Early Life
Riggs was born in Fort Worth, Texas on February 3, 1957. He was a child of civilian employees of the military and spent a great deal of his childhood traveling. He lived in Texas and Georgia before moving to West Germany at age 11 with his family. Later in his life, Riggs remembered the ostracism and name-calling that he experienced at Hephzibah Junior High School in Hephzibah, Georgia. He stated that black and white students alike called him a “punk," a “faggot,” and “Uncle Tom.” He explains that he felt isolated from everyone at the school: “I was caught between these two worlds where the whites hated me and the blacks disparaged me. It was so painful.”
From 1973 to 1974 Riggs attended Ansbach American High School's opening year in Katterbach, Germany. He was elected student body president at the military dependents school. In 1974, Riggs returned to the United States to attend college. As an undergraduate, Riggs studied history at Harvard University and graduated magna cum laude in 1978. As Riggs began studying the history of American racism and homophobia, he became interested in communicating his ideas about these subjects through film.
After working for a local television station in Texas for about a year, he moved to Oakland, California, where he entered graduate school. He received his master's degree in journalism with a specialization in Documentary film in 1981 from the University of California, Berkeley, having co-produced/co-directed with Peter Webster a master's thesis titled Long Train Running: The Story of the Oakland Blues, a half-hour video on the history of the blues in Oakland, California.
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