Richard produced their first album, simply entitled The Flirtations, recorded direct to digital two-track in New York City at Classic Sound and Manhattan Recording Company in November 1989 and February 1990. The critical reception was overwhelmingly positive. The gay music critic Will Grega, for example, wrote that “between the brilliant harmonies, general silliness, and giddy repertoire, a splendid time is guaranteed for all.” Gene Price, music critic for the San Francisco Bay Times, hailed the Flirts as “the most entertaining, vocally enchanting, all-male singing ensemble I have ever heard.” And the group often got standing ovations. Their tour in 1990 extended as far as Vancouver, where they ran into some momentary trouble: they made the mistake of revealing to a customs official that the records they had with them were intended for sale—which led to their prompt detention. Feigning haughtiness, Michael told the official, “That will teach us to tell the truth!” To which the officer sternly replied, “No Canadian would say that”—and proceeded to go meticulously through every one of their bags before finally giving them the nod to cross the border.
The group’s concerts, as one of them put it, had arrived “at that annoying point where it’s half way between part-time and full-time . . . I think within a year, we’ll get enough bookings to keep us at it full time.” Michael had a wittier take: “I’d say 90 per cent of my time is spent on activism, five per cent on music and five per cent on being a housewife. I’m trying to divide up that 90 per cent—like sleep for a change.”
Once back in New York City, the group returned to rehearsals with the goal and expectation that their next record would appear in fairly short order. But in August 1990, group member T.J. Myers succumbed to AIDS. His place in the Flirts was taken by Jimmy Rutland, who was gradually integrated into the group. Their second album, Out on the Road, was recorded live on December 3–7, 1991, and would appear in 1992.
Marlon Riggs was an “army brat” born in 1957 in Texas, but he grew up, starting at age eleven, in Georgia and then West Germany. He returned to the United States in 1974, got a BA from Harvard in American history, and returned to Texas to work at a television station. The endemic racism he encountered made him decide to leave the state and take a master’s degree at UC Berkeley. He made a number of short documentaries on a variety of themes, then turned his professional attention to the subject of racism. It took him five years to raise the $230,000 budget for his first feature-length film, Ethnic Notions, a documentary on the historical depiction of black Americans in the popular media, which won him an Emmy nomination in 1989.16
Riggs next turned his attention to making Tongues Untied, which would become by far the most controversial of the eight works he produced between 1987 and 1994. He wanted to attempt to do for black gay men what a number of filmmakers and writers—Michelle Parkerson, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Cheryl Clark, and Jewelle Gomez—had begun earlier for black lesbians. To reach his goal of exploring black gay male identity, Riggs wove together a wide variety of elements and crossed a variety of genre boundaries. He utilized lyric poetry (mostly work by Essex), vogue dancing, music by Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, “vérité” footage, autobiography, montage, and “Snap!-thology” (finger snapping). The latter was of special importance to Riggs. For him, “snap is a form of resistance, a form of saying, ‘Yes, I’m different and I’m also proud of it.’ ” For similar reasons, he utilized the “so-called effeminate gestures in vogueing”; it was a way to “deliberately distinguish yourself . . . to affirm those gestures which the dominant culture looks down upon. . . . It becomes a virtue rather than a vice or flaw.” He used Essex’s poem “A Homocide,” about the murder of a black drag queen, in a comparable way, moving the poem beyond an expression of grief to a longing search for community and love.
With himself, Essex, Wayson Jones, Craig Harris, and Larry Duckett as the film’s chief performers, Riggs created a vibrant tapestry that combined defiance and anger, flamboyance and wit, pain and frankness. Addressing black homophobia and antigay violence, in one sequence he showed black “ministers” fiercely denouncing homosexuality, and in another a young black man being mugged by a foul-mouthed (“Fag! Punk! Queer!”) gang of black toughs. As Kobena Mercer has pointed out, Riggs (as well as Isaac Julien in Looking for Langston), rejecting silence and exclusion, addressed his audience directly on the subject of black homosexuality, confronting it with the lived experiences of black gay men. As Riggs told an interviewer, “Tongues, for me, was a catharsis. It was a release of a lot of decades-old, pent-up emotion, rage, guilt, feelings of impotence in the face of some of my experiences as a youth. . . . [It] allowed me to move past all of those things that were bottled up inside me, that were acting as barriers to my own internal growth. . . . I could also finally express my rage about being treated as a pariah by the black community when I was younger, as my differences became more and more marked.”
