Profile: Giving Voice to Black Gay Men through Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied
Marlon Riggs, a Black gay documentarian and activist whose work was most prominent during the 1980s and early 1990s, released his classic film Tongues Untied in 1989. Riggs notes that it is a film “specifically for black gay men,” though its reception and praise has far exceeded this demographic.[25]Tongues Untied is a canonical film in the archive of Black queer cinema, along with Riggs’s other work—Ethnic Notions (1986),Color Adjustment (1991), and Black Is. . . Black Ain’t (1994). Ethnic Notions looks at racist stereotypes and caricatures of Black people in the United States; Color Adjustmentssurveys forty years of Black people in television; and Black Is. . . Black Ain’t explores how multifaceted Black identity is. Tongues Untied was a vanguard film because it was one of the first to explore the specificity of Black gay identity. This profile analyzes Tongues Untied as a film explicitly about Black gay identity and culture. It also meditates on Riggs’s biography and relationship to the content, marginalized voices, Black gay cultural practices, and the politics of sexuality within Black communities.
Riggs himself was in many ways the subject of his films. He was born in 1957 in Texas and grew up during the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century. Part of a loving family in a tight-knit Black community, Riggs was a smart, athletic, articulate child. When he graduated from high school and began college at Harvard University, he dated women while constantly trying to deny his attraction to men. For a while he tried to convince himself that men were ugly and disgusting and that loving men was vile. But eventually he conceded his sexual attractions and began living life as a Black gay man.[26] After entering into a long-term partnership with another man, he was compelled to bring his filmic talents to bear on his and others’ lives. Ultimately, Riggs felt the imperative to no longer remain silent about the plights and lives of Black gay male identity, so he took to the reel. Unlike many documentary directors at the time, he put himself in front of the camera. His films center the lives of Black people, and it was Tongues Untied that brought gay Black people to the forefront.
He brings all this to his films, and Tongues Untied can be understood as in part a representation of many things Riggs himself experienced throughout his life. Riggs was quite hesitant to make the film, remarking in an interview that everything within me was saying, “No, no don’t do it. Find somebody else who will talk about being HIV positive. Find somebody else who will talk about being an Uncle Tom. Find somebody else who will talk about being called nigger and punk and faggot and so forth.”[27]
Amid the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, when many people were dying from HIV/AIDS-related illnesses (and were disproportionately Black gay men), Black queer film at the time sought to answer the questions of how to speak in the face of death and how to give voice to the dying. Even when not afflicted with deadly diseases, Black gay men lived in social conditions that were not hospitable to their flourishing. They were marked as pariahs who, even if they were HIV negative, were seen as always capable of infecting “innocent” (read: non-Black and nongay) people with their “deviant” lifestyles. The act of calling someone a faggot or nigger is an attempt to silence that person, which often worked. Many Black gay men remained fearful of expressing their sexualities because of the verbal and physical violence they could be met with. This has been occurring for too long; for too long has a racist and homophobic society disallowed Black gay men from simply living as Black gay men. So Riggs thought it absolutely necessary to break this silence.
As a film, Tongues Untied was one of the first to speak explicitly about Black gay life in ways that were not denigrating. The film features a wide range of other cultural producers of Black art, featuring the music of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone and poetry by Essex Hemphill (who also appears in the film) and Joseph Beam. It also defied categorization in its time—melding documentary, experimental filmography, poetry, and interview. Tongues Untied represented Black gay men in unconventional ways in both content and form. It depicted more than a one-dimensional image of Black gay life and conveyed not only the Black man refused entry into the gay bar because of his Blackness or the violent attack that left the gay man bleeding on the sidewalk; it also demonstrated the resilience of Black gay men, from their public protest marches in solidarity with other struggles to their intimate community, to their humorous musicology and vogue dancing (figure 10.13). All this is groundbreaking, rarely depicted filmography.
Figure 10.13. A voguing dancer. (CC BY S Pakhrin.)
The vast majority of the film is dark. Its background is pitch black as it faces Black men speaking about their experiences. Many of the images shown are in black and white, muting colors that might have existed. The darkness of the film is symbolic of not only the Blackness of the Black men discussed but also the profound void that the imposed silence on Black gay men creates. It symbolizes isolation, loneliness, the lack of voice.
So often it is remarked that giving voice to the marginalized is important. But what does this mean? For Riggs and Tongues Untied it means “loosening the tongue,” as noted in the film. The tongue is a part of the body integral to speech, and its loosening marks a shift from voicelessness to being able to speak one’s truths. Racism and homophobia, or homophobic racism and racist homophobia, have shackled the voices of Black gay men. And their silence is and has been killing them, disallowing them to ask for things they need or to express their desires or to convey the aspects of their lives. As the Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde famously said, “Your silence will not protect you.”[28] It is a silence imposed on them, so to actualize liberation it is necessary for Black gay men to reclaim their voices.
