SPEAKING OUT: MARLON RIGGSTHE FIFTH INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL3 - 5 May 1992Evergreen State College and The Capitol Cinema, Olympia, Washington"RUMINATIONS OF A SNAP QUEEN"Marlon Riggs, Keynote Speaker"I stand here as a gay Black man with HIV. As a gay man I am not supposed to stand and speak. I speak against a deeply personalized shame. I speak for the many thousands who have spoken before me."Filmmaker Marlon Riggs (creator of Tongues Untied) addressed the multicultural debate, racism and homphobia in his keynote speech, "Ruminations of a Snap Queen," at the Fifth International Lesbian / Gay Film Festival at Evergreen State College on May 4. His timing could not have been more appropriate. While Rome was burning in response to the Los Angeles police officers' acquittal for the beating of motorist Rodney King, Riggs pointed out how little has changed in racial attitudes in this country: "Look at what the officers and jurors said about Rodney King -- he was regarded as a brutish figure, which then justified the brutality. That is, control of the 'savage' was justified." In light of the news media's coverage of the upheaval, Riggs decried the use of inherently racist language to describe African-Americans as 'thugs" and "looters," adding, "Through language -- what it says and and specifically what it doesn't say -- the disenfranchised find identity in themselves."Riggs' presentation was accompanied by clips from his films that document African-American representation in popular culture and the struggle for affirmation of identity among gay black men. Ethnic Notions and his latest film Color Adjustment both present and deconstruct the stereotypes of African-Americans. Riggs made explicit his opinion that "A family tree displaying dominant types in the cultural iconography of Black men would show, I believe, an unmistakalbe line of descent from Sambo to the Snap Queen, and in parallel lineage, from the Brute Negro to the AIDS-infected Black Homo-Con-Rapist" (from "Black Macho Revisited: Reflections of a SNAP! Queen," The Independent, April 1991).Ethnic Notions explores the psychologies of racial issues and race in an historical context. In one clip, a scene from D.W. Griffith's The Birth of A Nation (1914) (a film notorious for its racist profile of African-Americans) suggests that their emancipation was a mistake; such images, as Riggs suggests, have not only encouraged racial violence, but also justified it. "Historically, racial hysteria has been seen in every aspect of popular culture in the United States," Riggs told his predominantly white audience. "Psuedo-scientific discourse fused with popular icons of race in late 19th century America to project a social fantasy of Black men, not simply as sexual demons, but significantly, as intrinsically corrupt. Diseased, promiscuous, destructive -- of self and others -- our fundamental nature, it was widely assumed, would lead us to extinction." (Ibid)In Color Adjustment Riggs draws parallels between social history, and the development of television, focusing closely on the myth of the American family and how that model began to incorporate African-American families -- long marginalized outsiders. After World War II, African-Americans became more integrated into middle class America and industrialized society. At the same time, however, television programming recreated "blackface" radio comedies like Amos and Andy, which gained considerable audience as popular TV entertainment. The NAACP first drew attention to, and then tried to block programming which stereotyped African-Americans as either buffoons or crooks. By 1957, an FCC chairman, observing that such programming carries negative currency, remarked that "it is not enough that programming serve the nation's whims, it should also serve the nation's needs."Riggs suggests that in the history of TV, most programming -- from The Beulah Show, though The Cosby Show -- sketches out only African-American characters considered palatable to white, mainstream audiences. Even in The Cosby Show, the mythic status of an upwardly mobile Black American family stands out in sharp contrast to the reality of many single-parent, fractured families devastated by the redistribution of wealth under Reagan-Bush economic programs. Riggs also explores the news media's presentation of African-Americans as violent and "street" during the racial crises in American cities in the '60s. As Kobena Mercer wirtes in his essay "Skin Head Sex Thing" (from How Do I Look, ed. by Bad Object Choices, 1991), "In the master codes of the dominant culture, the assumption that 'all black people are the same' reinforces the view that black communities are monolithic and homogeneous and that black subjectivity is defined exclusively by race and nothing but race."Breaking from the confines of stereotypes, Riggs produced a personal image of gay black men in his short video Anthem. At once both celebratory and powerful, Anthem distills the prose and visual fluidity of Tongues Untied into a spirited portrait of gay black identity. The representational perspective of African-American men asserting their homosexuality makes no apologies for their pride. Indeed, as Riggs points out about Anthem, "We have to constantly confront the fact that we, as Americans, are a hybrid people. We need our spaces but we also have to watch for the imprisonment of our ethnocentricism." In light of this, Anthem posits a "revolution" of experience -- both internalized and externalized in the lesbian and gay community.Apart from the representational perspectives, there were also films and videos shown at the Festival which sought to contextualize cultural identity and expression in documentary formats. Among Good Christian Peoples addressed the struggle of African-American lesbians and gay men whose upbringing had been strongly religious and repressive. And Robert Hilfery's Stop the Church -- pulled from airing on PBS stations last year -- documented the ACT UP action against Cardinal John O'Connor at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York in 1989 in protest of O'Connor's and the Church's discriminatory views on impact of AIDS in the gay community.Riggs himself is no stranger to the impact of repressive political and religious agendas. Vigilance over issues of representation would seem to be necessitated, given the bruising attack instigated by Rev. Donald Wildmon and the far right on Riggs' film Tongues Untied, presented last summer as part of the public television series Point of View. By reediting and manipulating Riggs' film, Wildmon tried to convince Congress to decrease funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; many PBS station affiliates, fearful of conservative protest, chose to eithe pull the installment or to air at the dead of night. Adding insult to injury, presidential hopeful Patrick Buchanan then used parts of Tongues Untied in a TV campaign ad to inflame conservative taxpayers against President Bush and, more specifically, the NEA.In an op-ed piece that appeared March 6 in The New York Times, Riggs spoke out on the manipulation of his work: "In that single ad, old racial taboos and racial anxieties found renewed expression and public resonance."By opening the doors of representation to gays, lesbians and people of color, some of these stereotypes will begin to be erased. Increasingly, ambitious films that explore the diversity of representation are gaining ground, positing fresh perspectives about "queer" culture. Commenting on this diversity, Riggs states, "We must resolve the problem of difference and unity, but we must not tolerate the fetishism of difference. We must affirm difference in all culture and celebrate difference if there is to be a truly radical multiculturism."../img/tongues.jpg../img/nat-king-cole.jpg../img/img-placeholder.gif> Filmmaker Marlon Riggs and Poet Essex Hemphill, "Tongues Untied"; the Nat King Cole Show in "Color Adjustment."