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Virtue In Our Voice:
weaves an intricate tapestry of poignancy and humor
"Tongues Untied"
by Jim Marks
With his balding pate and round glasses, 32
year-old film maker Marlon Riggs looks a bit
like a young Mahatma Ghandi—another
intensely spiritual, intellectual man who liked
to shake people up.
Riggs did just that with his film "Ethnic
Notions." When the Emmy-winning
"Notions" aired nationally on PBS it proved
unsettling to blacks and whites alike.
Riggs continues to defy convention. In
October 1989, his "Tongues Untied" pre
miered at the American Film Institute’s (AF1)
Video Festival. "Tongues" captures Rigg’s per
sonal "search for affirmation, community, and
love in America as black gay men." It opens
with his nude image behind the opening cred
its and goes on to discuss AIDS in the context
of his discovery that he is antibody positive.
As Howard University professor Ron
Simmons wrote in Black Film Review, "One
cannot help but admire (his) courage."
Riggs first encountered racism during the
year he lived in Georgia. In 1968, racial ten
sions ran high at the newly desegregated
Hepzibah Junior High. The 11 year old Riggs
was one of two blacks placed in the top class.
"In the school yard its was, ’ look at that damn
nigger over there, who does he think he is?’"
He was friendless and isolated. "Because I
was in this class, the black students thought I
was above them, so they treated me with hos
tility too. I just suffered, worked hard and got
good grades."
Riggs felt liberated when his family moved
to Germany. "In Germany one saw friendships
between guys and girls who were Asian white,
Black, Latino, Puerto Rican. It was a very
affirming experience to find there could be a
community in which I could be myself."
By contrast, Harvard proved "...another
traumatic time. I had to confront this emerg
ing sense of homosexuality within myself, and
how that was setting me apart from the black
students."
Just as the little boy in Hepzibah studied
harder to survive, so the college student turned
to books to learn about himself.
"I was so naive. These are staid Harvard
professor types. A short black student comes
in—very serious, very somber—saying, ’I
would like to do a study independently direct
ed by you on homosexuality in American liter
ature’ as if it were a course listed in a cata
logue."
"They could not get out of their mouths the.
word ’gay.’ They would say, ’That’s an inter
esting theme. I don’t know if I have the quali
fications to direct it."’
But thanks to "this tunnel vision that I can
have" Riggs eventually met a tutor named
Paul Marx. "He was an exuberant man, full of
life. He brought out books and said, here, look
at this: Walt Whitman!"
"I consider him my mentor. He made me
see that homosexuality was more than intel
lectual. It became spiritual as well. It wasn't
just fucking, it wasn't just finding a boyfriend.
That's always been my thing, to look at histo
ry and find value and meaning and lessons."
The move from Harvard history major to
video maker "wasn't a big jump for me. It was
always assumed I would be a preacher, or an
attorney; that I would mobilize and lead peo
ple." Riggs decided television was the best
way "to communicate all the wonderful things
I was learning."
After a year-long detour to his hometown
of Ft. Worth, Texas, Riggs enrolled in the
Graduate School of Journalism at the
University of California at Berkeley, where he
now teaches. His first video, and his master's
thesis, "Long Train Running," documented the
creation of a distinctive jazz sound by the
blacks who'd migrated to the East Bay area
during World War II. It won an AF1 first prize
in 1982.
About the time "Long Train Running"
began winning awards, Riggs attended an
exhibit of Black memorabilia that Harvard
hadn't prepared him for. "Imagine a house full
of pickaninnies, grinning coons, watermelon
eating mammies, banjo-thumping Sambos,
Uncle Toms. Images of you as a black person,
hideously distorted. This was saying some
thing about America that no one had ever told
me in a history class and I'd definitely never
seen in any film or video."
It took five years to make "Ethnic
Notions," the film that exhibit inspired. "The
biggest problem was fundraising. It rubbed
people the wrong way, as cutting edge materi
al often does. 'Aren't we over this, can't we
forget about this,' funders would ask."
"And I would respond; your reaction tells
me we are not over it. If you look at the
images on television you'll find much the
same as 100 years ago: singing, laughing,
strutting—happy darkies entertaining
America."
"Ethnic Notion's" startling use of Black
images to focus on "white fantasies, white
perceptions, distortions and paranoia" is
enhanced by its clinically detached tone.
"Documentaries about racism tend to rail
against racism, or show its heart-wrenching
consequences. My intent was to look at
America as some specimen beneath a glass,
and say,' look at this cancer. Let's dissect it,
see what it is made of.'"
Riggs knows the technique works, and he
doesn't need awards to prove it. 'Tve been to
numerous screenings where people laugh at
the beginning. They see the cartoon of the big
Black mammy dancing with the little coon at
her breast. People giggle. But by the end of
the film, people stop laughing. They get the
point"
"Ethnic Notions" and "Tongues Untied"
show a talented film maker's hand, but they
are very different works. "Ethnic Notions" is
history as Riggs fell in love with it "Tongues
Untied" doesn't re-examine the past; it sur
veys the present—the living, breathing
moment frozen in the amber of technology,
"Tongues Untied" began in 1986, when
Black gay men first found their own voice
with the publication of In the Life, edited by
the late Joseph Beam. In D.C., Essex
Hemphill was writing poems of extraordinary
immediacy and beauty. In New York, the
Black gay collective, Blackheart, spawned the
writers group Other Countries. Across the
country, similar Black gay men's groups
sprang up.
Riggs was a regular at Oakland's Black
Gay Men United. At readings and confer
ences, he met many of the leading figures of
this "renaissance—or naissance" of black gay
literature.
"I said, boy this is just amazing. I also real
ized I hungered for visual work. I was tired of
going to the gay and lesbian film festival and
seeing nothing that touched my life directly."
"Tongues Untied," Rigg's portrait of his
post-Civil Rights, post-Stonewall generation,
began casually. ”1 just started shooting
things." Riggs went to New York, shot an
Other Countries workshop and dinner. He
caught street queens vogueing on the pier. He
took the footage back to Oakland and shamed
his group into performing for him.
"But, I couldn't go on just shooting willy
nilly; I had to organize, give it an overall
structure."
Riggs found that structure in his own life.
"The hardest part was injecting myself into
the film. I was trained not to put myself in
the shot. But without a narrative thread there
was no cohesiveness, just nice moments and
interesting poems."
That personal aspect gives an elegant
Cont'd on Page 12
Filmmaker Marlon Riggs with performance artist Essex Hemphill
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