Marlon Riggs & The Contexts of Twentieth-Century Black Queer Cultural Production

Sam King-Shaw is a PhD Candidate at the University of Buffalo in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies. Sam’s research explores questions of relationality, desire, (freedom) dreams, and genealogy in twentieth-century Black queer cultural production. They are the 2024 recipient of Rose Library’s LGBTQ Collections Fellowship. 

In the spring of 2025, I had the incredible opportunity to conduct archival research for my dissertation at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library as an LGBTQ Collections Fellow. My dissertation project is an examination of twentieth-century cultural production by Black queer writers and artists in the United States. Through archival research and comparative textual and visual analysis, my project aims to situate Black queer art and literature within a relational network that connects Black queer cultural workers across time and space. The notion that Black queer artists and the works they create are connected and in conversation with each other across time and space is at the center of my dissertation research; I examine film, literature, photography, and performance by twentieth-century Black queer artists, activists, and intellectuals, to analyze Black queer cultural production within its historical, political, and social context. My dissertation project centers work by Black queer U.S.-based artists and writers such as Richard Bruce Nugent, Angelina Weld Grimké, Jewelle Gomez, Marlon Riggs, Michelle Parkerson, and Cheryl Dunye. To further my dissertation research, I consulted materials in the Network Q, Southeastern Arts, Media, and Education Project (SAME), National Association of Black & White Men Together (BWMT), David Lowe, and Billy Howard collections. 

In my dissertation project, I focus on Black queer artists and artworks from the beginning of the twentieth century (the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance) and the end of the twentieth century (the first decades of the AIDS crisis and the New Queer Cinema). Thus, during my time at the Rose Library, I consulted materials from the 1980s and 1990s in order to glean further insight and perspectives on LGBTQ+ culture, politics, and social issues at the end of the twentieth century: digitized materials in the Network Q collection highlighted the range of issues and topics that were important to LGBTQ+ communities around the U.S. (including marriage equality, gay military service, gay tourism, gay parenting, film festivals, and AIDS), while materials such as newspaper clippings, organizational newsletters, and materials related to Atlanta’s Gay & Lesbian Film Festivals in the 1990s, from the David A. Lowe papers, BWMT records, and SAME records, respectively, provided local and national insights into the historical, social, and political contexts of LGBTQ+ cultural production and reception. As one example of the value of the LGBTQ Collections at the Rose Library to my dissertation research, I was particularly interested in tracing the reception and perceptions of the work of the Black gay filmmaker Marlon Riggs during the 1990s, from the first airings of his groundbreaking film Tongues Untied on U.S. public television in 1991, to his death in 1994 and the persistence of his legacy into the second half of the 1990s. Materials in the David A. Lowe, SAME, and BWMT collections provided insight into Riggs and his work, especially through materials related to local showings of Riggs’s films in Atlanta.  

Marlon Riggs’s groundbreaking 1989 film Tongues Untied explored the lives and experiences of Black gay men, addressing issues such as the AIDS crisis, racism in gay spaces and homophobia in the Black community, and the general invisibility of Black gay men in U.S. society. The film became a target of homophobic conservative backlash, particularly due to the film’s portrayals of Black gay intimacy and sexuality, and many broadcast stations around the U.S. refused to air the film. In the David A. Lowe papers, a copy of the Southern Voice from August 1991 includes an article that declared “Black gay film gets positive response here – other cities refuse to air program,” which offers insight into the reception of Tongues Untied in several southern locations.i As the article describes, despite an initial negative response in Atlanta, “by the end of the week, response had turned around, and the final count was 56% to 44% in favor of airing the film.” However, the statewide network of North Carolina “refused to air the program,” resulting in local organizers hosting “a free screening of Tongues Untied.” As a primary source, this article from the local Southern Voice indicates the diversity of responses to Riggs’s film. 

Two years after the initial airings of Tongues Untied on U.S. public television, materials in the SAME collection indicate that Riggs was still known by the controversy surrounding Tongues Untied. At the 1993 Atlanta Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, both Tongues Untied and Riggs’s new film, Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien/No Regret were both shown, as were films by other Black queer artists, such as Isaac Julien and Thomas Allen Harris. A press release (included among the promotional material for the film festival) announcing the release of No Regret declares, “Controversial Filmmaker Marlon T. Riggs to Premiere New Video on HIV/AIDS Disclosure.”ii Describing Riggs as the “controversial Emmy Award winning filmmaker,” this press release suggests that Riggs’s ongoing reception as an artist was deeply tied to the complex reactions to Tongues Untied and indicates the continuing impact of Tongues Untied¸ as the AIDS crisis continued to take a terrible toll on Black gay men.  

In my examination of Marlon Riggs and his legacy, the BWMT collection was also of significant value, providing the opportunity to examine a wide range of perspectives on LGBTQ+ history in the 1980s and 1990s, as this collection included materials from BWMT chapters across the U.S., including the Bay Area chapter, where Riggs worked and lived. Among the Bay Area BWMT materials was a copy of the May & June 1994 BWMT Bridge, the Bay Area BWMT newsletter, which included an obituary for Riggs: “Marlon Riggs – A Voice Stilled.”iii The obituary describes Riggs as “[b]rilliantly articulate, fearless in the face of his enemies, … [and] a bright flame in the world of documentary film – a consummate artist who brought a clear, distinctive voice to his work, and challenged us to see in new ways.” This moving obituary provides another layer of information about the vitality and impact of Riggs’s body of work, which touched the lives of many Black queer people in his community and left a powerful legacy. 

After his death, Riggs’s body of work and legacy as an artist continue to reverberate throughout the LGBTQ+ community. SAME materials related to the 1996 Atlanta Lesbian and Gay Film Festival show that this year’s festival included a screening of I Shall Not Be Removed, as posthumously released documentary about Riggs, his artistic practice, and his battle with AIDS, as well as a screening of Riggs’s 1990 short film Affirmations. A description of I Shall Not Be Removed describes Riggs as “a remarkable artist and human being.”iv I would argue that the screening of this film attests to Riggs’s ongoing legacy and continued significance in the tradition of Black queer cultural production, as well as marking the progression and devastation of the ongoing AIDS crisis. 

The LGBTQ Collections at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library have been invaluable to my dissertation research. As I continue to develop my dissertation project, materials such as those described above will play an important role in contextualizing my textual and visual analyses of Black queer cultural production such as Tongues Untied. Archival materials such as those held at the Rose Library illuminate the contexts from which Black queer cultural production emerged, and how such art and literature was received by diverse audiences. Studying these contexts creates new perspectives on Black LGBTQ+ history and offers new ways to help us understand Black queer pasts, presents and futures (where we have been, where we are, and where we are going) in a new light.