Moreover, the tongue is an instrument of pleasure and sexuality. It is used to lick, it is a key component in sucking, and it is integral to vocalizing lust and yearning. Nonheterosexual sex has been pathologized, and thus, to loosen the tongues of Black gay men gives them a voice and also allows them to express their sexual desires more freely. Riggs, in the title of his film, breaks the silence of Black gay men around sexuality and actual sexual acts.
Another prominent theme throughout is the complex culture of Black gay men. This rich complexity is showcased primarily through three practices: voguing, snapping, and responses to homophobia. Voguing is a stylized dance originating in the late 1980s and finding roots in underground ballroom scenes in the 1960s that were almost entirely queer people of color. It is inspired by the style of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and model poses in Vogue magazine. Voguers strike model-like poses in quick succession, integrating angular movement and holds with the arms and legs. The dance acts as a cultural site of expression in a world that routinely denies the unapologetic expression of Black and queer livelihood, thus serving as a site of catharsis among these marginalized people.
In turn, snapping is, of course, snapping one’s fingers. But this practice takes on a larger meaning in Black gay communities. Snapping is a sly yet profound retort to a number of things. The snap communicates in diverse languages and with varying connotations. It must, because Black gay men have so long been silenced. Snapping acts as a way to speak beyond conventional means; snapping is a vital communication tool for Black gay men who have been disallowed from speaking. There are a variety of different snaps, named in ways that describe their movement and purpose (e.g., classic snap, point snap). For a demographic so violently silenced, it is imperative that new forms of voice be created. Deprived of verbal voice, Black gay men can snap and say just as many things.
Encompassing these practices and the many others of Black gay communities is how the broader world treats people who are Black and gay. Riggs encapsulates this at one point in the film: a medley of different voices spew various epithets used to foreshadow and do harm to Black gay men—”punk,” “homo,” “faggot,” “motherfucking coon,” and “freak.” These are terms solely for denigrating Black and gay identity. Racist and homophobic terms such as these do more than speak badly of Black and gay people; they are themselves forms of violence. As such, these terms negatively influence how Black gay men in particular feel and behave in the world. For instance, especially in the 1980s—and still in the twenty-first century—gay men had to often hide their sexualities for fear of homophobic violence (yet still were subject to racist violence). If outed as gay, they would often be met with physical and verbal forms of harm. These violent practices led many Black gay men, and sexual minorities on the whole, to face a constant fear for their lives, unable to live publicly in affirmation of their gay identities.
To live in such constant fear necessitated an outlet. Quite often the only solace Black gay men could find during the 1980s was other Black gay men. Often, communing with other Black gay men was the only time each could be his full self. Viewers see an example of this in Tongues Untied when a group of Black gay men are sharing a meal together, sharing anecdotes about their lives. They converse about encountering homophobic vitriol, about confronting that vitriol, and about strategies used to survive in its aftermath. Such moments are life sustaining, and such moments allow for the tiny accumulation of boldness, acceptance, and love that constitute revolutionary acts.
What also weighed on Black gay men, especially during the 1980s, was how other people in the Black community forced an impossible choice, a choice described in the film as “Come the final throw-down, what is he first: Black or gay?” This is an impossible choice for Black gay men because it is impossible to separate the two identities—they are always, at the same time, Black and gay. Recognition of this is perhaps the primary lesson learned by intersectionality: that the various aspects of our identities and oppressions converge and make up one another rather than being separable into discrete categories. For example, one is Black and woman and faces bias on both of those grounds together, not one at a time. So when the revolution comes, they will be Black and gay first, because it could be no other way.
Black gay life is circumscribed by these violences, indeed, but it is not determined by them. In other words, Black gay men have a rich social life despite these violences and in the face of these violences. Riggs finds the perfect consolidation of this tension in Black gay men’s lives. Tongues Untied is, then, a film showcasing one possible way of holding on to the pain and the joy and how holding on to these two things is revolutionary. Consider what Riggs says in an interview titled “Tongues Untied Lets Loose Angry, Loving Words”:
I really spoke of black men loving black men being not just a revolutionary act, but within the context of black male dynamics, the revolutionary act. It’s not the overthrow of whitey. It’s learning to love within all the conditioning of learning to hate ourselves. To me that’s truly a radical break from our past.[29]
Revolution happens when we radically depart from the current state of things, a state of things that rests on the foundation of white supremacist and homophobic violence. In this context, Riggs is arguing that Black men loving one another is not just one revolutionary act among many others of equal weight; it is the revolutionary act. Because so much of Riggs’s world was structured by racism and homophobia, to love Black men marked a way of inhabiting the world in a profoundly revolutionary way.
