"Heavy Breathing" by Essex Hemphill (High Risk)

Ugly Tokenism from Silverberg and Scholder

As a Jew, I have a guaranteed path to publication. Just pitch an article shitting all over Israel with the requisite buzz words (apartheid, genocide, ethnostate, etc) and dozens of left-leaning publications would buy it. I'd make even more money if my grandparent had been Holocaust survivors. Selling out the entire Jewish community is a lucrative and easy paycheck, especially after October 7. When Hamas murders and rapes thousands of children, the leftist audiences for Salon, Slate, New Republic need Jews to support their biases. Else, they might have to consider that their “anti-zionist not antisemitic” obsession is problematic, even – dare I say it – Jew hating bullshit.

The leftist delusion of moral superiority is very fragile.

Essex Hemphill was a gay black poet who died in 1995. He wrote many poems about the loneliness of being caught between two worlds, gay sex, and AIDS destroying the gay community. He called out Robert Mapplethorpe and his fetishist black penis (no black faces) photographs. His poems were often sexually explicit (“I place my ring on your cock where it belongs”) but can turn political (“They don't know we are becoming powerful/Every time we kiss we confirm the new world coming”).

“Heavy Breathing” is a poem that relies on context. In a Hemphill collection, one could read it as a cry of a man feeling out of place in the black community, seeing his gay friends sidelined by groups that want him to sing “We Shall Overcome” when they ignore AIDS and “Silence equals Death.” It's full of anger and passion declaring “I'm an oversexed well-hung black Queen” with an extended depiction of watching a racist gay man fucking, a man that he still dreams of fucking even though he's dead.

In an Essex Hemphill collection, “Heavy Breathing” would feel like a sermon. His passages about the problems of the black community are reminders that Hemphill was from a preaching family and he's preaching to his neighbors in the same way that his parents preached to their friends before him.

In High Risk, these passages feel ugly and racist. High Risk is a white book for a white audience. Essex Hemphill is one of the few black writers in the anthology and the only one to speak specifically of the black community. In this context, “Heavy Breathing” sounds like the rantings of a black conservative – beloved by the same people who share Candace Owens and Thomas Sowell articles.

Besides the gay sex passages, “Heavy Breathing” has passages about Catherine Fuller, a grandmother, being murdered in broad daylight, believing initial reports that she died in full view of the entire neighborhood like Kitty Genovese. He calls out the “Colt 45 and gold chain crew” on the bus, harassing black women as other black men shamefully ignore them. He depicts the black neighborhood as full of crack and rape.

This is what the white editors chose to put forth as the Essex Hemphill poem to their white leftist readers. For all the talk of a “provocative collection” of radical boundary pushing writers, this collection presents the same talking points about black on black crime and smoking crack. Was this Essex Hemphill's best poem? Couldn't they have gotten a few more black writers?

High Risk was marketed to educated privileged white readers who would never come near the ghetto or even listen to rap. These are the kind of people who get their news from NPR. They support Karen Finley and Bob Flanagan performance art, in order to reject Jesse Helms' crusade against the NEA. The ideal High Risk reader would have voted for Obama a third time if they could.

It's still racist to have only a few token black writers and then choose - from one of those writers - the piece with the most racist stereotypes. As much as one wants to make the “it was a different time” excuses, there were plenty of black writers, directors, actors and producers working against whitewashing and racist stereotypes. In a book meant to challenge prevailing conservatism, the authors pushed a piece that supported old fashioned racism.

Shameful.

Here’s another article on Essex Hemphill as his own writer.

Buy an Essex Hemphill Poetry Collection.

I just put an AIDS story on Audible (It also has zombies).

As usual, please consider getting a paid subscription or hiring me to write/edit for you (at omanlieder@yahoo.com) or if you simply like me and want to tip, donate to my gofundme.