Marlon Riggs

Marlon Troy Riggs (February 3, 1957 – April 5, 1994) was a black gay filmmaker, educator, poet, and activist.

He produced, wrote, and directed several documentary films, including Ethnic Notions, Tongues Untied, Color Adjustment, and Black Is...Black Ain't. His films examine past and present representations of race and sexuality in the United States.

The Marlon Riggs Collection is housed at Stanford University Libraries.

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 the age of 11 with his family.

He was the son of Jean (mother) and Alvin Riggs (father) and also had a sibling named Sascha.

Later in his life, Riggs recalled 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 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."

Riggs excelled at Nurnberg American High School, where he played football and ran track, and was elected President of the Varsity Club while only a sophomore.

He also performed a solo interpretive dance in the school's talent show depicting American slaves' experiences from Africa through emancipation.

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, he studied history at Harvard University and graduated magna cum laude in 1978.

While a student at Harvard, Riggs realized that he was gay.

Because there were no courses that supported the study of homosexuality, he petitioned the History Department and received approval to pursue independent study of the portrayal of "male homosexuality in American fiction and poetry".

As he began studying the history of American racism and homophobia, Riggs 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 lived for 15 years with his lover, Jack Vincent.

Riggs entered graduate school and 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 blues music in Oakland, California.

Upon finishing graduate school, Riggs began working on many independent documentary productions in the Bay Area.

He assisted documentary directors and producers initially as an assistant editor and later as a post-production supervisor, editor on documentaries about the American arms race, Nicaragua, Central America, sexism, and disability rights.

Because of his proficiency in video technology, Riggs was the on-line editor for a video production company, Espresso Productions.

In 1987, Riggs was hired as a part-time faculty member at the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley to teach documentary filmmaking.

He became the youngest tenured professor at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

In 1987 he completed his first professional feature documentary Ethnic Notions.

An independently produced documentary, the film was inspired by an exhibit of black memorabilia at the Berkeley Art Center of black stereotypes from the collection of Jan Faulkner.

The film received technical support (online editing) from KQED, a public television station in San Francisco, and aired on public television stations throughout the United States.

In 1988, while working both on Color Adjustment and Tongues Untied, Riggs was diagnosed with HIV after undergoing treatment for near-fatal kidney failure at a hospital in Germany.

Despite his deteriorating health, Riggs decided to continue to teach at Berkeley and make documentaries.

The 1989 Marlon completed the landmark experimental documentary film Tongues Untied. Ultimately, it was aired on national PBS as part of the television series P.O.V. The three principal voices of Tongues Untied are those of Riggs, and poets Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam.

Tongues Untied had political backlash; Republican Senator Jesse Helms famously argued to defund the arts after its release.

In the short 1990 piece Affirmations, Riggs explored the African-American males' sexuality and relationship with the African-American community at large.

Some of the men expressed the lack of acceptance within the African-American community and the divide their sexual orientation caused.

In 1991, Riggs directed and produced Anthem, a short documentary about African-American male sexuality.

In 1991, Marlon founded Signifyin' Works, a non-profit production company that produces films about African-American history and culture.

In Ethnic Notions, Riggs sought to explore widespread and persistent stereotypes of African Americans – images of ugly, savage brutes and happy servants – in American popular culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Edited by Debbie Hoffmann, the film uses voice-over narration provided by African-American actress Esther Rolle in explaining striking film footage and historical stills which expose the blatant racism of the era immediately following the Civil War.

The documentary also presents a set of contemporary interviews with historians George Fredrickson and Lawrence Levine, the cultural critic Barbara Christian, folklorist Patricia Turner, and black memorabilia collector Jan Faulkner, who discuss the consequences of historical African-American stereotypes.