Charles Koehler 0:00 I'm Charles Koehler, and this is Lambda Reports, a weekly program by and far the St. Louis lesbian and gay community. Our guest today has created a film that, as one critic said, it slams you in the stomach while the poetry caresses your cheek. It's a film that takes a personal and provocative look at being black and gay in America. Joining us on tour from Whitesburg, Kentucky this morning is producer, editor and Emmy award winning director, Marlon Riggs, good morning, Marlon, and welcome to Lambda Reports. Marlon Riggs 0:34 Thank you. Good morning. Charles Koehler 0:35 We're looking forward to your visit in St. Louis tonight at Webster University for a special showing of your film, Tongues Untied. Just just what motivated you to make this film? Marlon Riggs 0:47 Tongues Untied, I guess, came from a different number of motivations. One was just a whole volume of black gay poetry that's been published over the last four or five years that deal very forthrightly, very articulately with the black gay experience in America. And I was just so inspired by so many works, it seemed finally to be addressing my life, my issues, my struggles, that I thought it would make a wonderful documentary to be able to incorporate the poets and their poems into a coherent, unified work. As I started doing that, however, it became obviously a problem to try to string together different poems and different poets in a way that really made sense to tell the story beyond just a particular poem. And so from there, I grew into a work that also became partly autobiographical and partly narrative, with a story that included included some dramatic creations, as well as documentary, as well as poetry. So it's in many ways, a hybrid form of a work. It's not just documentary. It's not clearly a dramatic film. It's not sort of a more traditional experimental film. It's a blend of all of those. And I think what I really wanted to do in this work is finally to create something that told the story of my life and spoke to me as a black gay man, and spoke to the larger community of black gay men and lesbians. So much work, I think that's done within the larger lesbian gay community, treats when it does treat us as old treats, the black gay male experience, as if it were just part and parcel of the overall gay experience, and the sexuality is the sort of common and overarching experience for all of us. And I think anyone who has tried to live on that basis, on that belief, which I think I did at one point, is quickly stung by the reality that, in fact, racism permeates the larger gay and lesbian community, that one simply doesn't come out and find a home within that community, that one continues to struggle and negotiate for a space that's affirming and nurturing and empowering, at the same time that trying to be gay in an out sense within the black community entails its own problems. Because there you find homophobia, you find internalized racism, you find all kinds of ways of yet again, sort of dehumanizing your sexual identity, your total identity, in effect, so that you have to wear a different mask to appease and appeal to different groups. So I wanted to deal with all of that in Tongues Untied to explore that space of negation and silence and try to recover a place where we could be ourselves, visible, outspoken, true to our identities and our nature. Charles Koehler 4:04 It's been said that Tongues Untied doesn't pull any punches. It's very straightforward. And I was wondering what the reaction to the film from the gay and the straight community has been, from the from the black and the white community? Were there any surprises? Marlon Riggs 4:19 It's that that's a complicated question, because there's lots of communities there. Charles Koehler 4:22 Yeah, I know. Marlon Riggs 4:24 Obviously the black community is not monolithic, Charles Koehler 4:27 absolutely. Marlon Riggs 4:27 And so in terms of the black gay and lesbian community, the response has been just overwhelmingly enthusiastic. I've traveled with this film, I think, over many parts of the country, at this point in the southern circuit tour, which is taking me through different points within the southeast, showing the work and just tremendous reaction and response of black gay men and lesbians who feel, finally, that here is something in the popular culture and media. It tells … Charles Koehler 5:01 It speaks to them Marlon Riggs 5:02 the truth of their own lives. It says, you know, what it really is like, and doesn't whitewash, doesn't dilute, doesn't try to camouflage, nor does it, you know, use the kind of caricatures that we associate with some popular programs, like in living color, in living color, that there's a complexity to the black gay character and to the black gay community that's finally revealed in film. For me, what's also been extremely pleasing, though, is how the work has transcended the most immediate vision that I had for it, which was to reach and affirm the black gay community. In fact, it's gone way beyond that, not only being shown within white, traditionally white, lesbian and gay community settings and groups and so forth, but also just mainstream, perfectly