Hold Tight Gently by Martin Duberman Read Free Book Online Page B

out to be “the most well-read adult black male” Essex had known, other than for some of his teachers, and he had a “beautiful, stimulating” mind. In adulthood Essex credited his older friend’s counsel with diverting him from making some “foolish choices”—he would never, for example, feel the need “to strike cool poses on the corner and father numerous children to prove my manhood.” His older friend pointed him toward the only acceptance that matters: “acceptance of myself.” It was an uncommonly lucky coming-out for any day and age, but especially for that one.
    Following high school, Essex in 1975 enrolled at the University of Maryland. He was assigned to room with another black gay man, Wayson Jones—probably a deliberate racial slight since they were the only blacks on the entire floor of the dormitory and the room was designed for one person. Wayson came from a military family and, having grown up in a more integrated environment than Essex, recalls no noticeable friction with white students in the dorm—one of his good friends was in fact “a real hippie type.” In any case, Essex decided to leave the University of Maryland after one year—not because of endemic racism or because he was in any sort of academic trouble, but rather, as Wayson has put it, because he “needed to ‘reinvent’ himself.” Essex spent some time in Los Angeles in 1976 and then returnedto D.C. and completed his degree at the University of the District of Columbia.
    During the year that they roomed together, Essex and Wayson “clicked,” bonding particularly around music—and smoking pot. Essex favored female jazz vocalists but was also into progressive jazz performers like Bennie Maupin and George Duke. Wayson leaned more toward rock—they both loved the groupies—and more dissonant jazz like that of John Coltrane. In general they (in Wayson’s words) had “a great time” together as roommates. Essex had a hot plate and after getting the munchies from smoking pot, they’d devour batch after batch of pancakes. They also shared a small TV set, their special favorites being Monty Python and Saturday Night Live . Essex showed Wayson some of his early writing, and though not a fan of poetry, Wayson to this day remembers the telling image in one of Essex’s poems: returning home in the evening to “count the brown pennies of this day.” Wayson, in turn, invited Essex to hear him play saxophone in a jam session and took to heart his opinion that Wayson held back too much when improvising. They were, as Wayson puts it, “very much in tune emotionally and spiritually.”
    Wayson was already “out” as a gay man, both sexually and politically, had already told his parents—and told Essex, too, the very first time they met. According to Wayson, Essex wasn’t at that point really open yet about being gay; he still dated girls and rarely talked about his private life. (Essex’s first public declaration of his homosexuality would come during a poetry reading at the library of Howard University in 1980.) Though Essex and Wayson tended to have separate friends, they did some occasional gay socializing together. Wayson took him to Pier 9, D.C.’s first “superdisco,” and at another time to a party—at which Essex was “visibly uncomfortable”—at the home of his former high school band director, Doug Hinkle, who’d been really helpful to Wayson when he was coming out during senior year in high school, and who went on to become a photographer for D.C.’s gay paper, the Washington Blade . Wayson belonged to the Maryland chapter of the Gay Student Alliance, and unlike Essex at that point was already “very much a gay activist,” even giving talks and holding Q and A sessions in front of university classes—a rare act of bravery at this relatively early stage of the gay rights movement. When Essex left the University of Maryland after his freshman year, he and Wayson stayed intouch and within a few years,