On this day in 1991, the groundbreaking film on Black Gay experience, Tongues Untied, was broadcast on national television in the United States.  The director Marlon Riggs stated that the piece was created to

"…shatter the nation’s brutalising silence on matters of sexual and racial difference.  [Tongues Untied] is partly about community-building. It’s an affirmation of some of the things that we as black Gay men take for granted. For example, lots of people snap. They snap on every syllable, and they don’t think about it. You can go from Mississippi to California to New York and this cultural form will be recognized-there will be a response. Some people are ashamed about snap because they look at it and think, ‘Oh, we know he’s a Gay man.’ Yet, snap is also a form of resistance, a form of saying, ‘Yes, I’m different and I’m also proud of it.’"

The national broadcast ignited a firestorm among the conservative Religious Right because of the film’s focus on Gay sexuality and its funding through a National Endowment for the Arts grant.  Jesse Helms railed against the film from the floor of the U.S. Senate mistitling the film "Tongues United." Months later Patrick Buchanan, who was running against the first George Bush for the presidential nomination, cited "Tongues Untied" as an example of how President Bush was using taxpayer’s money to fund "pornographic art."   He featured excerpts from the film in his political campaign commercials, curiously editing out any images of Black Gay men.

The Gay theorist and film critic Vito Russo wrote that "Usually, politically and socially admirable films fall short of the mark in the aesthetics department. They are praised more for their good intentions…Marlon Riggs has created that rarest of birds — a brilliant, innovative work of art that delivers a knock-out political punch."  The film featured poetic and visual segments including the work of Essex Hemphill, Brian Freeman, Joseph Beam and many others. 

The film would go on to win countless awards and accolades including Best Documentary Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, Best Independent Experimental Work by the Los Angeles Film Critics and Best Video at the New York Documentary Film Festival.

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TODAY’S GAY WISDOM

Today’s Gay Wisdom comes from Marlon Riggs:

"Frankly, with Tongues Untied if white heterosexuals don’t understand the reasons why black people are angry and just consider this piece militant, then so be it. I’m not going to take time to justify this for people for whom this experience is totally alien. Tongues Untied is an affirmation of the feelings and experiences of black Gay men, made for them by a black Gay man, or actually by black Gay men because the piece has a number of voices. If others understand, fine, but making sure everyone understands was not my prerequisite in making this."
— Marlon Riggs

"(The Christian Right says) Bring back the melting pot. Restore ‘traditional values.’ Re-institute prayer in schools. Preserve the primacy of Western civilization (the only one that matters anyway). And not least, protect that critical bedrock of American greatness: ‘the American family’ Such pronouncements reveal an intense, even pathological desire to perpetuate a thoroughly obsolete myth of America, and through this, a repressively orthodox system of sociocultural entitlement."   
— Marlon Riggs

“My struggle has allowed me to transcend that sense of shame and stigma identified with my being a black Gay man. Having come through that fire, they can’t touch me.” – Marlon T. Riggs

Read a great interview with Marlon Riggs titled "Listen to the Heartbeat" here.

Gay Wisdom – Arenas, Antinous & Kushner

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

Today is the birthday of Emperor Hadrian’s great love Antinous (110).

Today is also the birthday of Cuban poet, novelist & memoirist Reinaldo Arenas (July 16, 1943 – December 7, 1990.  Most known for his memoir Before Night Falls, about his childhood and life in Cuba, Arenas was also the author of over twenty books including his Pentagonia, a series of books detailing the secret history of post-revolutionary Cuba.  He emigrated to the United States in 1980 during the Mariel boatlife and lived in Miami for a short time before settling permanently in New York City.

Today is also the birthday of the great playwright Tony Kushner (1956) playwright Angels In America series.

