Marlon Riggs - Controversy

Controversy

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Riggs's production Tongues Untied triggered a national controversy surrounding the airing of the video on American public television stations. Along with private donations, Riggs had financed the documentary with a $5,000 grant from the Western States Regional Arts Fund, a re-granting agency funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, an independent federal agency that provides funding and support for visual, literary, and performing artists. The P.O.V. television series on PBS, which Tongues Untied was a part of, also received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts in the amount of $250,000. The film received much contention due to its depiction of nudity, use of street lingo, and scenes of men making love.

News of the film's airing sparked a national debate about whether or not it is appropriate for the Federal government of the United States to fund artistic creations that to some are considered obscene. Artists stressed their basic right of free speech and vehemently opposed censorship of their art. However, several right-wing United States government policymakers and many conservative watchdog groups were against using taxpayer money to fund what they believed were repulsive artistic works. In the 1992 Republican presidential primaries, presidential candidate Pat Buchanan cited Tongues Untied as an example of how President George H. W. Bush was investing “our tax dollars in pornographic and blasphemous art.” Buchanan released an anti-Bush television advertisement for his campaign using re-edited clips from Tongues United. The ad aired for several days throughout the United States but was quickly removed from television channels after Riggs accused Buchanan of copyright infringement and asked his campaign to stop airing the ad.

Reverend Donald E. Wildmon, the president of the American Family Association, opposed PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts for airing Tongues Untied but hoped that the film would be widely released, because he believed most Americans would find it offensive. “This will be the first time millions of Americans will have an opportunity to see the kinds of things their tax money is being spent on,” he said. “This is the first time there is no third party telling them what is going on; they can see for themselves.”

Riggs defended Tongues Untied for its ability to “shatter this nation's brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference.” He explained that the widespread attack on PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts by moral critics in response to the film was predictable, since “any public institution caught deviating from their puritanical morality is inexorably blasted as contributing to the nation's social decay.” In his defense, Riggs claimed that “implicit in the much overworked rhetoric about 'community standards' is the assumption of only one central community (patriarchal, heterosexual and usually white) and only one overarching cultural standard (ditto) to which television programming must necessarily appeal.” Riggs stated that ironically, the censorship campaign against Tongues Untied actually brought more publicity to the film than it would have otherwise received and thus allowed it to achieve its initial aim of challenging societal standards regarding depictions of race and sexuality.