Riggs: Tongues Untied (1989)

A groundbreaking vision of queer African-Americana, Marlon Riggs’ 1989 documentary revolves around his thwarted efforts to find acceptance in both the African-American and gay communities of the 1970s and 1980s. As Riggs paints them, gay black men occupy something like the lagging end of the civil rights movement, the dispersed, diasporic rearguard of the 1960s, as well as the epicentre of internalised African-American racism. Forced up against that “threatening universe of whiteness,” Riggs’ wanderings open up a panoply of street corners, half-glimpsed encounters and prehensile gazes; a drifting, floating world of melancholy attraction and repulsion, waterfronts and curbsides, that harks back to the great African-American memoirs of the late nineteenth-century, and their discomfort with newly-minted liberation: “In this great gay mecca, I was an invisible man, an alien, seen and unseen…a nigger, still.” As that might suggest, it’s profoundly cinephilic – as cruising segues into propriocruising, a sensory threshold below even the subliminal micro-cues of cruising, it feels as if Riggs is sketching out a series of agonies and raptures that are too fleeting for the camera to capture properly, the perspective of total invisibility, the passage of the AIDS virus. That, in turn, makes the spoken word interludes that parse the narrative positively revelatory – they seem to call a new world into being, or to speak from a parallel universe where hip-hop became a weapon against homophobia rather than settling into the gangsta groove it’s been riding for the last twenty years. And that new world is sensual, burnished with an almost unbearable romanticism – early in the film, Riggs points out that it’s not worth fighting to be gay if you can’t enjoy it, and he holds good to that, lingering over the sensuality of solidarity, the exquisite promiscuity of protest, with smouldering abandon. Not unlike the small-press, underground gay anthologies that emerged in the 1980s – it’s a compilation of queer African-American poets as much as anything else – it seems to glow with all the other hands and eyes that might have encountered it, passed it on, took solace from it, in one of the late, great works of the civil rights movement; a natural sequel to What’s Going On in its call and response from picket to afterparty, demonstration to dive bar, brother to brother.