Directed by Marlon Riggs • 1989 • United States
Marlon Riggs’s landmark documentary uses poetry, personal testimony, rap, and performance (featuring poet Essex Hemphill and others) to describe the homophobia and racism faced by Black gay men. The stories are often devastating: the man refused entry to a gay bar because of his skin color; the college student left bleeding on the sidewalk after a hate crime; the loneliness and isolation of a drag queen. Yet they also powerfully affirm the Black gay male experience through protest marches, smoky bars, “snap diva,” and Vogue dancers. Made, in Riggs’s own words, to “shatter this nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference,” TONGUES UNTIED remains, three decades after its controversy-inciting release, as urgent and vital as ever.
Up Next in Documentaries
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Greetings from Washington, D.C.
Directed by Lucy Winer • 1981 • United States
Starring Rob Epstein, Jan Oxenberg, Terry LawlerOn October 14, 1979, LGBTQ+ history was made when tens of thousands of people converged on America’s capital for the first ever National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. This empowering ...
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Shinjuku Boys
Directed by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams • 1995 • United Kingdom
Starring Gaish, Tatsu, KazukiThis remarkable documentary offers rich insight into gender and sexuality in Japan via a candid portrait of Kazuki, Tatsu, and Gaish, three trans masc hosts working at the New Marilyn Club in Tokyo...
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ocularis
Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 1997 • United States
This video highlights several narratives concerning video surveillance—not to reiterate the conventional privacy argument but rather to engage the desire to watch surveillance materials and society’s insatiable voyeurism. A variety of subjects...