Riggs had a highly sophisticated attitude toward the standard issue of whether black gays primarily identified with and owed their allegiance to being black or being gay. “Neither,” was Riggs’ response: “I try to invalidate that argument. Part of the message of the video is that the way to break loose of the schizophrenia in trying to define identity is to realize that you are many things within one person. Don’t try to [arrange] a hierarchy of things that are virtuous in your character and say, ‘This is more important than that.’ ” No single voice or attitude dominates Tongues Untied; there is no unifying “typical” narrative of what it is like to be a black gay man. Riggs’ views on “identity”—much debated in these years within intellectual circles—incorporated the current innovative investigations of “queer theory” and contributed to their expansion as well.
Unwilling to compromise his vision, Riggs was well aware that the provocative Tongues Untied, unlike his earlier film Ethnic Notions, would have trouble finding an audience. Ethnic Notions had been shown on many PBS stations, but Tongues Untied could hardly count on a national venue and had to mostly rely instead on film festivals and college audiences—despite receiving a number of favorable reviews and even awards (eventually including Best Documentary at the Berlin International Film Festival, and Best Video at the New York Documentary Film Festival). The very first showing of Tongues Untied was at the American Film Institute Video Festival before an invited audience of some 150 to 200 “largely white” fellow filmmakers and artists. Preceding it, Riggs had been isolated in the editing room day and night and had had no advance work-in-progress screenings to give him some sense of what to expect. At the festival, people reacted so enthusiastically that Riggs was profoundly shocked. The second showing of the film—at the Film Arts Festival at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco—was before a sold-out crowd filled with Riggs’ primary intended audience of gay black men. At the film’s close, the audience rose as one to give Riggs a standing ovation.17
Given the difficulty of finding outlets for screening Tongues Untied, Riggs was pleased when an invitation arrived to show the film at the Washington, D.C., Filmfest at the Kennedy Center. But he was far less pleased with the way the screening turned out—and Essex was downright apoplectic, calling the event a “disgraceful embarrassment.” He wrote a long, scorching letter to the directors of the festival in which he itemized the assorted insults of “this shabbily handled affair.” Six weeks in advance of the screening, Essex had himself submitted a list of the technical needs—microphones, music stands, and so forth—that the artists planning a performance along with the screening would require. Arriving at the theater an hour ahead of time, Essex discovered that none of the equipment had been assembled and that the directors denied ever having received such a request. Essex and Larry Duckett had to chase the theater manager around for some forty-five minutes in an effort to obtain the needed equipment, but that produced only four microphones—two of them dead—and music stands so wobbly that one actually fell apart when handled. Essex found the situation “galling,” since the Kennedy Center was a national performing arts space with first-ra
te equipment of every kind.
To top off the shoddy business, people who’d reserved tickets in advance were told after arriving that their names weren’t on the box office list. Angry “chaos” followed in the lobby. Once the performance finally got started, it turned out that the two microphones that did function were too loud for the room (the artists’ request to do a sound check had been denied) and no technical personnel, they were told, were available to make the needed adjustments. On top of all that, once the screening began, the images that appeared jumped shakily up and down. After five minutes, Riggs, Essex, and Ron Simmons raced to the screening booth—only to find that the projectionist was occupied with something else entirely and paying no attention to what was happening on the screen. He was finally persuaded to stop the film and rethread it. The only partial consolation for the botched event was that it had sold out.
