As I got closer, I recognized him as ‘that guy in Marlon Riggs’ film,’ the one pictured on the poster with Riggs, hugging, bare-chested. For me, that was scandalous.

I was getting off of my part-time administrative job at the American Film Institute at the Kennedy Center. As I exited the elevator, I spotted a fine, little shorty. The automatic glass doors opened before him as he exited the Hall of States. They closed, separating us. My first thought, “He’s kinda sexy…” I discretely picked up my pace, the automatic doors opening onto a temperate summer day.
A slight breeze blew off the Potomac River just behind the Center, animating the red, white and purple beds of Impatiens. There’s no place like Washington in the summer. The faint smell of flowers in the air, newly planted beds arranged like soldiers, every color carefully chosen and placed, almost obsessively so. The monuments are freshly scrubbed, and the cherry blossoms are in bloom. So was this day.
There was something in shorty’s walk, something that made me think that he might be good in bed. Not a roguish swagger, but almost feminine, but then not.
His stride bespoke his sexuality, but not with neon. It was just him owning the space in which he found himself, nothing hidden. I noted his not-so-Washington drag. No gear from the Madness Connection on Georgia Avenue, no Timberlands (before they became the rage). “He’s different,” I thought. He looked like a hippie, a flower child in jeans and a wrinkled t-shirt. He stopped on the bus top and stared into a notebook.
We would board the same bus, or so I hoped. I determined, as I approached the stop, that I would try and talk to him, to pick him up;. Something I was never (and still ain’t) good at. But this time, I was gonna do it.
As I got closer, I recognized him as ‘that guy in Marlon Riggs’ film,’ the one pictured on the poster with Riggs, hugging, bare-chested. For me, that was scandalous. I don’t know why I found it scandalous in light of the fact that I was living in D.C., a city where it is not uncommon to see little boys, teenagers, and sometime grown men, hugging and holding hands while walking on public streets.
My pulse increased as I approached the bus stop, trying to be casual, acting like I didn’t know of his ‘celebrity,’ ‘who he was.’ I had done the same thing many years before when Raymond St. Jacques had picked me up on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood. I had seen Cotton Comes to Harlem and the Pawnbroker. Likewise, I had seen Essex perform around The District, heard him in Tongues, and read his writing. I didn’t want to seem like a starfucker, either time.
Essex was scratching furiously in a notebook, looking up into the clear Washington sky now and then. He looked in my direction. No. He looked right through me to see if the bus was coming. I shifted and smiled. He nodded and went back to his writing. Only the hungry Starlings talked until the bus came.
“The bus is coming.” I said.
He thanked me.
The bus pulled up, and the doors opened with a slap. I stood back to allow Essex to board first. One more peek at that booty. He went straight to the back with no hesitation. I followed. “That’s bold,” I thought, always having considered the back of the bus the domain of the hard boys, the thugs. From that day forward, the back would be my section of choice.
I worked up the nerve to say something. “Don’t you know Ron Simmons?” (He wasn’t Doctor Simmons, at that time).
“Yes. Have we met before?”
“No. We’ve never met, but I heard your poetry in Marlon’s film.”
“Tongues Untied.”
“Yeah. My lover and I showed it at our shop in Anacostia.”
“Anacostia? Good for you.”
I would learn later that Hemphill grew up in that neighborhood.
“Yeah, it was packed.”
He seemed impressed, but didn’t ask how many people. But if he had, I don’t suspect that he would have considered 30 a small number. Besides, that was packed for our tiny photography studio.
I asked him how he could have his face on the poster advertising Tongues. He answered saying that he had to do it, that it was natural, not even a thought, that he had to be who he was, ‘out with it.” Essex was a freeman, in the truest sense. He freed himself.
Unlike the secrecy which shrouds who Langston loved, question of who Essex Hemphill loved will never be asked. No need. Larry Duckett, Sharon Farmer, Gideon Ferebee, Wayson Jones, Michelle Parkerson and Dr. Ron Simmons. This D.C. tribe says it loud.
The noise of the bus engine filled the bus’s cavity. He turned towards me, head only.
‘Do you write?”
“I try to” I said.
“Either you write or you don’t. There’s no trying.”
He stood and pulled the string to signal his stop. As he walked away, I took one last look at his butt and wondered what it was like to do it with him. He descended into the back stairwell. Only his head was visible now. I couldn’t help but marvel at how Phaoronic he looked.
Damn, I thought, he didn’t even try to pick me up. Here I was all hard and trying to make it obvious. He never looked down. He seemed to be enraptured on another plane, listening to voices. Kinda like the lady down the street from me who stopped to listen to the chimes I had hung over my front door. She commented and walked on, head high, seeming to be called by a voice I could not hear. In a week, she would be no more.
Essex too, was on a mission. His purpose-lifted chin and sure footfalls said so.
The bus stopped. He exited. I thought about following him (something I was good at) but instead waved at him through the window as the bus pulled away. He waved back, half-smiled. I turned and looked through the back window, hoping that he would give ‘the signal,’ stop and nod, or lift his arms in the palms up crucified pose customary in my D. C. pick-up experience. He kept on his path, kept scratching in that notebook.
So what? I rode the bus with Essex Hemphill. Yeah… I did.
November 4, 2005 will mark the tenth anniversary of his transition, but his words make him immortal. Legend. Though that was probably not his goal, I suspect that he had some inkling of the importance of his work and his life, his profession.
Reminiscing on that ride reminds me that he did indeed exist, in the flesh, that he was a flesh and blood person, just like me. He gave me permission to be who I professed. And in doing so, gave us all permission to be who and what we profess. That’s what ‘professionalism’ is, right? It’s too bad the language has been so degraded that now the common understanding of the word (professional) is something bestowed by an outside force, usually a corporation.
The dictionary defines “profess” thusly: “To affirm openly; declare or claim”. So… artists and dancers and writers and chefs and filmmakers and hairdressers and ministers are professionals.
My bus ride with Essex was a brush with a man, a force, who would one-day-soon join the ancestors. That fleeting moment helped me to locate my self in that precise moment, at that longitude and latitude, within that milieu, in my life. How generous of you, Essex. It showed me that one can be who one professes; that one can make love, without touching.
I was in pursuit of a close encounter of the carnal kind, but got so much more. Those few words live in me in a way that all the sweet nothings and pillow talk I have forgotten, do not. His words were, if aloof, love-laden. They are a gift that will never age, rust, or decay. He gave them to me and now I give them you: “There’s no trying. Either you are, or you’re not.”
To quote goddess Diana: “He lives in me…” and now… “He lives in you.”

©G.B. Mann