It cannot be overstated how profound Black men loving Black men is, especially amid the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s when there was an underground culture of cruising—men looking for illicit, often unprotected sex with other men—during a sexual crisis. This practice affirms denigrated life. To clarify: for two Black gay men to choose one another for unprotected sex, for pure pleasure and sexual autonomy, amid the HIV/AIDS crisis is not to be reduced simply to sexual irresponsibility or, even worse, ignorance. No, it is, rather, a commitment to living one’s sexual life as fully as possible despite how much one’s very identity has been pathologized. For two Black gay men to have sex during this epidemic is an affirmation of closeness, of touch; of disregard for the various ways they have been told that their bodies and desires are disgusting and literally illegal. “I will not do what they have done to us,” the act says. “I will love every inch of you, every crevice.” And this is an unwavering love for those who have been said to be unlovable. Riggs, in giving voice to Black gay men, is voicing precisely this sentiment.
Tongues Untied remains relevant today because there is still a lack of Black gay male representation in film and media. Love between Black gay men is still a taboo topic for films, only starting to change with the acclaim a film like Moonlight (2016) received. That Tongues Untied is still one of only a few films that explicitly take up Black gay male life shows that there is still a lack of representation, which signals a larger silencing of Black gay male experience in social life. Returning to this film could reassert the importance of Black gay identity, could usher in a shift in the cultural imaginary.
All in all, the radical, revolutionary act is love, loving those who have been said to be unlovable. Tongues Untied is an ode to how breaking the silence and giving voice to the oppressed is revolutionary. So often in the 1970s Black identity and liberation was understood as one thing, by the masculinist revolutionary calls of Black Power and Black Nationalism. But Riggs’s revolution is one focused on more than just “the overthrow of whitey”; it is focused on how Black men can learn to love one another. Real transformation, at least for Riggs, is in the ending of the silence Black gay men have been forced to keep. When the silence—what is called in Tongues Untied “the deadliest weapon”—ends, perhaps Black gay men can come together and love unapologetically and openly. And as said in the opening minutes of the film, through coming together—the coming together of “BGAs: Black gay activists”—”we can make a serious revolution together.”
Profile: How One Day at a Time Avoids Negative Queer Tropes
Shyla Saltzman
Popular media, for better or worse, helps teach audiences what is valued and what is possible. Inclusive representation, or portrayals of people with diverse bodies and identities in the media, can influence how we see ourselves and feel and behave toward other people. In a Washington Post article, Amber Leventry explains that “coverage of topics and people that have historically been considered taboo can take the emotional burden off LGBTQ+ people by educating people about gender, pronouns, gender expression and sexual orientation.”[30] Studies have shown that when we see sympathetic depictions of marginalized groups, our opinions of those groups improve.[31] One study found that people are more accepting of transgender individuals after seeing them depicted onscreen, which could have positive implications for persuading the public to support policies that combat transgender discrimination.[32]Representation aids in educating, familiarizing, and also developing empathy for people we may otherwise be biased toward.
Representation is important in itself, but it needs to be handled responsibly. Reliance on reductive stereotypes or tropes can reinforce harmful messages despite the best intentions. There is more queer representation on television and in media today than ever before, which is an incredible achievement. GLAAD’s annual “Where We Are on TV” report found a larger than ever percentage of not only queer characters on network, cable, and streaming television but also queer characters of color: for the 2018–2019 TV season, 8.8 percent of regular series characters were LGBTQ+ (up from 6.4 percent), and queer characters of color outnumbered white queer characters for the first time.[33] But sometimes we celebrate too soon. LGBTQ+ visibility is important, but it is not always an advancement in and of itself. There are more queer television characters, but they are often limited to a few categories: “safe” and celibate, deeply pathologized, or otherwise preoccupied with homophobia to the detriment of their mental health and development. To consider contemporary examples of LGBTQ+ representation in media, this profile explores how the Netflix series One Day at a Time showcases nuanced queer characters in a way that offers drama, empowers queer youth, and provides learning opportunities and positive depictions for queer viewers, allies, and allies to be.
Figure 10.14. Isabella Gomez plays Elena, a lesbian Latina teenager, on One Day at a Time. (CC BY Jeff Hitchcock.)
