How this controversial documentary created space for Black gay love and sexuality in film
Tongues Untied, extraordinary was his ability to blend an essayistic quality with the immediacy and viscerality of film.In Tongues Untied, Riggs burrows into his past and its connection to the social, cultural, and political past of Blackness and queerness, from its erasure by white institutions to its survival within Black and queer communities.
As often as Riggs indicts the racist and homophobic society we exist in, he, too, is able to find the vulnerability and realness that constantly must fight against it.
He cuts between direct address and slam poetry, interviews, act outs, a collage of clips and sketches, examining a convention of silence that winnows itself through culture and subculture.
Riggs, working with poet Essex Hemphill, engages with the thorny issues of the cratering lack of images and representation of Blackness within the gay community and homophobia in cultures of Blackness, both suffering at the hands of white supremacy.The repetition of certain phrases (“Brother to brother,” “Now we think as we f*ck”) begins to sound likea desperate heartbeat.
