Marlon Riggs

Jun 26

Written By malcolm aime musoni

Marlon Riggs was born on February 3rd, 1957.
Due to being a military brat, he lived in Texas until he was 11 before moving to Georgia and later West Germany.
He returned to America to do his undergraduate studies at Harvard and realized there that he was gay.
He told a 1990 Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference at Harvard University about his experience, saying, "I had come to Harvard, naively, in search of my own black reflection. I awakened, after I arrived, to the realization that I was also gay." There were no lesbian/gay studies, then. There were no bisexual/lesbian/gay students associations. There were no 'out' faculty, to my knowledge, nor conferences or seminars that addressed, in the remotest way, the turmoil or the raging questions within me. Most days, at lunch and dinner, over the course of my freshman year, I self-consciously surveyed the dining hall, steered a course beyond the anonymous rows of young, white, animated faces, among whom I clearly did not belong; moved further still beyond the cluster of 'Black Tables,' where I knew deep down, no matter how much I masqueraded, my true self would show and would be shunned; and sat, often alone, eating quickly, hurrying my exit from a room where all eyes, I felt, condemned me with unspoken contempt: misfit, freak, faggot. Beneath such judgment I did as millions have done before me and since: I withdrew into the shadows of my soul; chained my tongue; attempted, as best as I could, to snuff out the flame of my sexuality; assumed the impassive face and stiff pose of Silent Black Macho. I wore the mask. I was serving time. For what crime I didn't know."
During his senior year, he successfully petitioned the history department to allow him to do a special independent course of study on, “the evolution of the depiction of male homosexuality in American fiction and poetry.”
He graduated magna cum laude with a major in history from Harvard in 1978.
He moved back to Texas for a year, working at a local television.
In 1980, he moved to California, enrolling at the University of Berkley, California to pursue a master’s degree in journalism.
In 1981, he graduated, receiving a master’s degree in journalism with a specialization in documentary film.
He co-directed and co-produced his graduate thesis with fellow classmate Peter Webster. The thesis was a 30 minute film on the history of the blues in Oakland, California, Long Train Running: The Story of the Oakland Blues.
He returned to Berkley to teach in the documentary program in 1987, becoming the youngest tenured professor there.
His first major film, Ethnic Notions was released that same year.
Inspired by and named after a 1982 exhibition of racist memorabilia at the Berkeley Art Center, the documentary is an in-depth analyzation into the origins of the anti-black stereotypes and caricatures that permeate American pop-culture.
Ethnic Notions won an Emmy in 1988.
He completed his second major film, the groundbreaking and experimental Tongues Untied in 1989.
Tongues Untied combines poetry, personal testimony, rap, and performance to explore the pain and pleasure of existing as a Black gay man at that time.
“Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act” is repeated and performed several times throughout Tongues Untied.
While working on that film in 1988 he tested positive for HIV. This diagnosis led him to change the direction of the film from a short film on Black poets to the expansive film on Black gay male sexuality we have today.
Tongues Untied was funded with his own money and a $5,000 grant from the Western States Regional Arts Fund, a re-granting agency funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, an independent federal agency that provides funding and support for visual, literary, and performing artists.
In 1990, he released a 10-minute short film, Affirmations, “expressing the hopes, dreams, and desires of gay Black men in this ode to queer African American empowerment.”
In 1991, alongside friend and fellow filmmaker Vivian Kleiman, he co-founded the production company Signifyin’ Works.
That same year, he released a nine-minute music, Anthem, “a bold vision of queer revolution, proclaiming “Every time we kiss we confirm the new world coming.”
Ahead of Tongues Untied scheduled July 16th, 1991 airing nationwide on PBS, a national debate was started by conservatives on if tax payer dollars should be used to fund as they called it, “pornography.”
PBS went ahead with the airing with 17 stations in the top 50 markets deciding not to air it and the rest of the stations either going ahead with the scheduled airing, delaying the airing to after primetime, or postponing the airing to a different day.
During the 1992 presidential campaign, Pat Buchanan used unauthorized clips of Tongues Untied in an anti-George H. Bush TV ad “suggesting he was too liberal to run the country and that public tax dollars were being spent on promoting pornography and immorality.”
Before the ad was removed for copyright infringement, he wrote an op-ed on March 6th 1992 in the NY Times entitled, “Meet The New Willie Horton.”
In the op-ed he writes, “As the author of the so-called pornographic images (not quite too shocking to show) now so grossly butchered in Mr. Buchanan's anti-Bush, anti-National Endowment for the Arts ad, I've witnessed with rising horror a perversion of a different order now on the rise in politics: the ruthless exploitation of race and sexuality to win high public office.
Mr. Buchanan, of course, is not alone in manipulating the divisive politics of fear and enmity. The Bush campaign of 1988 proved as adept in tarring Michael Dukakis with responsibility for the release of Mr. Horton, a black convict, and his subsequent rape of a white women.
In that single ad, old racial taboos and racist anxieties found renewed expression and public resonance. Since neither the President nor his campaign managers have ever acknowledged how deeply their strategy offended millions of African Americans (or millions of others sensitive to America's shameful history of psychosexual myths about black men), I can't help but feel a certain cool delight in Mr. Buchanan's ironic reversal of the smear tactic against George Bush himself.
But my satisfaction is cut short by the realization that my work and life, and more important, the multiple communities of which I am a part, are being grossly maligned in the process. In this mud-slinging match, I along with other gay and lesbian Americans, particularly those of color, have again become the mud.
Because my film, Tongues Untied affirms the lives and dignity of black gay men, conservatives have found it a convenient target, despite the awards and popular and critical acclaim it received after its broadcast last summer on public television.”
In 1992, he release his third major work, Color Adjustment.
Narrated by Ruby Dee and featuring interview with actors Diahann Carroll, Tim Reid, and Esther Rolle; and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr, the documentary chronicles how Black people were depicted on TV from 1948 until 1988 and how the later depictions were incongruent with reality and helped shaped unrealistic views of racial progress.
The Peabody Awards honored Color Adjustment in 1992 for its “revealing examination of the presentation of African-American life on television.”
In 1992, he also directed Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (No Regret), a documentary that features 5 Black HIV+ men as they “discuss their individual confrontations with AIDS, illuminating their journeys through the fear, shame, and stigma that accompanied the disease at the height of the epidemic toward healing, acceptance, and truth.”
That same year he penned an essay in Letter To The Dead (pg 19), sharing candidly his thoughts on his own HIV+ diagnosis.
In his final years and despite being at one point hospitalized and bed-ridden, he continued to direct and appear on film for Black Is…Black Ain’t, and even teach his students via speaker phone.
Black Is…Black Ain’t, his final film, was completed after his death by his production team that adhered to his extensive notes.
The film, a meditation on “what” the Black identity is, features performances by choreographer Bill T. Jones, poems by friend and frequent collaborator Essex Hemphill and commentary from Angela Y. Davis, bell hooks, Cornel West, Michele Wallace, Barbara Smith and Maulana Karenga.
Marlon Riggs died on April 5th, 1994 from AIDS-related complications. He was 37 years old.
Black Is…Black Aint was released in 1995.
In December 2022, Tongues Untied was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry.