Tongues Untied

Combining interviews with performance, poetry, and personal reflection, Tongues Untied originally aired on PBS stations in 1991, facilitating fresh conversations and fierce debates across communities about the place of black gay life in the United States. Anchored by the rallying cry that “black men loving black men is the revolutionary act,” the film continues to speak to some of the most fundamental cultural struggles of our times.

Stay after the film for Bost’s lecture “Black Gay Freedom: Aesthetic Experimentation and Abolitionist Imaginings in the Work of Marlon Riggs.” Building on Bost’s recent book on the black gay cultural renaissance of the 1980s, this talk will focus on the history of New York–based organizations Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD) and Other Countries Collective alongside the experimental films of Marlon Riggs (1957–94). Bost will explore Riggs's aesthetic experimentation as an imaginative practice of freedom from the modes of capture that have marked the black male homosexual as a “slave” within the black political imagination.