Essex Hemphill, Black Gay Bard

Essex Hemphill, revered by many in the black gay community and considered the foremost black gay poet in America died November 4, 1995 at the age of 38 in Philadelphia, where he lived.

His untimely death due to complications from AIDS silenced an influential literary activist whose poems and essays are uncompromisingly frank about what it means to be black and gay in a racist and homophobic society. "I have not chosen to isolate myself from my friends and community," he wrote in an essay in Essence magazine. "There are valid reasons for doing so, but I feel that would contribute to the absence of visible, positive homosexual images...."

To the late filmmaker Marlon Riggs, in whose controversial PBS documentary on black gay life, Tongues Untied, Hemphill appeared, Hemphill's poetic talent was "Astounding." Riggs further stated that "No voice speaks with more eloquent, insightful, thought-provoking clarity about contemporary Black gay life."

Those are the characteristics that struck a chord with Steve Langley, a young African-American poet/singer from Washington, D.C. When he first read Hemphill's poetry he was riding the Metro, D.C.'s subway system, and the words "brought tears to my eyes. here was finally someone who was writing about my life. As a writer, he was a role model. He encouraged me [through his example] to write."

Don Jackson, a writer from Durham, N.C., is another individual Hemphill inspired. "We spent many occasions on the phone talking about books, [James] Baldwin, music, and our lives. It was an electrifying experience. He gave me a surge of confidence."

Hemphill, Chicago-born and D.C.-raised, began writing poetry at age 14. In an interview with Joseph Beam in Au Courant, a Philadelphia gay newspaper, he revealed what led him to poetry. "I was a loner and I am still very much a loner." he attended "a predominantly black, urban high school rife with all kinds of problems--gangs, drugs, etc. My quietness probably kept me out of a lot of trouble. I had friends, but the kinds of things I needed to communicate, or say to someone else seemed best said to myself on paper, so I started writing poems."

At the University of Maryland, he met a young woman named Kathy Anderson. She turned him on to the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka). They later co-founded and published Nethula Journal, a black cultural magazine.

Over the years, Hemphill was widely anthologized and was the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Library Association's New Authors in Poetry Award for his book of prose and poetry, Ceremonies (Plume) and a Lambda Book Award (Lammy) for Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (Alyson), which he edited.

In addition, Hemphill was selected in 1993 by the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities in Santa Monica, California to participate in its Visiting Scholars Program.

If Hemphill had been a speaker at the Million Man March in Washington in October 1995, these words from his poem, "For My Own Protection," would have been appropriate as well as uplifting: "I want to start an organization to save my life./If whales, snails, dogs, cats, Chrysler, and Nixon/can be saved,/the lives of Black men/are priceless/and can be saved./We should be able/to save each other."

Hemphill--who, at the time of his death, was survived by his mother, three sisters, and a brother--was buried in Washington, D.C.

This article was originally published in the New York Amsterdam News (November 18, 1995).