Tongues Untied.
Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied starts frenetically. Shots of Black men walking down the street, playing basketball, with a chanting, hypnotic voice saying over and over again: “Brother to brother, brother to brother,” as the images flash by. I knew this was a documentary about Black gay men in the ‘80s, but I didn’t know it would be like this: everything at once almost, impossible to look away from.
It goes on, swinging from silly (one part showing you how to snap like a snap divarette) to serious, getting to the root of homophobia in the Black community. It addresses how it feels to be both Black and gay, considering this homophobia, how lost it can make you especially when you’re coming of age. Riggs, in a gorgeous monologue, describes the feeling of being stuck in the intersection of race, sexuality and class, where it feels like you’re not quite aligned enough for any of the groups to call you one of theirs. He speaks on the desire for Whiteness too, on what it means for your first romance to be with a White boy, how it can propel you into wanting to belong to a group that won’t be able to reflect you: “I was intent on the search for my reflection,” he says. “Love, affirmation, in eyes of blue, grey, green.”
One man talks about what it means to find community among other Black gay men, how sometimes this connection isn’t instant, how instead these men can look away when you pass them on the street instead of looking at you with recognition. He quotes Audre Lorde when he asks, “What is it that we see in each other that makes us avert our eyes so quickly? Do we turn away from each other in order not to see our collective anger and sadness?” Another man says, “The same angry face donned for safety in a white world is the same expression I bring to you. I am cool and unemotive. Distant from what I need most.”
I love how Tongues Untied approaches what must have been a deep feeling of yearning and pain in a group that perhaps only felt belonging with each other (and sometimes not even then). I love how Riggs takes these deep feelings and explores them by moving the pieces around. The documentary is hodge podge, collage, art and especially poetry. Riggs digs deep, not to teach outsiders so much as to speak soothingly in code to people who already understand, and while that’s not me, I love how huddled and inward the result feels—how full of pieces that don’t allow you to directly consume them (the privacy of it similar to that of Clifford Prince King’s work). And the documentary doesn’t just huddle to explore pain—it works through the joy of the community too. The language, the dancing, the culture, the love. A man addresses his mother when he says, “I’ll take you here and you will never notice the absence of rice and bridesmaids.”
Now, we’re at a Pride march, Black men with their arms around each other, holding a banner that says, “Black Men Loving Black Men is a Revolutionary Act.” The shots cut with ones of a Black band singing, “Hey boy, you coming out tonight?”
I love this documentary for everything it holds, for how it explores desire and love and continuing on despite what might try to stop you. I love how it works through the complications of the moment by coming at it sideways, upside down, roundaboutly, using poetry and not the directness of prose, in case prose would miss something in its exactness. It holds you and it moves you and it brings you along without telling you everything, without being for you. In a moment where both the political and the personal feel so publicly vulnerable, it’s nice to experience the intimacy of privacy, of process, of things being slowly worked through.
