In Martin Duberman's latest book HOLD TIGHT GENTLY he chronicles the AIDS epidemic in the U. S. from the years 1981 through 1995 by highlighting the lives of two of the gay community's finest artists Michael Callen and Essex Hemphill, both of whom died of AIDS, Michael on December 27, 1993, Essex on November 5, 1995. Both men were thirty-eight years old at the time of their deaths. Mr. Duberman says in his Introduction that he knew both men only slightly but admired them as his highly informative account of their lives bears witness. He laments also in his Introduction the fact that AIDS is no longer anyone's top priority, that we are now concerned with same-sex marriage and the right to serve openly in the military even though "self-identified gay men in the United States do still make up 48 percent of the 1 million people currently living with AIDS." And I wondered, as I read this very moving book, how many in the gay community would read it. Several of my friends tell me they no longer want to read books or see movies about AIDS.
Mr. Duberman covers much of the same territory of Sean Strub's just-published BODY COUNTS although this is not a criticism of this book. Some overlapping is unavoidable. Many of the heroes and villains remain the same: the Elizabeth Taylors, the Mathilde Krims, many of the PWA's and members of ACT UP as opposed to the Pat Buchanans, the Ronald Reagans, The Jerry Falwells. (I was pleased to see Atlanta's own Reverend Joseph Lowery get the credit he rightly deserves for saying that the Civil Rights Act should be amended to protect the rights of lesbians and gay men and dismayed to learn that Callen and the Flirtations who had sung "Mr. Sandman" in the movie "Philadelphia" were eliminated when the soundtrack was produced.)
The author points out that these two men were very different and never met. Mr. Callen, for example, was much more of the type who had few secrets about any aspect of his life. For example, he tells the world how many sex partners he had. By his best calculation, he believed by the time he was 27 that he had "bottomed" for 2,496 men. Or in Mr. Duberman"s words: "He was outspoken and unashamed about his `sluthood.'" (Surely this is way too much information.) Mr. Hemphill, on the other hand, would never have made such a statement. And while it does not speak to their differences, Mr. Hemphill had a dual dilemma: he had to deal with homophobia in the black community and rampant racism in the white gay community as well. Mr. Callen of course only had to confront homophobia.
Mr. Duberman's book is thorough and extremely well-researched with voluminous footnotes. (To his everlasting credit, he does not do what so many biographers these days insist on doing: telling the reader what their subject was thinking when they have no way of knowing that.) Additionally, he had access to a large amount of material-- letters, speeches, diary notes, music-- of Callen's and less from Hemphill although he conducted interviews with many of his close friends and also gained assess to some of his unpublished poems. One of those, expressing Mr. Hemphill's feelings after the death of his friend Joe Beam (whose obit in the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER said that ''he is believed to have died of natural causes'") is not one I will soon forget and worth the price of this book:
There should have been
More letters between us.
In later years it will be difficult to ascertain
The full meaning of our relations.
Most of us will not be here
To bear witness.
There should have been
more letters hastily written
or carefully typed,
long-winded scripts
or short, cryptic messages.
Volumes of letters
should have gathered
over time, but we leave
hastily scrawled postcards,
outrageous, long-distance
phone bills,
and in rare instances
evidence that some of us
were more than brothers,
we were intimate,
loyal, companions.
HOLD TIGHT GENTLY is another sad reminder of all those we have lost, not only the extremely gifted but the rest of us, the ordinary as well. Those of us who remain will never forget them.
Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS
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