Tongues Untied

Intended to “shatter this nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference,” Marlon Riggs’ gorgeous, groundbreaking essay film weaves together documentary, performance, poetry, music, and personal testimony into a witnessing and an assertion of Black gay life in America. Made at the height of the AIDS crisis, Tongues Untied generously and defiantly insists on sharing moments of pleasure and tenderness alongside righteous rage and grief. It allows the community and the individuals within it to be witnessed in the fullness of their humanity—a humanity that was so violently denied by mainstream culture that the firestorm of controversy around the film reached Congress, where it was reduced to a talking point in the bitter culture wars and weaponized as an excuse to cut federal funding to the arts. Sensual, playful, confrontational, and formally audacious, Tongues Untied remains a radical and necessary part of the queer cinema canon.