mainstream settings where there are no blacks, hardly at times, maybe no gays or very few. In fact, we're in very as many women as there are men, and yet the work still seems to speak. It's been shown, for instance, in the Soviet Union. It's going to be shown in Ireland in the summer. It's been shown in Australia and New Zealand and Canada, Brazil. So … Charles Koehler 6:24 it's received awards Speaker 1 6:25 … my intent, which is wonderful, and yet it also seems to communicate to people on that level. At the same time, as you can anticipate, there are people who are extremely uncomfortable, and they're obviously the homophobic fundamentalist types, you know, who just who discredit our sexual identity as gay and lesbian people, and so forth, and for that reason, don't and can't deal with all of the kinds of issues experiences put on the table in the film. At the same time, within the black community, there are not only the fundamentalist types, but I would call the sort of more more political, sort of politically Afrocentric, revolutionary types, if you will, who believe that gayness, that homosexuality is a corruption inherited from European white civilization, and that gayness within black men, black men is a testament to how we've been corrupted and emasculated by the white race. And so that there's that kind of objection that occurs too. And then I think within the larger society, within larger white society, that uncomfortableness with the forthrightness of the film, that the language is frank, that the images are frankly erotic, that nothing is made digestible, is diluted to make people more easily digest what they're saying. That they're dealing with a whole canopy of experiences and emotions, from drag queens to people dealing with HIV and AIDS, to people glorying in their sexuality, poems which revel in sexuality as well as in political struggle, to anger and rage about the hostility and the general repressive environment that black men, and particular black gay men, face in American society. So there's a lot there. And you know, depending upon who you are, it pushes very various buttons of discomfort. And yet, I think the overwhelming response has been positive, and it's received enormous critical acclaim in various film festivals around the world. Charles Koehler 8:42 Were there any surprises in terms of reaction to the film? Marlon Riggs 8:46 Oh, definitely. I never, I never saw this work as having any appeal, I won't say any, but having much appeal or being able to speak to people outside of the black, gay and lesbian community Charles Koehler 8:59 and certainly two different countries. Marlon Riggs 9:01 I hope that it might speak to the larger black community, because a lot of rhetorical devices that are part of African American culture, not just gay African American culture, but just African African American culture as such. And so I had hoped that the work would speak to that larger black community. I never, my first screening, for instance, was in Los Angeles, at the American Film Institute. I would say there are probably maybe two blacks in an audience of about 150 people. So this was not my primary audience. There were maybe just a few lesbians engaged, but the overwhelming majority of people were heterosexual because I knew them, and I know them as art directors and so forth. And I was thinking, well, this is just a wonderful place to launch the work, but I won't gage the reaction here as an indication of what the work succeeds in doing. And yet, at the end of that screening, actually, within the first 10 seconds of that screening, you heard these enormous hoops, and you heard these these grunts of affirmation. You heard people signifying in a way that I'm, quite frankly, not used to hearing white people signify during screening. Usually I'm accustomed to a sort of reserve, a polite sort of applause, perhaps a titter here or there. And these people really did let go, I think because the work, let's go on that level too. And from that moment on, it was the shock at how various communities all around were wanting to see the work, asking for demanding it. Public Television Stations started to call up, which shocked me no end. Do you really know what this is about. Charles Koehler 10:41 Are you sure you want to hear this? Marlon Riggs 10:43 It's not, I mean, you know how we tend to in a lot of films that deal with minority communities, whatever those minorities tend to be, tend to dress up the characters so that they're the most assimilatable character that you could find to make it palatable to the mainstream. And I had no intention of doing that. I had no intention of wanting to dress up and dilute so that people on the outside wouldn't be offended, and that includes gay whites and lesbians, white gays and lesbians, that in fact, it would speak truthfully about experience and about racism. And so I anticipated just the work falling on, you know, on defensive, rejecting ears, and yet it has, you know, again, opened up all these areas of dialog and communication, which, to me, is just a continuing delight. It's no longer quite a surprise, because his work has now been out for about a year, so a little bit over a year. But