Hemphill’s poetry often struggled against this
complacency on the part of black gay men within
the larger context of black American politics and
community.
The cofounder of the Nethula Journal of Con-
temporary Literature, Hemphill’s poetry appeared
in Obsidian, Black Scholar, CALLALOO, and ESSENCE.
He wrote numerous essays for gay publications
and taught a course on black gay identity at the
Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.
Hemphill’s first collections of poems, Earth Life
(1985) and Conditions (1986), were self-published
chapbooks. He gained national attention, however,
after his work appeared in In the Life (1986), the
first contemporary anthology of writings by black
gay men, edited by Hemphill’s friend Joseph Beam.
He also contributed to Tongues Untied (1987), a
British collection that also included the work of
Dirg Aaab-Richards, Craig G. Harris, Isaac Jack-
son, and ASOTTO SAINT.
After Joseph Beam’s death from AIDS in 1988,
Hemphill compiled and edited BROTHER TO
BROTHER: NEW WRITINGS BY BLACK GAY MEN (1991),
a follow-up collection to In the Life. Brother to
Brother won a Lambda Literary Award. Hemp-
hill, who received a National Endowment for the
Arts Fellowship in poetry in 1986, later published
Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry (1992), the only
complete collection of his works. In it he offers
provocative commentary on such topics as Robert
Mapplethorpe’s photographs of African-American
men, feminism among men, and AIDS in the black
community. Ceremonies was awarded the National
Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual
New Author Award in 1993.
Hemphill’s bold, assertive poems were often
written to be performed aloud, as he believed
strongly that poetry was not solely intended for
the page but was meant to be heard. He performed
readings and lectured at Harvard University, Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, University of California at Los Ange-
les, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National
Black Arts Festival at the Whitney Museum, and
many other institutions. He received four grants
from the District of Columbia Commission for the
Arts and was a visiting scholar at the Getty Center
for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa
Monica in 1993.
Hemphill, with Larry Duckett and later Wayson
Jones, created Cinque, a Washington, D.C.–based
performance trio that first performed at the Enik
Alley Coffeehouse. The trio also worked with
Emmy- and Peabody Award–winning filmmaker
MARLON RIGGS on his final film, Black Is... Black
Ain’t, which deals with the explosive conflicts over
African-American identity. Hemphill’s work was
also featured in two other award-winning films:
Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989) and
Riggs’s documentary Tongues Untied (1991), in
which he also performs his poetry.
At his death, Hemphill left three projects un-
completed: Standing in the Gap, a novel in which
a mother challenges a preacher’s condemnation of
her gay son who is suffering from AIDS; Bedside
Companions, a collection of short stories by black
gay men; and The Evidence of Being, narratives of
older black gay men, which he had been working
on since the early 1990s in order to satisfy his cu-
riosity about cultural and social history before the
term “gay” entered popular usage. Unlike some
gay activists, Hemphill was greatly concerned that
black gay men recognize the entire range of pos-
sibilities that exists in their lives and that they not
disconnect from primary institutions like family
and community. He saw gay life as only a part of
the greater African-American family and experi-
ence. Hemphill died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
on November 4, 1995, from complications related
to AIDS.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abbott, Franklin, ed. Men and Intimacy: Personal Ac-
counts Exploring the Dilemmas of Modern Male
Sexuality. Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1990.
Avena, Thomas, ed. Life Sentences: Writers, Artists and
AIDS. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1994.
Bean, Joseph, ed. In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology.
Los Angeles: Alyson Publications, 1986.
Hemphill, Essex, ed. Brother to Brother: New Writings
by Black Gay Men. Los Angeles: Alyson Publica-
tions, 1991.Hemphill, Essex C. 241