STORIES

Filmmaker and professor Marlon Riggs proclaimed that “Black men loving Black men is THE revolutionary act.”

Born in 1957, Marlon Riggs graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1978.  In 1981, at Cal Berkeley, he received a master’s degree in journalism, with a focus on documentary film.  He later became the youngest tenured professor at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and won a string of prestigious awards in his tragically short career.

Hi, I’m Lee Daniels, two-time Oscar-nominated director and producer of Precious and The Butler, and co-creator of the television series Empire.

In its introduction to its collection of seven of Riggs’ films, the Criterion Collection describes Riggs as “an unapologetic gay Black man who defied a culture of silence and shame to speak his truth with resounding joy and conviction. An early adopter of video technology, Riggs employed a bold mix of documentary, performance, poetry, and music in order to confront the devastating legacy of racist stereotypes, the impact of AIDS on his community, and the very definition of what it means to be Black.”

Amidst the culture wars of the 1990s, Marlon exposed and explored what it’s like to be intersectional, to be gay, Black and marginalized in a culture with defined expectations for Black masculinity.  In the film Tongues Untied, Marlon came out as gay and HIV positive but also was clear in his objective of making a film about and for Black gay men.

The principal virtue of the film, in his words, was “its refusal to present an historically disparaged community on bended knee, begging courteously for tidbits of mainstream tolerance.”   The International Documentary Association describes the film as “a manifesto that calls for Black gay men to unburden themselves of the shame-induced silence and claim the centrality and dignity of their identity and voice.”

Former Reagan Communications Director Pat Buchanan, running for President in 1992, used clips of the film to attack President George H.W. Bush as too liberal because tax dollars were being used to support what Buchanan called pornography and immorality.  Riggs had received a grant of only $5,000 for Tongues Untied from the National Endowment for the Arts.  PBS released the film as part of its POV series.  Although some public TV stations wouldn’t broadcast it, Tongues Untied was the first televised documentary about the Black gay experience. Riggs was diagnosed with HIV during the filming of that documentary.

Riggs didn’t shy away from the controversy.  As he put it, “My struggle has allowed me to transcend that sense of shame and stigma identified with my being a Black gay man. Having come through the fire, they can’t touch me.”

Riggs won an Emmy in 1988 for Ethnic Notions, a documentary about Black stereotypes that fueled racial prejudice.  He received the prestigious Peabody Award in 1992 and the Distinguished Documentary Achievement Award in 1991 from the International Documentary Association for his documentary Color Adjustment, which tracked 40 years of the denigrating and exploitative depiction of Black Americans in primetime television. Tongues Untied won the Los Angeles Film Critics Award and won Best Documentary at the 1988 Berlinale Film Festival.

Riggs died of complications due to AIDS in 1994, at the young age of 37.  His film Black Is, Black Ain’t was completed after his death.  It won the Grand Jury Prize and Filmmakers Trophy at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival.  In 2022, Tongues Untied was added to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.

Marlon Riggs is the reason that I am here today.