it is just delight to see it move in places like the Soviet Union, where I never thought it would show. I never envisioned it still in some place like that. Charles Koehler 11:51 Well perhaps it's good that you didn't envision the broad range of audiences. Otherwise things might have been done differently and perhaps not as powerfully. Marlon Riggs 12:01 I think so. I think exactly that. And that's the lesson that I've learned is that you can speak with force about your own particular experience and that but because your experience is in many ways transcendent and dealing with human, basically human problems … Charles Koehler 12:17 Exactly. Marlon Riggs 12:17 … around identity, that that work and that experience speaks to many other people who are not necessarily black or male or gay, but people who have had to struggle with identity. Charles Koehler 12:31 I think that can be a lesson for all of us Marlon Riggs 12:32 …… by society and by all kinds of pressure. Charles Koehler 12:35 In this film, you work with a very wide range of very creative people. Can you tell us a little bit about who they were, and what did you learn from them? Marlon Riggs 12:46 I worked with, I think foremost, Essex Hemphill, just a wonderful, exquisite black gay poetry performance artist. I work with a number of people from the Other Countries collective in New York, which is a black gay poetry workshop and collective. I worked with some of the men who were performers, late Joseph Beams Brother to Brother essay, which was transformed into a performance piece. And I worked also with my own group in the Bay Area, Black Gay Men United, who were there as sort of supporting cast, as friends, people who fix food when I need it, I mean, and it just would, what that really gave to me in working on this project was the sense of community, which I think in the abstract, I held on to, but never quite felt as a reality in my life, or as I looked in traveled around the nation in a sense that really there was community here, and not just clubs and house parties, but people who really were working together on behalf of our overall good and promoting our visibility and our strength as a community. And what I discovered was, in fact, that that people gave of their hearts, their time, their energy, their creativity, their resourcefulness, their ideas. They gave of the truth of their lives in ways that are just astounding for the courage that it takes. And for me, it was just so inspiring and doing the work that I was, in fact, able to edit it in record time for a 55 minute work. I finished editing it in about a month, which when I tell fellow editors and filmmakers … Charles Koehler 14:26 It's impossible. Marlon Riggs 14:27 Yeah, because they look at the complexity of the work and they think, how did you do this? And yet, I was working on such an adrenaline high. I think it was such just this tremendous rush of energy and spiritual creativity, because of the larger community that was feeding me, in a way, spiritually and creatively, that the word came about so quickly, Charles Koehler 14:49 Great. Some of the other people that can be seen in the film are Blackberry, who's a singer, composer, and Steve Langley, Alan Miller, gay men of the. African descent and Black Gay Men uUnited, among others, just a wide range of very creative people and and Marlon Riggs 15:09 I mean it tongues does not present a monolithic black gay community. It, in fact, presents black gay communities and deals with black gay identities, I think we tend often when we think about any culture, particularly when we think of so called minority cultures, we think in various and very reductive ways that there is some unifying single experience which all these people share in this community and culture, and which binds them all. And to some degree, I think perhaps that's slightly true, but there's also a lot which differentiates, which is a virtue, whether it's in physical ideology, whether it's in the actual identification that one assumes, in defining one's sexual and racial identity, whether it's in the geography where you live and the kind of culture that springs from that unique geography, that culture and what I wanted to do was present as much as that, as I could, through the poetry in particular, but also through the various kinds of characters that you see in the work, people who are, you know, more upper class people who are working class, people who are fat, people who are skinny, people who are, people who are not. But all of this presented as a virtuous diversity in the community that should be prized. Charles Koehler 16:30 You make the statement that black men loving other black men is the revolutionary act. What does that mean in 1991? Marlon Riggs 16:38 What I wanted it to mean, not only in 1991, but I think, for in the past and for many years to come, is that is one, not that, given all of the various revolutions and social upheavals occurring across the world, that black men loving black men is that pinnacle. That's silly. That's stupid. I would never say such a thing. I was not thinking in that kind of context, and to not mean that statement to be understood in that way. Charles Koehler 17:07 