One Day at a Time focuses on a Latinx family that faces multifaceted issues and challenges. The grandmother is a devout Catholic from Cuba, and part of her narrative arc is becoming a U.S. citizen at a time when Latin American immigration is a painfully charged topic in the United States. Her daughter, Penelope Alvarez, is a single mother, as well as a war veteran who suffers from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Penelope struggles to become a nurse practitioner and often deals with racism and sexism in the doctor’s office where she works. Most importantly for this chapter, Penelope’s daughter, Elena, is a lesbian teenager (figure 10.14). To explain why Elena is a noteworthy lesbian character on television, we need to discuss a trope that is regularly featured in queer narratives: plot arcs that center homophobia and the calling out of bigotry.
Most shows that explore homophobia or transphobia resort to calling out for dealing with discrimination. To call someone out is to expose their problematic behavior, often in a stern way that allows onlookers to also judge them. In “Speaking Up Without Tearing Down,” Loretta J. Ross writes, “Calling out happens when we point out a mistake, not to address or rectify the damage, but instead to publicly shame the offender. In calling out, a person or group uses tactics like humiliation, shunning, scapegoating, or gossip to dominate others.”[34] The TV network Freeform has perfected the call-out scene. In their hit show Pretty Little Liars, the teenager Emily Fields has a relatively conservative mother who is horrified to learn that her daughter is lesbian. Pam Fields’s journey to acceptance begins when her husband, who fights in the U.S. military, gently chides her for judging their daughter so harshly: “I don’t like this, but [Emily] is struggling with this; I can see it. . . . She is alive and healthy, and after everything I’ve seen, alive and healthy counts for a lot, believe me.”[35] The turning point for Pam comes at an even more severe calling-out session, when multiple members of Emily’s high school English faculty confront a belligerent father who insists that Emily only won her spot on the swim team because of the school’s “gay agenda.” Pam’s moment of redemption is not, as we might hope, an embracing of Emily on her own terms or a realization that nothing has changed or broken about her daughter or their relationship; instead we get a moment of protective instinct that pits Pam against this other parent’s even more egregious form of homophobia: “My daughter never got anything she didn’t earn. That’s how we raised her. That is who she is. So you drop this . . . or I’ll show you what a real agenda is.”[36] The audience does not get to witness a substantial transformation by Pam—instead, at best, we see her realize that her daughter is subjected to a lot of pain and anger in the outside world, and she does not want to add anymore: “Emily—I still don’t understand, but I love you. You are my child, and nobody hurts my child.”[37] Before she can apologize specifically for her prejudice, Emily stops her with a hug. The gesture suggests that Pam has done enough hard work for the day and that Emily should acknowledge her for that alone.
Pam and Emily have a very moving relationship throughout the series, but Pretty Little Liars erases the discord in the family about Emily’s lesbian identity by contrasting Pam’s tortured religious homophobia with the privileged white man’s supposedly much worse homophobia. Pam saying, essentially, “My love for you and desire to protect you matters more to me than my misgivings about your sexuality,” is not the same as saying, “I am sorry that I had an unhealthy reaction that made you feel unsafe and less loved. I am your mother, and I love you the same now as I did when you were born.”
When the message is always and only “I love you more than I hate queerness,” the bar for compassion and acceptance remains very low. It magically lets family members and friends off the hook for problematic core beliefs, and it reinforces the idea that an LGBTQ+ teen’s happiness rests entirely on the benevolent epiphanies of the prejudiced people in her life. It necessitates that bigots come around before the character can have a happy ending. It also often makes the LGBTQ+ teen character take responsibility for or accept the homophobia of adults.
One Day at a Time moves away from the calling-out narrative in favor of calling in. Calling in usually involves a more sympathetic way of addressing problematic behavior: “Call-ins are agreements between people who work together to consciously help each other expand their perspectives. They encourage us to recognize our requirements for growth, to admit our mistakes and to commit to doing better.”[38] The emphasis is on educating and changing an individual, rather than shaming them. Elena’s mother, Penelope, is not on board when she first comes out as a lesbian (figure 10.15). The first refreshing and positive aspect is that the calling in is not Elena’s responsibility. In season 1, episode 11, “Pride and Prejudice,” Penelope makes every effort to support her daughter’s coming out. The audience realizes that Penelope is battling her own homophobia, but at no point does she make that Elena’s problem. Penelope notices that out of everyone in their life—her other child, a close family friend, her own mother—she is the only one struggling with Elena’s news: “I feel really weird about this Elena stuff. . . . I hate that I feel weird about it but I do.”
