TONGUES UNTIED (1989) | Dir: Marlon Riggs | An experimental documentary film, TONGUES UNTIED was like no film I had ever seen. Blending poetry and personal stories of Black, gay men, director Marlon Riggs uses documentary footage and staged, stylized tableaus that are confrontational, confessional, and brutally honest. What I remember most was the film’s mirror — Riggs’ brought into sharp relief the privilege I held as a white, gay male American as he (alongside performers Brian Freeman and Essex Hemphill) detail the invisibility Black gay men feel, marginalized in an already marginalized group of people. Riggs says the film was meant to "shatter this nation's brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference.” I watched TONGUES because it was the target of an attack from a right wing evangelical minister who was angry that Riggs had received public money to make the film, via a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Senator Jesse Helms argued to defund the NEA, citing this film as the reason. Perhaps that is one of the positive outcomes of such a puritanical reaction to art — that it calls attention to it, bringing into the consciousness of an even larger audience. Riggs is yet another artist whose life’s work was cut short due to his death from complications from AIDS in 1994. He was only 37 years old. His courage to boldly foreground Black male homosexuality without shame only underscores how important he is in the LGBTQ canon. TONGUES UNTIED was included in the National Film Registry in 2022.
