Essex Hemphill

Essex Hemphill (April 16, 1957 – November 4, 1995) was an openly gay American poet and activist. He is known for his contributions to the Washington, D.C. art scene in the 1980s, and for openly discussing the topics pertinent to the African-American gay community.

Biography

Early life Essex Hemphill was born April 16, 1957, in Chicago, Illinois, to Warren and Mantalene Hemphill, and was the eldest of five children. Early in his life, he moved to Washington D.C. where he attended Ballou High School. Though he left college after his freshman year, he continued to interact with the D.C. art scene: performing spoken word, working on journals, and beginning to publish his first poetry chapbooks.

Career In 1979, Hemphill and his colleagues started the Nethula Journal of Contemporary Literature, a publication aimed at showcasing the works of modern Black artists. One of his first public readings was arranged by E. Ethelbert Miller at Howard University’s Founder Library where he performed beside and befriended filmmaker Michelle Parkerson.

In 1982, Essex Hemphill, Larry Duckett, his close friend, and Wayson Jones, his university roommate, founded the spoken word group called "Cinque," which performed in the Washington D.C. area. and fellow author, Joseph F. Beam. Hemphill also worked with Emmy award-winning filmmaker Marlon Riggs on two documentaries:Tongues Untied (1989) which looked into the complex overlapping of Black and queer identities, and Black is... Black Ain't (1992) which discussed what exactly constitutes "Blackness." Writing about Hemphill and Beam in his book, Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence, Darius Bost notes that Hemphill moved in with Beam's mother to help finish the anthology, taking on domestic tasks in exchange for room and board. He writes that Hemphill said in an interview that the anthology “was produced in the ‘context of confronting AIDS and the death around us. It's almost like a fierce resistance that says, ‘Before I die, I'm going to say these things.’’” Hemphill also wrote a poem dedicated to Beam after his death titled “When My Brother Fell,” and dedicated his 1986 poem “Heavy Corners” to him. In 1990, he gave a speech at the OutWrite conference (where he was the only Black panelist), which eventually became the introduction to the anthology. Brother to Brother would go on to win a Lambda Literary Award. The next year, the anthology would be awarded the National Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual New Author Award, and a Pew Charitable Trust Fellowship in the Arts. It was not until 1994 that he wrote about his experiences with the disease in his poem "Vital Signs." He died on November 4, 1995, of AIDS-related complications. Glave writes:In this now, we celebrate your life and language Essex. So celebrating, we know that we re-call you in what is largely, to borrow from another visionary, a 'giantless time.' The sheer giantry of your breathing presence has passed. Now present and future warriors—ourselves and others—will be compelled to learn, as you did and made manifest, that all hauls toward truth—toward venality; ardor, not arrogance; forthrightness, not cowardice. The book would go on to win the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction.

In June 2019, Hemphill was one of the inaugural fifty American “pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes” inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument (SNM) in New York City’s Stonewall Inn. The SNM is the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history, and the wall's unveiling was timed to take place during the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

In March 2025, New Directions Publishing released a collection of poems by Hemphill titled Love Is a Dangerous Word: The Selected Poems of Essex Hemphill. The collection was edited by John Keene and Robert F. Reid-Pharr.

"The collection brings Ceremonies back into print alongside a number of uncollected pieces pulled from the archives of such long-running publications as Obsidian, among others, spotlighting the work of a figure notable for his innovative and incendiary poetics and advocacy for Black LGBTQ+ and feminist art and activism." – Publishers Weekly

Works

Themes Much of Hemphill's poetry and spoken word was autobiographical, and portrayed his experiences as a minority in both the African-American and LGBT communities.

He wrote pieces such as "Family Jewels," which conveyed his frustrations about White bigotry, specifically within the gay community. In his essay "Does Your Momma Know About me?" Hemphill criticizes photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's The Black Book, which showcased pictures of the penises of Black men.

Hemphill repeatedly invoked loneliness throughout his work. Loneliness in Hemphill's work is a traumatic feeling, a constant sense of rejection. Many of the men returned home after being rejected by White gay communities, only to be rejected within Black communities as well. In Hemphill's poetry, he portrays loneliness as a collective feeling. He defined loneliness as a sense of being, marked by suffering without public recognition. A sense of separation from the public creates a social longing because even though the journey is lonesome, fighting against that journey not to kill you, as Hemphill said in one of his poems, makes you yearn for community and support.

Essays (essay in) Patrick Merla (ed.), Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories, Avon Books. 1996 (essays in) Thomas Avena (ed.), "Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and AIDS", Mercury House. 1994 Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry, 1992;

Anthologies In the Life Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time Tongues Untied (1989) Black Is...Black Ain't (1994) Narrator: Out of the Shadows, AIDS documentary