Yet his filmography retains all its power-and indeed gains new significance-when viewed today. In recent years, however, Riggs has been pigeonholed as a historical figure, inextricably tied in both style and substance to the early 1990s. The controversy surrounding the PBS broadcast of Tongues Untied (1989), his poetic and unapologetic portrait of black gay male existence, had pushed him to the center of the culture wars, where he quickly became a media spokesman for numerous constituencies at once: African Americans, gay men, people with AIDS-not to mention independent filmmakers. “Because of the likelihood that you could die at this moment,” Riggs explains on camera, “ AIDS forces you to deal with that and to look around you and say, ‘Hey, I’m wasting my time if I’m not devoting every moment to thinking about how can I communicate to black people so that we start to look at each other, we start to see each other.’”Īt the time of his death, Riggs seemed poised to become one of America’s most important public intellectuals. This sense of urgency had gripped him since his HIV diagnosis five years earlier, but a decline in health had increased his determination. In one such moment, he relates how, during a visit to the emergency room, he had dreams of Harriet Tubman appearing to him and leading him through a forest and across a river, a vision he interpreted as a sign that he needed to keep working through his adversity. Black Ain’t forthrightly reveals in several sequences that show the filmmaker, hooked up to machines, providing narration and commentary from his bed. Like many of his generation who developed AIDS, Riggs spent his last days in a hospital, as Black Is. Black Ain’t (1995), a sweeping video essay on the manifold complexities of African American identity, was completed by his production team in the months following his death. WHEN MARLON RIGGS DIED in April 1994, at the age of thirty-seven, he was immersed in making his fourth feature-length documentary.
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