This is what happens when you take something out of context. Marlon Riggs 17:10 And that often happens. Charles Koehler 17:11 Of course. Marlon Riggs 17:12 What I really what I meant by that was that in the context of African American liberation, as it's typically spoken of, that the revolution won't come just because we're able to overthrow Whitey, if you will. It won't come just because we're able to assume economic and political power in society. That if we still hate ourselves, as we do, I believe, in many ways, in many instances, as we still hate each other, evidenced by the mass of killing, the dissing, the denigration, the you know, the violence, the drug usage. If we, if we continue to live in this way, even with political, economic power, even with culture that seems to address our lives, then in fact, we still won't be free, and that our true freedom will only begin once you've learned to embrace the totality of who we are, to be able to say, I love who I am, and without embarrassment or shame or intimidation, to be able to say, I love black men. I love you, brother, and we're not at that point. So that's what I meant by that statement, though it has been taken out of context and looked at as a statement that disqualifies all other kinds of love as well as all other kinds of revolutions. And that was not my intent. Charles Koehler 18:35 Sure. Well, do you feel to the certain extent that some black gay men or their end up being their own worst enemies in terms of self-oppression, Marlon Riggs 18:43 I think black gay men within their own lives become many, many, many ways, their own interior enemies in that so much of what Tongues Untied tries to do is to untie the tongues of those men, to unlock the tunes of their heart so that they can speak and sing and shout who they really are. And I think the worst oppression is not so much that which other people inflict upon others, but rather that which we internalize and inflict upon ourselves, not even knowing we're doing it, buying so much into the way things are, that our silence, our invisibility, becomes a norm which we don't even question. And that is a way in which I think that we become profoundly oppressive within ourselves, as well as in our relations with each other and and Tongues Untied struggles with breaking that, that that chain of oppression, that chain of silence. Charles Koehler 19:42 In St. Louis there used to be a chapter of Black and White Men Together, but for some reason, it dissolved about four or six years ago, and racism is found here in a number of different areas in St. Louis, from our public school election, which we just had. It played a big part to our neighborhoods and politics. It's, it's certainly, as you say, no stranger in the lesbian and gay community. It's, it's been one of many issues that we've been trying to address on this program. What observations on racism in the in the gay community do you have for our listeners? Marlon Riggs 20:18 Well, I mean, I think that what we have to get beyond, as you know, a larger lesbian gay community that includes many people of color, is this relatively naive notion of a rainbow that we're, you know, we are gentle, loving people and so forth, in which we in many ways, negate the real struggle that all of those people have to deal with in defining who they are in relation to their own communities of origin, in particular, if they are Latin or Black or Asian Native American, that because of that part of their identity, they can't just easily, and don't easily assimilate into some larger mythic culture of inclusion, that in fact, that larger mythic culture of gay community is in fact, premised upon whiteness, often maleness, premised upon ignoring class differences, pretending as if they don't exist, or exploiting them when they do, premised upon a lot of sexual stereotypes about various people of color communities, whether it's black men and the hypersexuality that they promise, whether it's in their genitalia, whether it's in their animalistic, analistic kind of sexuality that are that is, you can often see sort of, sort of talked about and asked for in various personal accounts across the country. That these are real issues that divide and fragment that larger gay community, and in truth, there will never be a real community until gays and lesbians overall address these issues in which they themselves oppress others within the community, and not just talk about the oppression that faces from the larger heterosexual community. Charles Koehler 22:09 That's one of the things that's always amazed me, is and I hear at the same time a person who's White, who is a lesbian or gay talking about the oppression from outside, and then almost in the same breath, they say something or do something that demonstrates their oppression of other people. It seems Marlon Riggs 22:30 It seems very clearly to me, I mean, it's historically true that oppression is not a great teacher. It's if one one sense of liberation and embraces only oneself, but that there should be an equation of liberation struggles, so that you see not only your own condition, but also the conditions of others different from you, but facing similar struggles, that