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TODAY’S GAY WISDOM

Today’s gay wisdom comes from Tony Kushner and Reinaldo Arenas:

"Mine is not an obedient writing. I think that literature as any art has to be irreverent.  And in a totalitarian system irreverence is punished."  Reinaldo Arenas

"Now, needless to say, after ten years, I have realised that an exile has no place anywhere, because there is no place, because the place where we started to dream, where we discovered the natural world around us, read our first book, loved for the first time, is a ghost, the shadow of someone who never achieves full reality. I ceased to exist when I went into exile; I started to run away from myself."    Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls

"Well, I write and survive.  I am a dissident." – Reinaldo Arenas

Here’s a great little film featuring Reinaldo Arenas and those who knew him.

This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all.  And the dead will be commemorated, and we’ll struggle on with the living. And we are not going away.  We won’t die secret deaths anymore..  The world only spins forward.  We will be citizens.  The time has come.
Bye now.  You are fabulous each and everyone.  And I bless you.  More life. The great work begins.
Tony Kushner, Angels In America Part II – Perestroika

Today is the birthday of naturalist and transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau (born 1817).  Famous for his writings Walden and Civil Disobedience, historians such as Jonathan Ned Katz have written about Thoreau’s deep attachments to male friends throughout his life. 

Like Whitman and Emerson, much of Thoreau’s meditations on the higher meaning of male friendships can be found in his writing, specifically Thoreau’s notebooks which he kept throughout his life.

From Thoreau’s Notebooks:

[Nov. 5, 1839]
These young buds of manhood in the streets are like buttercups in the meadows, —surrendered to nature as they.

On June 17, 1839, Edmund Sewall of Scituate visited Concord for a week. After five days of sailing and hiking with Edmund, the twenty-two-year- old Thoreau fell in love with him, writing in his journal:

[June 22, 1839] Saturday. I have within the last few days come into contact with a pure, uncompromising spirit, that is somewhere wandering in the atmosphere, but settles not positively anywhere. . . . Such [spirits] it is impossible not to love; still is their loveliness, as it were, independent of them, so that you seem not to lose it when they are absent, for when they are near it is like an invisible presence which attends you.

Two days later, after Edmund’s departure, Thoreau writes a love poem.

[June 24, 1839]

 

Sympathy

 

Lately, alas, I knew a gentle boy,

Whose features all were cast in Virtue’s mould,

As one she had designed for Beauty’s toy,

But after manned him for her own stronghold.

On every side he open was as day,

That you might see no lack of strength within,

For walls and ports do only serve alway

For a pretense to feebleness and sin.

Say not that Caesar was victorious,

With toil and strife who stormed the House of Fame,

In other sense this youth was glorious,

Himself a kingdom wheresoe’er he came.

No strength went out to get him victory,

When all was income of its own accord;

For where he went none other was to see,

But all were parcel of their noble lord.

He forayed like the subtile haze of summer,

That stilly shows fresh landscapes to our eyes,

And revolutions works without a murmur,

Or rustling of a leaf beneath the skies..

So was I taken unawares by this,

I quite forgot my homage to confess;

Yet now am forced to know, though hard it is,

I might have loved him had I loved him less.

Each moment as we nearer drew to each,

A stern respect withheld us farther yet,

So that we seemed beyond each other’s reach,

And less acquainted than when first we met.

We two were one while we did sympathize,

So could we not the simplest bargain drive;

And what avails it now that we are wise,

If absence doth this doubleness contrive?

Eternity may not the chance repeat,

But I must tread my single way alone,

In sad remembrance that we once did meet,

And know that bliss irrevocably gone.

The spheres henceforth my elegy shall sing,

For elegy has other subject none;

Each strain of music in my ears shall ring

Knell of departure from that other one.

Make haste and celebrate my tragedy;

With fitting strain resound ye woods and fields;

Sorrow is dearer in such case to me

Than all the joys other occasion yields.

_______________________

Is’t then too late the damage to repair?

Distance, forsooth, from my weak grasp hath reft

The empty husk, and clutched the useless tare,

But in my hands the wheat and kernel left.

If I but love that virtue which he is,

Though it be scented in the morning air,

Still shall we be truest acquaintances,

Nor mortals know a sympathy more rare.

 

from Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay American History, Meridian, 1992. pp. 481-494