Figure 10.15. Justina Machado plays Penelope Alvarez, Elena’s mother, on One Day at a Time. (CC BY-SA Dominick D.)
While Penelope is figuring out her hang-ups about her daughter’s sexuality, she knows to put on a supportive face because her “reaction could affect Elena for the rest of her life.” She turns to trustworthy adults for help. She meets with a friend, Ramona, who is an out lesbian, to talk about her reservations: “I’m a monster. My daughter came out to me and I am not totally okay with it. And I hate myself for it.” Often this sort of conversation could turn into Ramona making Penelope feel ashamed of herself or guilting her into magically getting over her homophobia because she wants to prove she is a good person. Instead, Ramona fields Penelope’s questions—“How do I know if a girl coming over is a friend or more? Does she all of a sudden think men are disgusting?”—and validates her process of coming to terms with the loss of heteronormativity in her life: “You’re just not there yet. It’s a complete adjustment in how you see your daughter. Your heart is okay; you just need a little time waiting for your [mind] to catch up.”
Aside from the inclusive coming-out narrative, Elena serves to educate audiences about queer identity and the gender binary. The first season of One Day at a Time focuses heavily on Elena’s upcoming quinceañera and how or if the occasion will reflect that she is gay. According to the website My Quince, “This coming-of-age ceremony plays an important part in preserving the heritage and cultures of the individual. Similar to the process of planning a wedding, the [quinceañera] requires the same amount of effort, time, and proper preparation in order to make the person’s birthday a memorable event.”[39] The event traditionally celebrates a teenage girl’s entering womanhood and marriageability at age fifteen—but now the family also has to reckon with Elena’s expression of womanhood not matching the underlying message and expectations of a traditional quinceañera. According to Marybel Gonzalez, “The quinceañera marks an important milestone in a girl’s life. Part birthday party, part rite of passage, it symbolizes a girl’s entrance into womanhood when turning 15, traditionally showcasing her purity and readiness for marriage.”[40] It is similar to debutante balls, a tradition of upper-class Southern white society in the United States, which signify that a teen girl has reached the age thought suitable to be married to a man. Elena’s resistance to the event’s heteronormativity manifests as concern about her dress and about the role of her relatively absent father, who is supposed to close the event with a father-daughter dance.
Elena’s grandmother happens to be a skilled seamstress and insists on making Elena’s dress; however, the grandmother’s best design does not appeal to Elena. In season 1, episode 13, “Quinces,” the grandmother confronts Elena about why she is not yet excited about her ensemble. Elena suggests, “What you’re picking up on is that I’m not really comfortable wearing a dress. . . . What about instead of heels I wear my Doc Martens?” Elena confirms that she wants a “feminist quinces” that undoes some of the heterosexist traditions. Ultimately, the grandmother redesigns the dress and reveals it to Elena the night before the quinces. The audience does not see it yet, but we know she did something important to the dress that is truer to Elena’s gender expression. When she is finally revealed at the event, we see that the grandmother eliminated the skirt portion entirely, so that now the glamorous glittering bodice of the gown is a top paired with a white suit. She is wearing masculine pants but with a generous amount of feminine sparkle.
One concession Elena makes is that she dances with a boy, presumably for the benefit of her father, who is still unhappy with Elena coming out as well as the unconventional interpretations of her quinceañera. Dancing with a boy while being dressed similarly to him actually highlights Elena’s queerness, and it is at this point that the father decides to leave the quinces and not participate in the father-daughter dance. Note that during this episode, the father’s homophobia is not centered. Beyond Penelope entreating him to show up at the quinces, no undue amount of energy is spent trying to gui -41">[41]
One Day at a Time does not present a utopia where everyone is accepted without conflict. It instead refuses to pathologize queerness or to divide the world between people who love you and people who hate you. It educates viewers on the dilemmas surrounding queer brown immigrant youth and demonstrates an alternative possibility, in which adults recognize that their bigotry is their own problem and that the happiness of a young LGBTQ+ person does not rest entirely on the acceptance of their family.
Key Questions
One controversy this chapter discusses is the question of what exactly an LGBTQ+ film or television show is. Must it have explicitly queer characters, or is a queer aesthetic such as camp enough to qualify it?
Discuss the tropes this chapter outlines. Are stereotyped depictions always negative? What about when their creators are themselves queer? Are stereotypical representations better or worse than no representations at all?
Diversity of all kinds has been a historic weak point for the film and media industries. How do different elements of identity (race, sexuality, class, age, ability, etc.) interact with one another in LGBTQ+ film and media? List five to ten films or TV shows that you believe fall under the LGBTQ+ heading. How do or don’t they represent diverse voices?
