"Essex Charles Hemphill" (April 16,1957-November 4,1995)

Poet,editor,and performance,artists,was born in Chicago,Illinois,the second oldest of five children of Mantalene Hemphill from Columbia,South Carolina.Little is known about his daddy.Essex was raised in Anderson,Indiana,Columbia,South Carolina,and Southeast Washington,D.C.Fron an early age he was aware of both his homosexuality and the homophobia among his peers.He described the oppressive situation of his youth in the introduction to Brother to Brother "The male code of the streets where I grew up made this very clear:Sissies,punks,and faggots were not "cool"with the boys." Essex started writing in 1971 at age fourteen.That same year he had his first homosexual affair with an older white man from his Washington neighborhood.Essex grew up in a situation with hardly any visible African American gay men who could have been role models, he decided to explore the dimensions and intersections of race and sexuality both politically and artistically and was one of the first openly gay African American artists.Radically addressing white supremacists attitudes and racist stereotypes of African American men within the white-dominated gay subculture,as well as homophobic attitudes within the African American community,Essex became an important protagonist of the African American gay culture of the 1980s.After graduating from Ballou High School in Washington,D.C. Essex studied English and journalism at the University of Maryland and got his degree in English at the University of the District of Columbia.In 1978 he and another student from the University of Maryland founded the Nethula Journal of Contemporary Literature.During a poetry reading at Howard University in 1980 Essex publicly came out as a gay man.He became known to Washington audiences in 1983,when,together with Wayson R.Jones and Larry Duckette,his longtime companion,he formed the poetry performance group Cinque.They first peformed at the Enik Alley Coffeehouse in northeast Washington,an important venue for African American lesbian and gay artists.Two years later he self-published his first chapbook, Earth Life (1985),which he funded entirely with his own savings. His His career as a writer accelerated in 1986 when he received a fellowship in poetry from the National Endownment of the Arts (NEA) that enable him to publish Conditions (1986),his second book of poems,with editorial assistance from Joseph Beam.That same year his work appealed in Gay and Lesbian Poetry of Our Time and In The Life,an influential anthology of texts by African American gay writers edited by Joseph Beam.In 1987  his  poetry was included in Tongues United,an anthology of poems by five African Americans poets.The title refers to the poem "Tongue-Tied in black and White"by Michael Steve Harper and was chosen because Michael "expounds on how the mores and language of a dominant culture can stifle the creativity of peoples within the culture" (Tongues United,5).Two years later the filmmaker Marlon Riggs chose "Tongues United"as the title for his influential documentary on African Amerigan gay identity.In Tongues United (1989) Marlon combined poetry,performance,and personal testimony to reflect on the situation of African American gay men in the United States.It is one of three internationally acclaimed and controversially debated films in which Essex and his poetry would appear.He also peformed his poetry for the soundtrack of Looking for Langston (1989) a filmic meditation on Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance directed by the black British filmmaker Isaac Julien.In the U.S. some parts of the estate of the film were censored by the executor of the estate of Langston Hughes to prevent a connection of  Langston's name and homosexuality.The third film featuring Essex and his poetry is Marlon's Black...Black Ain't (1994),a personal and radical examination of African American gay experiences in the age of AIDS.
Owing to these films,Essex became known internationally.
In 1991 Essex edited Brother to Brother:New Writings by Black Gay Men.The Book was originally conceived and planned by Joseph Beam as a companion anthology to In the Life.After Joseph's death from AIDS-related complications in 1988 Essex completed the work with the support of Joseph's parents,Dorothy & Sun Beam,in their home in Philadelphia.Like In the Life,the anthology includes texts by important African American gay artists of the 1980s,such as Assotto Saint,Graig G.Harris,and Melvin Dixon,and was awarded the Lambda Literary Award.That same year,Essex's work was included in the anthologies The Road before Us:100 Gay Black Poets (1991) and Hometowns: Gay Men Write about Where They Belong (1991).
Essex's collection Cremonies: Prose and Poetry was published in 1992.Its poems and essays cover a wide range of topics concerning the situation of African American gay men in the United States, such as the intersections of the categories blackness and gayness, white gay racism,homophobia among some African American nationalists, and AIDS. Essex's pointed critique of racists representations of African American men in the work of the white gay photographer Robert Mapplethrope in his essay "Does Your Mama Know About Me?"led to controversial debates within the gay community.Ceremonies was awarded the National Library Association's Gay Lesbian,and Bisexual New Author Award.In 1993 he was a visiting scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica,California,and he received a Pew Charitable Trust Fellowship in the Arts and the Emery S.Hetrick Award for community-based activism from the Hetrick-Martin Institute.That same year his poem "vital Signs"was published in the anthology Life Sentences:Writers,Artists,and AIDS (1994),revealing his positive HIV status to the public.Apart from books and anthologies,Essex's work appeared in numerous journals,among them Black Scholar,Callalo,Obsidian,Painted Bride Quarterly,Gay Community News,the James White Review,and Essence.Essex died from AIDS-related complications in Philadelphia.