The following year, the PBS documentary series POV (Point of View) scheduled Tongues Untied for a ten p.m. showing. A national viewing audience at last seemed possible. The Reverend Donald E. Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, a conservative media watchdog group, expressed his wish for as many people as possible to view Tongues Untied, secure in the belief that its “offensive” nature would swell conservative ranks. But Wildmon failed to get his wish. Affiliated stations aren’t required to broadcast PBS programs and a number of them immediately announced that they wouldn’t show the film during prime time; eighteen of the top fifty markets refused to show it at all. In total, 174 out of 284 stations—more than 60 percent—that ordinarily carried the POV series refused to show Tongues. Perhaps most hurtful of all, a number of local black leaders spoke out against the film. One bank vice president sounded a common note: “I had a strong concern that it was sort of degrading to African-American men, and just represented a small segment of the population,” too small to be allotted that amount of time.
Another kind of controversy opened up within the black gay community itself. It centered on the bold lettering that closed the film: “Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act” (the phrase originated with Joe Beam). When it became known that Riggs’ lover was in fact a white man, one well-known figure in the black gay community, Cary Alan Johnson, published a review in the left-wing Gay Community News in which he wrote: “that Riggs has a white lover struck me as ironic and may leave some feeling cheated. I do not fault Riggs for his choice of a partner, only for what I see as a deception. . . . If Black men loving Black men is truly ‘the revolutionary act’ . . . then why isn’t he acting?” Since the British filmmaker Isaac Julien also had a white partner, the issue for a time became heated.18
And Essex jumped right into the middle of it. He characterized Cary Alan Johnson’s remarks as “blatantly intrusive,” even while acknowledging that many black gay people were suspicious, if not downright hostile, about those who took white partners. Did that mean, Essex asked, that “we burn the writings of James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry (they had white lovers)? Should we not acknowledge civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington (he had a white lover, too)? Should we not honor the significance of poet Pat Parker’s work (she had a white lover)?”
Essex directly entered the debate over “identity” that Riggs himself had earlier outlined. “What is this ‘blackness’ that is being addressed?” Essex asked. “Is one still being black if one is out attacking innocent citizens? Is it black to be buried denying one was ever homosexual? Is it black to be fucking without a condom? Is it black to be shooting each other dead in the streets? Is it black to be selling cocaine or crack to black people?” Was it “revolutionary” to love any black man regardless, say, of his behavior—like betraying friends, employing violence, preferring lies to truth, terrifying children?
Besides, Essex went on, the phrase “Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act” was never meant to refer to strictly sexual or romantic matters: it was meant to “speak of a responsibility we must each have and maintain as it relates to home, community, self and each other”—in other words, Essex argued, Riggs was envisioning something more encompassing than physical intimacy, something like the generalized support and comfort black men should try to offer one another. Isaac Jackson, another black gay writer, joined the debate to ask, “Is this a movement for all black gay men—or only those with black lovers? . . . Relationships in general between gay men are so hard to maintain, why must we chastise the black man who found what satisfies him, regardless of the color of his lover? . . . Why do we always come out of one limiting situation right into another?”
In Essex’s view, the implication of Cary Alan Johnson’s comment was that the black gay journey Riggs depicted in Tongues Untied was fraudulent, not credible, simply because his lover was white—a remarkably thin criterion, in Essex’s view, for evaluating cultural documents. Or, for that matter, lives. A few years later, in his unpublished novel, “Standing in the Gap,” Essex has one black gay man say to another,
Just because you’ve decided that there’s no place in your life for white men doesn’t mean the brothers who are dating white men aren’t being fulfilled in their relationships. And it doesn’t mean they are less black than you. . . . As far as I’m concerned your thinking isn’t any different than the thinking of black nationalists who believe our homosexuality is caused by white people, and that we aren’t really black because we’re homosexuals. You can’t tell how black a person is based on who he’s sleeping with or loving or his sexuality. What you really sound like is a bigot and a hypocrite when you suggest such a thing.
