To Love WITH Accountability®: On Essex Hemphill and the Refusal of Silence

“We so called men
We so called Brothers
Wonder why it’s so hard to love our women
When we’re about them the way America loves us.”

April holds both National Poetry Month and Sexual Assault Awareness Month in the United States.

Today, April 16, 2026, marks the 69th anniversary of Black gay poet Essex Hemphill’s birth, and I return to his searing poem, To Some Supposed Brothers.

In June 1995, I directed and produced the filming of Essex with a phenomenal crew of diasporic Black women filmmakers and one Kenyan brother filmmaker.
I was the last person to film him, five months before his death from AIDS-related complications on November 4, 1995.

He was very ill. And still, he insisted on multiple takes. Resting between them. Returning. Committed to the truth he was naming.

We could sense his physical end was near. He was 38.

In this knowing, he did not give up. He gave a gift that continues to give, thirty-one (31) years later.

With support from the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Poet Laureate and beloved movement auntie since my childhood Sonia Sanchez, and cherished friends Inelle Cox Bagwell and Pat Clark, I created a trailer featuring this poem and shared it across the U.S. and internationally—France, England, Amsterdam, Italy—raising support for NO! The Rape Documentary.

NO! would not have its world premiere until February 2006 at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles—before the application of U.S. Title IX to campus sexual assault cases in 2007, and well before #MeToo gained global recognition, as part of a longer continuum of survivor-centered truth-telling.

Essex’s words, featured in his landmark, award-winning Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry, refuse silence. They refuse distortion. They refuse the lie that harm is only “out there.”

photo by Aishah Shahidah Simmons

This is a practice of turning toward suffering rather than away—of seeing clearly, even when what is revealed is painful.

Right now, as the ongoing revelations connected to the Epstein Files expose networks of power, wealth, and protection that enabled sexual violence at scale, we are reminded that this harm is not isolated. It is systemic. It is sustained.

And Essex was also speaking inward.

His poem calls Black men into accountability. Not to isolate or shame, but to interrupt the ways patriarchy takes hold within our own communities.

What Essex models is not only critique, but responsibility.
The willingness to name harm where we stand.
The refusal to protect what is familiar at the expense of those harmed.

That practice does not belong to one community.

As we grapple with painful truths closer to movements and communities we thought we understood, including those connected to Cesar Chavez, we are asked to meet those truths with the same clarity Essex demanded. Not deflection. Not exception. Not silence.

Sexual violence is not confined to one community. It is not owned by one race, one gender, one class, one nation. It is systemic. It is relational. It is sustained by silence, denial, and power.

Black women, and all women of color, live at the intersections of patriarchy and white supremacy. When we are queer and/or trans, we also navigate homophobia and transphobia layered onto that harm.

Essex took no prisoners.

He named what many refused to name then. What many still resist naming now.

He was ahead of his time.
And he was right on time.

May we have the courage to turn toward what is here.
To see clearly and name harm without flinching.
To love WITH accountability®.

design by Kathryn Bowser.

Essex, your words remain—a living call to turn toward what is here, and to meet it with truth.

I will share more soon about some of the many ancestors who made NO! The Rape Documentary possible.

*Edited April 17, 2026, to correct the anniversary year of Essex Hemphill’s birth. The original post stated it was the 59th anniversary; it is the 69th anniversary of his birth.