often doesn't happen. I mean, it doesn't happen in terms of how black men, for instance, treat black women that there's still oppression on that level. It doesn't happen in terms of how white gay men treat white women, white lesbians oftentimes, or how the larger white gay and lesbian community looks upon people of color. Charles Koehler 23:15 We have about five minutes left. I got umpteen questions. Just real briefly, who is your role model? Who was your inspiration? Marlon Riggs 23:23 I don't know if I had one single inspiration for the work again, because there were so many different people, historically, as well as in the present, who were feeding my creative juices, if you will. I think historically, and this image is actually referenced to in the work, historically, one of my greatest heroines has been Harriet Tubman in terms of her courage, her nobility, her struggle for freedom, and her willingness to constantly go back into the community, to go back into slavery, to go back into that dark, deep jungle of oppression and sickness and death and brutality and rescue others to bring them to freedom. And so in many ways, I look upon her as a role model, if you will, who has constantly fed my ambition as a filmmaker, my desire to be able to achieve within that medium, my dream for liberation for myself and for my people. Charles Koehler 24:24 Very briefly, how did being African American and gay affect your sources of financial backing and grants for this film, when you when you told the people that you wanted to make a film about African American gay men? Marlon Riggs 24:36 Oh, that's joke. I mean, particularly, this is being made during the Jessie Helms hysteria. Charles Koehler 24:42 And I understand also you had some interaction with the National Endowment of the Arts to further complicate things. Marlon Riggs 24:46 That's true, because I received, actually what's called a sub-grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. It's not a direct grant from NEA with the sub granting agency that takes NEA money and then disperses it and is our former fellowship to various artists, and I received one of those grants. So in the credits, it says, thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts. I love it. So we will see, actually, Tongues Untied will be on public television, National Public Television this summer. Charles Koehler 25:13 I doubt that it'll make St Louis, knowing the Channel Nine local PBS track record, but we'll see, hopefully, we'll be proved wrong. Marlon Riggs 25:23 Well, I hope that people will call and let them know and ask for it if they think that the channel will not be showing it. Because … Charles Koehler 25:30 Thank you for that suggestion. Thank you for that suggestion. Definitely. Very briefly, you teach journalism at the University of California in Berkeley. What advice do you have for lesbian and gay America when it comes to dealing with the press and everything that goes with it? Marlon Riggs 25:46 I think one of the most important lessons I think we've learned since Stonewall is the need for our voices and our visibility, that when we see degradation and distortion, when we see various oversights in the press, and they are numerous, that we have to call them on it, as I call my own students and their assumptions and how they address different issues. And I think I have a pretty sophisticated bunch of students, and yet they're so conditioned by the larger media culture, they often don't know what they're doing. They do it often very subconsciously. And I think our role as gay American people is constantly to call the press the dominant press and the alternative gay press itself on its exclusions, its myths, its stereotypes and demand accounting. Charles Koehler 26:33 Any advice for aspiring artists out there in our audience? Marlon Riggs 26:39 I would hope people would be my greatest hope from Tongues Untied is that people will be inspired to tell their own stories. And in particular, I must say, for people of color who are only beginning to emerge into and to visibility, to tell their stories, to tell the truth of their lives, and to preserve that in some cultural form, whether it's film or video or poetry or novels or short stories, sculpture, drawings, what have you? Photographs, anything but that our greatest strength, not only in the presence, but I think, in the long run, will be the way that we define ourselves for ourselves, rather than being defined by others outside of our community. Charles Koehler 27:22 Well, Marlon, unfortunately, our time is up. It's been a real pleasure talking with you, and once again, our listeners will have an opportunity to meet you tonight. That's That's Sunday night for a special showing of Tongues Untied. That's Sunday, April the 14th at Webster University at 8pm you can call Webster University at 968-7487 that's 968-7487 and I understand that you'll be there to speak, to answer some questions, and that's we hope to see all of you, all of our listeners, there tonight at eight o'clock Webster University at 968-7487. Until next week, this is Charles Koehler. Join us in again, same time, same station for Lambda Reports. Transcribed by https://otter.ai