Hemphill, Essex

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HEMPHILL, Essex

HEMPHILL, Essex (b. 16 April 1957; d. 4 November 1995), writer, performer, activist.

Essex Hemphill was arguably the most talented and most critically successful black gay male poet to emerge after the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Born in Chicago, Illinois, as the second of five children, he was raised in southeast Washington, D.C., where he began to write poetry at the age of fourteen. He briefly attended the University of Maryland at College Park but left before receiving a degree. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hemphill became a prominent member of the quickly developing community of black LGBT artists and intellectuals in Washington, D.C., a community that included filmmaker Michelle Parkeson, activists Gil Gerald and Louis Hughes, and musician Wayson Jones. Washington was also visited often by the likes of black lesbian critic Barbara Smith, writer and editor Joseph Beam, and poet Pat Parker. Indeed, "Chocolate City," as it was often called, was for a time the recognized center of black LGBT cultural and political activity in the United States, housing the now defunct National Coalition of Black Lesbian and Gays as well as several black lesbian and gay businesses and local civic organizations.

With Wayson Jones, Hemphill started to present his poetry at various venues in the city, eventually developing a style that built upon the aesthetics of the black arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Like that earlier generation of poets, Hemphill stressed the idea that poetry should be performed, even sang, in order to reach the masses of black and LGBT people. Hemphill's highly rhythmic, jazz-influenced poetry and performance soon captivated audiences in Washington and elsewhere. Many saw him as not only one of the very first writers to portray the reality of black and LGBT experience without apology but also one of the finest technicians of contemporary American poetry. As comfortable with black American vernacular traditions as with classical poetic forms, Hemphill was able to portray to his audiences—black, LGBT and otherwise—that the everyday reality of their lives was, in fact, the substance of which poetry is made.

Self-publishing his first two collections of poetry, Earth Life (1985) and Conditions (1986), Hemphill first came to national attention when his work appeared in the 1986 collection of black gay male writers In the Life , edited by Joseph Beam. That same year Hemphill received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He soon became something of a cult figure when in 1989 he was featured in two films by black gay directors, Tongues Untied by Marlon Riggs and Looking for Langston by Isaac Julien. Hemphill's star status among American poets continued to develop as he read and lectured at, among other places, Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Los Angeles, the City University of New York, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Whitney Museum, as well as a host of LGBT venues. Honoring the memory of Joseph Beam, who died in 1988, Hemphill moved to Philadelphia and continued the work that Beam had begun on a second collection of black gay male writers. When Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men was published by Alyson Publications in 1991, Hemphill became the undisputed leader of an emergent black gay male arts community. The following year, Hemphill published his first work with a major press, Ceremonies: Poetry and Prose , for which he won the National Library Association's Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual New Writer's Award.

In this work Hemphill demonstrates with absolute clarity that the work of the intellectual is necessarily both aesthetic and political. He treats topics such as AIDS, racial stereotyping, homophobia in the black community, and the pleasures of sex with a precision and delicacy that is, at times, breathtaking. In 1993 his contributions to American arts and letters were further recognized when he became a visiting fellow at the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities in Santa Monica, California.

During the last years of his life, Hemphill continued to speak out with great courage and poise about racism, both inside and outside the LGBT community, and homophobia, both inside and outside the black American community. He also pointed out, however, the ways in which AIDS was ravaging both communities. Strangers and friends alike will remember the phrase that Hemphill repeated whenever he took his leave, "Take care of your blessings." Essex Hemphill died in November 1995 in Philadelphia from complications related to HIV. He was thirty-eight.