Educational Media Reviews Online

“Whatever awaits me, this much I know: I was blind to my brother's beauty, and now I see my own,” is Marlon Riggs' revelatory conclusion to his 1989 documentary Tongues Untied, an intensely personal, impressionistic exploration of how race and sexuality shaped his life. This is Riggs' story from how as a young boy, one of only two blacks in his advanced junior high class, he was bullied and beaten, to his time in San Francisco's gay Castro District where he says, “I was an invisible man,” too preoccupied with white lovers to acknowledge fellow gay black men. Racists assailed him as an African American; homophobes attacked him as a gay black man, while fear and revulsion greeted those with HIV-AIDS.

Although this is an autobiographical story, Riggs intends his film to speak for the larger community of gay black men—men who are seen as a threat to the black family and subject to “a chorus of contempt.” Riggs counterpoints scenes of homophobic diatribes, such as Eddie Murphy's cruel homophobic monologue with the eloquent poetry of Essex Hemphill, who simply points out, “it's easier to be angry than to hurt.” Riggs chronicles his eloquent exploration using a blend of poetry, performance, music, and dance along with a montage of still and moving images. While acknowledging the “time bomb ticking in my blood,” (Riggs died of complications from HIV-AIDS in 1997), he sees the journey of gay black men as a further step in the struggle of African Americans for equality. The young gay pride marchers are the heirs of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King as they, carrying banners proclaiming “black men loving black men,” assert their own sense of self-worth.

When PBS broadcast Tongues Untied as part of the P.O.V. series in 1991, the film generated an immediate backlash from the conservative religious right. Sixteen years later the film's graphic images, frank language, and mature content may still shock some viewers. Riggs's Tongues Untied is an eloquent and groundbreaking exploration of the world of gay black men. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries especially for institutions with programs in gay and lesbian studies and gender studies.