rather than an act. Butler's primary example of illocutionary speech is judicial or state speech, such as a judge stating "I sentence you to five years in prison." Butler writes "his [the judge's] saying is itself a kind of doing" (Excitable Speech 17). This is not merely a statement, but it is also an act. But another example of speech which acts are the marriage vows themselves: "With this ring, I thee wed" is as much an act as it is a statement. Butler's argument in Excitable Speech is that illocutionary speech is primarily the province of state speech, but that hate speech also invokes the illocutionary qualities of speech by attempting to make speaking a certain kind of doing. Furthermore, Butler argues that it requires juridical acts to produce hate speech in the first place. Butler writes

Considered as discriminatory action, hate speech is a matter for the courts to decide, and so "hate speech" is not deemed hateful or discriminatory until the courts decide that it is. There is no hate speech in the full sense of the term until and unless there is a court that decides that there is. Indeed, the petition to call something hate speech, and to argue that it is also conduct, efficacious in its effects, consequentially and significantly privative of rights and liberties, is not yet to have made the case. The case is made only when it is "decided." In this sense, it is the decision of the state, the sanctioned utterance of the state, which produces the act of hate speech--produces, but does not cause. (Excitable Speech 96). Hemphill's poem opens up another possibility into this dynamic. His poem is illocutionary; it claims to be a doing rather than merely a saying, but it is one in a written medium. Because it could be read at any time, in any situation, its ability to do anything is seriously compromised, as illocutionary speech must occur within certain contexts in order for its power to do to hold together coherently. For example, the statement "I sentence you to five years in prison" makes no sense if it's coming from a grocery store sacker; similarly, "I place my ring / on your cock" places the marriage vow in an unfamiliar context. Furthermore, it reiterates the standard marriage vows, but in new ways, opening up the possibility of resistance to the original values held by traditional marriage; Hemphill cites heterosexist and nationalist values in this poem, but in new ways. Butler writes "no one has ever worked through an injury without repeating it; its repetition is both the continuation of the trauma and that which marks a self-distance within the very structure of trauma, its constitutive possibility of being otherwise. There is no possibility of not repeating" (Excitable Speech 102). While Hemphill's poem repeats a heterosexist ceremonial utterance, but his poem "marks a self-distance to" the heterosexist and nationalist "structure of trauma," one that has excluded him both as a gay man and as a Black man. Hemphill's use of the marriage vows in this poem effects "a subversive reterritorialization" of the very vows it's repeating (Butler, Psychic Life 99).

Essex Hemphill's poetry brings up many of the issues discussed in academia currently of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism. His works have been largely ignored by academia, however, as there are very few critical writings on them, and only a handful of book reviews of his poetry. The fact that there is no critical attention to his work, and that his works have gone out of print quickly after his death, lead one to believe that academia would like to forget that these issues are not discrete and separable, but can occur over the site of one person, one body. His poetry opens up the possibility of resistance to the discourses that lead to the identification as "Other" of persons such as Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. His critiques of homophobia and heterosexism within the Black community, of sexism among Black men and of racism among gay whites serve as reminders that being oppressed does not mean one is unable to oppress others.

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