Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS by Martin Duberman; The New Press, $27.95
Loss permeates our foremost contemporary gay historian Martin Duberman's latest book, with its title communicating the shared pain and bewilderment of a community under siege. This narrative history of the early period (1981-95) of the AIDS epidemic is told through the prism of two alternating lives, the musician-activist-writer Michael Callen and the poet-provocateur Essex Hemphill. The two gay men never met and had little in common, but both died of the disease at the unspeakably young age of 38. One of the themes haunting these pages is how dissimilar the experience of AIDS was for the white gay community (represented by Callen) and the black gay one (represented by Hemphill). Callen is recalled as a singer with the a cappella group the Flirtations, and Hemphill for his appearance in Marlon Riggs' documentary Tongues Untied, which created a firestorm when it was televised on PBS in 1990. Duberman makes the case that both men accomplished much more than their public remembrance, and filters their lives through the "relationship of race, sexuality, class, identity, and the politics of AIDS activism."
Callen was a long-term survivor of AIDS, first diagnosed in 1982. After given a death sentence of two months, he became an outspoken, controversial AIDS patient advocate. Callen was one of the inventors of safer sex before medicine promoted it, via his contentious pamphlet How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, co-authored with Richard Berkowitz, which opposed abstinence and advocated a positive, adventuresome approach to sex. He founded the Community Research Initiative (CRI) and the group Gay Men with AIDS (GMA), both based on his principle that "for the first time in the history of epidemics, a group of people with a disease have banded together to sponsor a top-notch treatment research in an effort to save our own lives."
A diva perfectionist, Callen could both enchant and infuriate his friends and enemies. He rejected the drugs-into-bodies philosophy of mainstream AIDS organizations at the time, which implied that because death was inevitable, any experimental drug was worth taking, even if its effectiveness was low and toxicity high. Callen parodied it "as any drug into any body." He attributed his longevity to not taking these risky drugs, as well as to being a fighter, "passionately committed to living and working hard to stay alive."
Hemphill started by performing his searing, incisive poetry live in clubs, using a kind of "melodic and intelligent rap music" or dramatic monologue. For him, race was the primary source of his selfhood. He wrote, "I'm a black man first, and my sexuality falls in line after that," though later he was sympathetic to Riggs' message in Tongues, "that you are many things within one person."
Hemphill also realized that AIDS interacted with other crises such as lack of health care, homelessness, drug addiction, poverty, heterosexual black homophobia, and particularly white racism. In 1986, African Americans, though comprising only 12% of the population, had 25% of all diagnosed AIDS cases, often waiting until the end stages of the disease to seek treatment. Hemphill would cultivate all these themes into his poetry, as well as into his anthology about black and gay identities, Brothers to Brothers. He became a key figure in the Second Harlem Renaissance of the 1980s. He was more of a cultural activist than a political one. As their health declined, both men retreated from public activism and took refuge in their creativity, producing stellar work at the end of their lives.
Duberman reminds us that neither Callen nor Hemphill gave into despair. While he presents us with two exemplary but flawed artists, how completely either man is portrayed is open to question. In Callen's case, Duberman omits any discussion of his influential book Surviving AIDS; the use of his AIDS anthem "Living in Wartime" in Larry Kramer's play The Normal Heart; and his profile in the important 1990 documentary Positive, by Rosa von Praunheim. While Duberman quotes generously from Hemphill's poems, he offers no commentary or assessment, as is true of his presentation of Michael's music. If Duberman had focused less on the more direct, confrontational AIDS activism (such as ACT UP), in which neither Callen or Hemphill participated, he could have produced richer portrayals of both men. Also, the epidemic history presented is slanted primarily through a New York lens, and by Duberman's diary entries and historical reminiscences to fill the gaps, yet it is far from complete.
These quibbles aside, Duberman resurrects these two gay icons in our memory, and recreates the chaos and despair of those early years, indicting the criminal neglect of the Reagan federal and New York City local governments, the medical bureaucracy which delayed treatment and rapid access to new drugs, the sexual culture that allowed the disease initially to thrive, and the infighting of the conflicting gay community and AIDS organizations. At times, these groups seemed more interested in turf wars and projecting a positive media image than instituting public-health measures to save lives. No one comes out untarnished, yet with death omnipresent, it seems near-miraculous that the gay community managed to embrace its own in caring for the dying and advocating for new treatments.
Lest we overly congratulate ourselves, Duberman reminds us that AIDS is still very much with us, even if a sense of urgency has disappeared. In the US, gay men compose half of the one million people currently infected. Treatment (and no cure) of the newly infected lags, probably because the disease now infects primarily poor, young ethnic minorities, with black men accounting for 45% of new AIDS diagnoses. The racism deplored by Hemphill still impacts how we view and treat AIDS today. Sadly, Duberman's history, with its battlefield metaphors, is as relevant and heartbreaking today as it was 30 years ago.