During the 1992
presidential primaries, Pat Buchanan, seeking the Republican Party's
nomination, used an unauthorized clip from Tongues Untied to
blast the National Endowment for the Arts and attack George H. W. Bush.
Documentary
filmmaker Marlon Riggs’s masterpiece — exploring black gay identity and
experience through storytelling, poetry, movement, and expression — premiered
on PBS the year before. At least 17 stations refused to air it.
The controversy
surrounding the work revolved around some profanity, a drawing of a penis, and
depictions of black men kissing. Buchanan, the Christian Coalition, and the
American Family Association sought to use the film to defund the NEA.
Tongues Untied would
become weaponized in the culture war. The brilliant work was condemned as
pornography by the right wing and debated in the halls of Congress, when Sen.
Jesse Helms of North Carolina used it to argue against funding the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting.
Despite the
fact that only $5,000 in NEA funds was used to produce Tongues Untied, the
film became front and center in the debate against arts funding. And Riggs
became the lightning rod.
Riggs — a
talented master of rhetoric himself, and far from a shrinking violet — fired
back with an op-ed in The New York Times. In “Meet the New
Willie Horton,” he accused Buchanan of “ruthless exploitation of race and
sexuality to win high public office.” (Riggs was referring to a deeply racist
and exploitive ad run by Bush’s 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. It
insinuated that the then-governor was responsible for letting convicted killer
Horton out of jail, only for him to rape a woman and assault her fiancé.)
By framing
himself as “the new Willie Horton,” Riggs recast the public narrative from arts
funding to how America’s racist fears are exploited by politicians. The
condemnation of Tongues Untied was not just about art, but
about stoking white fears of black sexuality. White fear has been a winning
strategy for conservative politicians since the birth of American democracy.
And it is still working.
For Riggs, who
was a prophet as much as an artist, the culture war waged against him — and the
blatant distortion of his work — was never just about arts funding; it was
always about race, always about sexuality.
Riggs was the
rare black artist who created work not for white pity or pleasure, but for
black affirmation. This is how a black artist responds to a repressive regime. Tongues
Untied is exemplary of this, but it’s not his only work. In his
stunning nonfiction films, Riggs provides a people’s history of 1980s and ’90s
AIDS activism. In No Regret, for example, black gay men tell
their stories and speak candidly about HIV. This counters the prevailing
notion, from movement history gatekeepers, that black people were mostly silent
around HIV in the early days of the epidemic. Riggs’s work provides both
evidence and testimony of our existence. We fought on the frontlines,
too.
Like his
contemporaries of the era, Craig Harris and Joseph Beam, Riggs was a
pro-feminist black gay man whose work, particularly Black Is... Black
Ain’t, might be viewed as one of the early foundational texts of
intersectionality. Black Is… features such acclaimed scholars
and activists as bell hooks, Angela Davis, Cornel West, and Essex Hemphill;
critiquing the contours and borders of black identity and imagining broader and
more inclusive possibilities of our race.
I am troubled
that a lot of emerging black HIV activists don’t know about Riggs and his
legacy. Whenever someone says “there isn’t a black community, but black
communities,” they are in part invoking his legacy.
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