8. Tongues Untied (1990)

What? —Tongues Untied is a searing and uncompromising part-fictional, part-documentary account of the contradictions inherent in living as a gay black man - rejected by the African American community for being a 'punk' or 'mother-f**kin' coon', while simultaneously existing on the fringes of a sometimes racist gay community. Riggs described his 55-minute video as an "unabashed celebration of the struggles, lives and loves of black gay men in America."

Tongues is a frank, rhythmic poetic collage of personal accounts, musical numbers, documentary footage and media clips that powerfully translates Marlon Riggs' anger and bitterness at the ruling class for silencing sexual and racial minorities. Riggs' lyrical masterpiece takes its title from the numerous voices it showcases, with each one commenting or elucidating some aspect of being a black gay man in 1980s America. Riggs takes us back to his anxious childhood through a poignant testimony of his precocious sexuality and how it got him into a heap of trouble. After learning to suppress his homophobic desires, he reminisces about being rescued from gay bashing by his first love, a seductive white boy with a Southern drawl.

Riggs builds complex, justified thematic bridges between disparate elements and flows freely from one to the next. From recounting his newfound infatuation with white boys to the point of rejecting of his own culture ("I was immersed in vanilla," he says), he segues into a montage of virulently homophobic black politicians, activists and entertainers. Riggs employs sardonic humor to emphasize the performativity often at play in black gay urban culture (voguing, lessons in snapping with the Master Snap! Grand Diva) and he also layers musical tracks deftly for maximal emotional resonance, as in a song performed a cappella by the African-American Lavender Lovelights. Their lyrics "No one can say, we can't love this way" are juxtaposed over black people congregating at gay pride parades. The latter half of Riggs' sweeping personal work takes on an even greater significance, as the tangible hope he infuses Tongues with makes it an uplifting tale of survival and self-acceptance.

Why? — One criticism the New Queer Cinema movement elicited was that apart from Gregg Araki's Asian heritage, the so-called queer collective was anything but, with representations of women and non-whites markedly absent or at the very least severely lacking.

Enter Marlon Riggs, a radical and blunt videographer, who during his short career (once again, cut abruptly short because of AIDS in 1994) was critically lauded for his unflinching documentaries that explored the reality of queer African Americans and the representation of blacks on television (Color Adjustment). Tongues Untied finally broke the silence surrounding the "triple taboo" of gay black lives.

The hysterical voices of conservative detractors, of course, condemned both PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts for their support of "morally wayward" art such as Tongues. A (very imaginative) editorial in the Washington Times actually suggested that the broadcast of Tongues on PBS contributed to the transformation of American households into "a gay striptease joint"!

Almost Made the Cut: Looking for Langston (Isaac Julien, 1989).

This acclaimed 45-minute avant-garde film suggested Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes' partly closeted sexuality was a defining feature in his written work. Julien's meditation on Hughes' writings and the black gay underworld scene from Harlem in the 20s to London in the 80s celebrates the power of artistic expression in transcending one's condition.

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