Tongues Untied blends documentary and performance to defy the stigmas surrounding Black gay sexuality. Through music, dance, words, and poetry by such pathbreaking writers as Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam, and candid, humorous, and heartbreaking interviews with queer African American men, this film gives voice to what it means to live as an outsider. (Marlon Riggs, 1989, 55 minutes)

Preceded by Riggs’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (No Regret). Five HIV-positive gay Black men (among them poet and performance artist Assotto Saint) discuss their individual confrontations with AIDS, illuminating their journeys through the fear, shame, and stigma that accompanied the disease at the height of the epidemic toward healing, acceptance, and truth. (1993, 38 minutes).

Image caption: Still from Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989) courtesy of Signifyin’ Works.