Riggs speaks unapologetically for a group that mainstream America
would prefer to 'erase'
http://www.current.org/prog/prog114g.html
Marlon Riggs, who died in 1994, produced and directed the film Tongues
Untied that aired in July 1991 on the PBS series P.O.V., and a number
of other films. He also taught at the University of California,
Berkeley. This commentary was published in Current, Aug. 12, 1991.
By Marlon Riggs
The vice squad of American culture was once again on the attack. After
being rebuffed in their attempts to ban the homoerotic images of
Robert Mapplethorpe and then the Todd Haynes film Poison, and after
suffering embarrassing defeat in the "anti-obscenity" court case
against the black rap group 2 Live Crew, America's self-appointed
media watchdogs regrouped and found another, seemingly perfect target:
my experimental documentary, Tongues Untied, which unabashedly
celebrates the struggles, lives and loves of black gay men in America.
Tongues Untied was motivated by a singular imperative: to shatter
America's brutalizing silence around matters of sexual and racial
difference. Yet despite a concerted smear and censorship campaign,
perhaps even because of it, this work achieved its aim. The 55-minute
video documents a nationwide community of voices--some quietly poetic,
some undeniably raw and angry--which together challenge society's most
deeply entrenched myths about what it means to be black, gay, a man,
and above all, human.
Tongues Untied has achieved international acclaim: from the Berlin,
London and New York Documentary Film Festivals, the National Black
Programming Consortium and the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, as well
as the Whitney Museum and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
This, of course, did not mean a hill of beans to white arch-
conservatives and religious fundamentalists, who pointedly minimized
or ignored altogether the abundant evidence affirming Tongues Untied's
artistic and social merit.
Among these would-be guardians of American culture, sexuality as such
remains taboo. Black heterosexuality is shrouded by even deeper layers
of silence and aversion. And black homosexuality, the triple taboo,
equates in their minds with an unspeakable obscenity.
Predictably, the morals censors pounced on both PBS and the National
Endowment for the Arts in an ongoing effort to force American culture
into line with their rigid, narrow notions of morally correct art. In
their rhetorical equivalent to hate-filled fag-bashing, the morality
watchdogs smeared and disfigured Tongues Untied beyond recognition. An
editorial in the arch-conservative Washington Times suggested in all
seriousness that the PBS broadcast of my work was tantamount to
disseminating raw homosexual "pornography," transforming the
households of America into a "gay striptease joint"!
Equally predictable in this so-called "obscenity" controversy was the
collusion--by silence--of mainstream black America in this nakedly
homophobic and covertly racial assault. Black heterosexuals (many of
whom consider themselves "progressive" or even "Afrocentric
revolutionaries") passively, silently acquiesced as political bedmates
with the likes of Rev. Wildmon, James Kilpatrick and the rabidly anti-
gay, race-baiting Sen. Jesse Helms.
Suddenly, traditional conceptions of America's Left, Right and Center
prove bankrupt. The general desire to suppress any realistic
acknowledgment or exploration of homosexuality in America has spawned
the ultimate postmodern coalition!
Sandwiched uncomfortably amidst this improbable collection of
censorship co-conspirators was a dismaying number of U.S. public
television executives. The broadcasters, most of whom had the sense
not to object to homosexuality per se, nonetheless cited the
"offensive language" of Tongues Untied and its affront to "community
standards" as justification for banning the work or scheduling it in
the wee hours of the night.
The question such broadcasters never asked, because the answers are
too revealing, is: whose community and whose standards are they
upholding?
Implicit in the much overworked rhetoric about "community standards"
is the assumption of one privileged community (mythically patriarchal,
heterosexist and usually white) and one overarching culture (ditto)
which a station's programming must never deeply affront.
Tongues Untied's frank, nonconformist imagery and language thus lent
themselves as easy targets for station censorship. Ripped completely
out of context, words like "fuck" or images of two black men tenderly
embracing and even my own highly diffused, silhouetted nudity, were
repeatedly characterized as unjustifiably "indecent," "graphic," even
"obscene." Such rhetoric clearly attempted to circumvent the need to
examine the fears, biases and profound gaps of ignorance that shape
many PTV broadcasters' myopic, monocultural notions of "community
values" and "prevailing standards."
But there was also another purpose behind the "obscenity" rhetoric:
the charge of being too "graphic" or "grossly offensive" offered the
perfect pretext for silencing a disfranchised minority's attempt to
end its subjugation and challenge the cultural terms of the majority's
social control. Having deemed the language of black gay men unsuitable
for public broadcast, tongues untied were peremptorily re-tied. The
suppression of the culturally (and politically) disempowered thus
continued in many American communities without compunction. How
utterly convenient!
That this dynamic has shaped the cultural distortion and outright
erasure of many groups throughout American history--African, Native,
Asian and Latin Americans, working-class communities, women as well as
homosexuals--wholly escapes most who objected to the "language" and
"confrontational" imagery of Tongues Untied.
"We are uninvited guests in people's homes," one station executive in
Detroit typically explained. "We have to be careful about what we put
on the air so as not to alienate and offend our community." On this
basis, public television offers little if any distinction from its
commercial counterpart.
Like most of mainstream American media, it serves merely to
consolidate the myths, power and authority of the majority:
"minorities" might be granted the right to speak and be heard, but
only if we abide by the "master codes" of courteous speech, proper
subject matter, conventional aesthetics and "mainstream" appeal.
Disobey this often unquestioned rule and you risk banishment into
cultural oblivion.
Paradoxically, the Tongues Untied censorship hysteria has helped re-
kindle an essential public debate: who is to have access to so-called
"public" media, and on what terms? Who should represent and define
"minority" perspectives and experience? Above all, who has the
authority to draw the thin line between innocuous "diversity" and
unacceptable "deviance?"
James Baldwin, renowned black American homosexual novelist and
essayist, once wrote that the general aim of white Americans was to
refashion the Negro face after their own, and failing that, to make
the black face "blank." Straight America, black well as white, has
demanded much the same of homosexual men and women: to win majority
acceptance, we are asked to represent ourselves in ways which, in
effect, reaffirm the majority's self-image of privilege. The
alternative is our wholesale erasure.
But there is another alternative, and for many this was the real
outrage of Tongues Untied, and for many, many more, its principal
virtue: the refusal to present an historically disparaged community on
bended knee, begging courteously for tidbits of mainstream tolerance.
What Tongues instead unapologetically affirms and delivers is a frank,
uncensored, uncompromising articulation of an autonomously defined
self and social identity. SNAP!
Copyright 1991 by Marlon T. Riggs.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
No comments:
Post a Comment