It reminded Essex of the reverse snobbism of those who located black “authenticity” in those who grew up in ghettos. In his view, “a ghetto childhood in and of itself does not make one ‘black’ nor define ‘black culture.’ ” Nor, obversely, should it be assumed that interracial lust and love were functions of self-hatred. To see such pairings as somehow aberrational was, Essex argued, to suggest “that the natural roles of white and black people are to be, for all time, adversarial and corrupt with cruelties and indignities.”
Riggs had his own reaction to the attack on his interracial relationship: “I didn’t want people to believe that black men loving black men,” he told an interviewer, “was a total kind of love that excluded any other, that it was a monolithic love. And I didn’t want people to think of that love solely in sexual-romantic terms. I still think that for African-American men, our learning to love ourselves and each other would be a paramount act of revolutionary sentiment and behavior, because the opposite so much prevails now. But by acknowledging the importance and place of interracial love, one also says that there are other kinds of loves that are part of our universe.”
Essex had found working on Tongues Untied—despite the Kennedy Center debacle—a “wonderful experience,” and he felt sure that his collaboration with Riggs would continue (he felt the same about working again with Isaac Julien). Within a year, Tongues Untied traveled to the Soviet Union, Scandinavia, New Zealand, Canada, and Germany and was also bought by the BBC. What that taught him, Riggs said, was that “when you speak from the heart, people understand, even when you speak in ways that are troublesome.” Within a short time of the release of Tongues Untied, he produced a new eight-minute work, Anthem, based on the Langston Hughes poem “I Too Sing America” but also including the words of black gay poets like Essex, Donald Woods, and Colin Robinson—to accompany the fast-paced screen images ranging from cock rings to ACT UP’s “Silence = Death” logo to a pink triangle superimposed on a map of Africa in African National Congress colors. About Essex’s poetry, Riggs said, it “moves me extremely just reading it, and it did so before I ever met or heard him.”
A few years later, Essex and Isaac Julien, in a conversation intended for publication, extended the issues relating to “identity” into a different sphere. Sympathetic as the two friends were, they strongly disagreed about whether black gay men should participate in Louis Farrakhan’s pendi
ng Million Man March. Julien considered the suggestion unthinkable. The Nation of Islam’s political base consisted primarily of lower-and working-class heterosexual black men, and the reigning discourse among them centered on “black macho.” Julien felt being excluded from that kind of “oppressive masculinity” was “a part of what it means to be queer. That’s what our work has been about.”
Essex agreed with Julien’s point but felt “the power of the possibility of black men coming together” overwhelmed it in importance. Despite his aversion to Farrakhan and black nationalism, he felt drawn to gay participation in the march—“my blackness is the priority.” He didn’t believe that current macho notions of masculinity worked for anyone—and certainly not for black women. But whether many of Farrakhan’s followers saw patriarchy as a liability was of course the point of contention. The evidence suggests they did not. The March’s organizers and many of its participants took as a given that the male-dominated family was the essential building block of black unity—and that meant the exclusion of faggots.
Essex held out the hope that the organizers of the March might be pressed to include gay men as speakers, and even if not, that black gay participation in the March might help to end gay and lesbian invisibility. For the same reason, the National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum, while declining formally to endorse the March, encouraged black gays to participate. Keith Boykin, executive director of the Forum, led a contingent of some two hundred black gay and bisexual men in the March and subsequently wrote of it with sonorous awe: “We stood on the mall in the nation’s capital in all of our beautiful diversity. . . . There was hardly a whisper of criticism as we marched along that day. The crowd of men on the mall split like the parting of the Red Sea as we marched and chanted, and most of those who had any reaction at all simply clapped. . . . Almost all of us left with a sense of awe and wonder in the possibilities for the future.” Boykin neglected to mention in his account that Ben Chavis, national director of the March (and until recently executive director of the NAACP), had rejected the suggestion of a black gay speaker.19
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