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Marlon Riggs

The vice squad of American culture is once again on the attack. After being rebuffed in their attempts to ban the homoerotic images of Robert Mapplethorpe and, more recently, the Todd Haynes film Pojson , after su{{ering embarrassing defeat in the "antiobscenity" court case against the black rap group 2 Live Crew, the nation's self-appointed media watchdogs have regrouped and found another, seemingly perfect target: my experimental documentary, Tongues Untied, which unabashedly celebrates the struggles, lives, and loves of black gay men. Tongues Untied was motivated by a singular imperative: to shatter this nation's brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference. Yet despite a concerted smear and censorship campaign, perhaps even because of it, this work is achieving its aim. The fifty-five-minute video documents a nationwide community of voices-some cluietly poetic, some undeniably raw and angry-that together challenge our society's most deeply entrenched myths about what it means to be black, to be gay, to be a man, and above all, to be human. Tongues Untied has achieved a host of international awards. 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-to name a select few-have accorded this work top honors. Ironically, just as the Reverend Don Wildmon of the American Family Association was first citing Tongues Llntied as an offensive misuse of "American taxpayers'dollars" {it never seems to occur to his ilk that gay,lesbian, and bisexual Americans are taxpayers, too), the documentary was screening at this year's International Public Television Festival in Dublin. Selected by an international jury of public broadcasters, my work was offered as exemplary, innovative programming in U.S. public television. Since then, England, Spain, Australia, and Sweden have commissioned
Tongues Untied for their own public television broadcasts.

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This, of course, has not meant a hill of beans to white archconservatives and religious fundamentalists, who pointedly minirnize or ignore altogether the abundant evidence affirrning Tongues [Jntied's artistic and social merit. Among these would-be guardians of American culture, sexuality as such remains taboo; shrouded by even deeper layers of silence, stigma, and aversion is black heterosexuality. Black homosexuality, the triple taboo, equates in their minds with an unspeakable obscenity. Predictably, the moral censors have pounced on both PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts in an ongoing effort to force Arnerican Culture into line with their rigid, narrow notions of morally correct art. Any public institution caught deviating from their puritanical morality is inexorably blasted as contributing to the nation's social decay. In a rhetorical equivalent to hate-filled fag bashing, the morality watchdogs have smeared and disfigured Tongues tlntied beyond recognition. A recent editorial in the Washington Times suggested in all seriousness that the PBS broadcast of my work was tantamount to disseminating raw homosexual "pornography,, across the public airwaves, transforming the households of America into a "gay striptease joint"l Eclually predictable in the current "obscenity" controversy (and also more dis-

186
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heartening) is the collusion-through silence-of mainstream black America in this nakedly homophobic and covertly racial assault. The legacy of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, fames Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King |r., and the many thousands more who lived and died to free us all from prescribed social roles defined by a dominant majority, that legacy has come to this: biack straight Americans {many of whom consider themselves "progressive," even "Afrocentric revolutionaries"l passively, silently, acquiescing as political bedmates to the likes of the Reverend Wildmon, fames Kilpatrick, and |esse Helms. Suddenly, traditional conceptions of America's Left, Right, and Center prove bankrupt. The general desire to suppress any realistic acknowledgment, let alone exploration, of homosexuality in the United States has engendered the ultimate postmodern

coalition! Sandwiched uncomfortably amidst this improbable collection o{ censorship coconspirators are a significant number of public television executives and newspaper critics. Generally more politic than the Wildmons of America, the broadcasters and the critics nonetheless cite 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 critics never ask, because the answers are profoundly revealing, is, Whose community andwhose standards? Implicit in the much overworked rhetoric about "community standards" is the assumption of only one central community (patriarchal, heterosexual, and usually white) and one overarching cultural standard {ditto) to which public television programming must necessarily appeal. By this reasoning, any work seriously affronting majority biases and beliefs guarantees a highly marginal place, if any at all, on public television. Defining imagery and language as either "acceptable" or "impermissible" then becomes a critical tool of cultural domination: the charge of "obscenity" ot of being "grossly offensive" offers the perfect pretext for silencing a minority/s attempt at ending its subjugation and challenging the majority's social control. Tongues untied are thereby retted. The suppression of the culturally (and politically) disfranchised thus continues without compunction. How 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-c1ass communities, women as well as homosexuals-wholiy escapes most who object to the "language" and homoerotic imagery of Tongues untied. "We are uninvited guests in people's homes," one station executive in Detroit explained. "We have to be careful about what we put on the air so as not to alienate and oifend our community." Public television, on this basis, offers litt1e if any distinction {rom its commercial counterpart. Like most of mainstream American media, public television 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 courte-

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ous speech/ proper subject matter/ conventional aesthetics, and "mainstream" appeal. Disobey this often unwritten rule and you risk banishment into cultural oblivion. The present censorship hysteria has paradoxically rekindled 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? Above all, whose authority draws

the thin line between "diversity" and unacceptable "deviance"? |ames Baldwin, renowned black 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 as well as white, now demands much the same of homosexual men and women: to win majority acceptance, we are asked to represent ourselves in ways that, in effect, reaffirm the majority's self-image of privilege. The alternative is erasure. But there is another alternative, and this for many is the real outrage oI Tongues [Jntied, and for man, many tnore, its principal virtue: its refusal to present a historically disparaged community begging on bended knee for tidbits of mainstream tolerance. What Tonguas instead affirms and demands is a {rank, uncensored, uncompromising articulation of an autonomously defined self and social identity. (SNAP!)

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Michael Renov & Erika Suderburg, editors

University oi Minnesota Minneapolis London

Press

Copyright 1996 by the Regents of the University o{ Minnesota A French-language version of chapter 6 appeared in Passage de f image (Paris: Editions du Centre
Pompidou, 1990), translated and reprinted by permission, chapter 9 first appeared in Lynn Hershman: Chimera Monographie, ed. Lynn Hershman (Montb6liard: Editions du Centre International de Cr6ation Vid6o, 1992), copyright David E. |ames; a French-language version of chapter l1 first appeared rn L'Entre-Images (Paris: Editions de la Di{f6rence, 1990), translated and reprinted by permission; an earlier version of chapter 22 appearcd in Quarterly Review of Film and Video 15, no. 1 (1993): 15-26, copyright Harwood Academic Publishers, by permission; "slipping Between" copyright 1991 by Sandra P Hahn, by permission.
Every effort has been made to obtain permissron to reproduce copyright material in this book. The publishers ask copyright holders to contact them if permission has inadvertently not been sought or if proper acknowledgment has not been made. A1l rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means/ electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University o{ Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Library oI Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Resolutions : contemporary video practices

i Michael

Renov and Erika Suderburg, editors.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-2327-9 {alk. paper) ISBN 0-8166-2330-9 {pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Video recordings. I. Renon Michael, 1950-

II. Suderburg, Erika

95-10972

PN1992.935.R47 1996
384.55'8-'dc2o The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer