This post is part of the Breathing is Brilliant reprise of the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus for Black History Month 2019.

“I love myself enough to be who I am,” is an enduring reminder of the connection between our inner work and how we structure our lives.  As a prophetic poet and activist who spoke against the deadly homophobic and racist silences that impacted Black gay men and the multiple communities that cannot evolve without Black gay genius, Essex Hemphill created prayers that cultivated bravery.  He offered his own life as an example of how one can live in their truth.

And Hemphill’s self-love, was not a selfish love.  In fact, it was accountable and activated by legacy and interdependence.  Hemphill was involved in ACT UP, a creative direct action queer visibility campaign to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS, to collectively mourn and to save the lives of gay people in the 1980s and 90s.  At the same time, he spoke to the exclusion and racism he saw in organizing spaces dominated by white gay men.  Hemphill’s love and accountability to his chosen brother Joseph Beam, led him not only to continue his publishing vision (working to complete the anthology Brother to Brother after Beam died of AIDS) but also to work with Beam’s mother, Dorothy Beam, to secure the archive of her son’s legacy with love and specificity.  Exploring the Beam collection, which is part of the Black LGBTQ Collection that my archivist soulmate Steven Fullwood nurtured at the Schomburg Center, changed my life forever.  And in one of my favorite examples of Hemphill’s expansive love, he appears in Aishah Shahidah Simmons’s groundbreaking film NO! The Rape Documentary which may be one of the very last times he appeared on film.  He offers a poem that holds Black men accountable for harming Black women in the ways that racism harms them as Black men.  It was Simmons’s film that first inspired me to revere Essex Hemphill as a Black feminist prophet and ancestor.  His impact on an intergenerational community of Black feminists is well-documented and should be celebrated even more. For example, in the Beam collection at the Schomburg you can read a letter from Audre Lorde to Joseph Beam where she unabashedly gushes about how much she loves Essex Hemphill and how grateful she is that her son will grow up in a world that Essex and Beam have changed.  All of this is to say that the self-love that allowed Essex Hemphill to “be who I am,” was not individualistic.  Countless communities, families, institutions and movements continue to benefit from the “being who I am” practice that Essex Hemphill fought for with the self-love a racist homophobic society told him was impossible.

Essex Hemphill’s example and legacy teach us that there need not be a binary between our self-love and our accountability to the important collectives in our lives.  Being who we are in our neighborhoods, organizations, classrooms and elsewhere is an act of love for ourselves and the collectives we transform with our being.  What decisions would we make if we remembered Essex Hemphill and thought, is this decision loving towards myself? Does this decision allow me to be fully who I am in this space?

I know personally that I have often thought that not being fully who I was in some spaces was safer and more convenient for me than the work of either showing up fully or leaving.  I have also underestimated the capacity of my communities to benefit from how attentively, creatively and infinitely I love myself.  But in the name of Essex Hemphill I know that the love I cultivate within myself is a resource.  It is my direct investment in the best hope that we have of the world we deserve where there will continue to be enough love to grow and change us all.

At Brilliance Remastered we support the process through which love can fuel revolutionary practices and profound decisions that make our lives spaces where we be who we are and exemplify love.  We offer this meditation which we created in 2014 inspired by Essex Hemphill to support the decisions you are making right now, daily and weekly and in this still slightly new year.

And if you want to stay connected to Brilliance Remastered and be among the first to hear about our events and online offerings as they emerge, join the email list here.

And here are links if you want to support the Black Feminist Bookmobile Project and the ongoing work of the Mobile Homecoming Trust Living Library and Archive.

Loving you with every breath (because breathing is brilliant,)

       Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs