"Marlon Troy Riggs" (February 3,1957-April 5,1994)

Was a gay African-American filmmaker,educator,and gay rights activist.He produced,wrote,and directed  several TV. documentaries,including Ethnic Notions,Tongues United,Color Adjustment,

and Black is...Black Ain't.Marlon aesthetically innovative films examine past and present representatives of race and sexuality in America.Born in Forth Worth,Texas.Marlon was 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, he remembered the ostracism and name-calling that he experienced at Hephzibah Junior High School in Hephzibah,Georgia.Marlon stated that African-American 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 1973-1974 Marlon attended Ansbach American High School's opening year in Katterbach,Germany.Marlon was elected student body president at the military dependent school.In 1974 he returned to the U.S. to attend college.As an undergraduate,Marlon studied history at Harvard University and graduated from magna cum laude in 1978.As he 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 T.V. station in Texas for about a year,he moved to Oakland,California,where he entered graduate school.Marlon received his master's degree in journalism with a special 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 Oakland Blues,a half-hour video on the history of the blues in Oakland,California.Upon finishing graduate school,Marlon began working many independent documentary production in the Bay Area.He assisted documentary directors and producers initially as a production assistant and later as a post-production supervisor,editor,and sound editor on documentaries about the American arms race,Nicaragua,Central America,sexism,and disability rights.Because of his proficiency in video technology,Marlon was the on-line editor for a video production company.In 1987,he was hired as a part-time faculty member at the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley to teach documentary film making.Marlon became a tenured professor at Berkeley shortly thereafter.That same year he completed his first professional feature documentary Ethnic Notions.The film was produced in association with KQED,a public television station in San Francisco,and aired on public television stations throughout the U.S..In Ethnic Notions,Marlon sought to explore widespread and persistent stereotypes of African-Americans images, of ugly,savage brutes,and happy servants-in American popular culture of the 19th and 20th centuries.This film uses a a narrative voice-over provided by African-American actress Esther Rolle in explaining striking film footage and historical still which exposes the blatant racism of the era immediately following the Civil War.This documentary also presents a set of contemporary interviews with expert commentators,including historians George Fredrickson and Larry Levine,cultural critic Barbara Christian,and many others who discuss the consequences of historical African-American stereotypes.This film expanded the commonly held assumptions about the parameters of documentary film aesthetics through its bold use of performance,dance,and music,to explore a historical narrative.While Marlon continued working as an educator at Berkeley,he kept making his own films.The 1989 film Tongues United,a highly personalized and moving documentary about the life experiences of gay African-American men,was aired as part of the PBS television series P.O.V. The film employs autobiographical footage as well as performance,including monologues,songs,poems,and nonverbal gestures such as snapping to convey an authentic and positive African-American gay identity.In order to demonstrate the harmful effects of silence on self-esteem,the film contrasts this image with negative representations of gay African-American men as comic-tragic stock caricatures and drag queens in contemporary American popular culture.The three principle voices of Tongues United are those of Marlon as well as gay rights activists.Marlon described the production as his own personal "coming out"film celebrating black gay life experiences and that he ultimately became "the person,the vehicle,and the vessel for these experience.Marlon explained that tongues was a catharsis for him: "It was a release of  a lot of decades-old,pent-up emotion,rage,guilt,feelings of impotence in the face of some of my experiences as a youth...it allowed me to move past all of those things that were bottled up inside me...I could finally let go.In 1988,while working on Tongues United,Marlon was diagnosed with HIV after undergoing treatment for near-fatal kidney failure at a hospital in Germany.The film shows the pain as well as the mentally and physically agonizing therapy that he had to go through in order in order to deal with his  kidney failure.Despite his deteriorating health,Marlon decided to continue to teach at Berkeley and make documentaries.In the short 1990 piece Affirmations,Marlon further developed his critique of homophobia that he originally expressed in Tongues Untied.In Affirmations,film made from the outtakes of "Tongues Untied," Marlon included Marlon included a coming-out story gay writer Reginald T.Jackson and footage of African-American men marching in a Harlem African America Freedom Day Parade.In 1991,he directed and produced Anthem,a short documentary about African-America male sexuality.The film includes a collage of erotic images of African-America men,hip-hop music,and a call to celebrate differences in sexuality.In 1991,Marlon founded signifin'works,a non-profit corporation whose mission is to produce films about history&culture.The founding Board of Directors included:Vivian Kleiman,Herman Gray,Patricia Turner,and Cornelius Moore.The 1992 documentary Color Adjustment was his second film to air on the PBS t.v. series P.V.O. the film Color Adjustment was Marlon follow-up to Ethnic Notions,focusing on images of African-American people in America t.v. from the mid-1940s through the 1980s.Unlike Ethnic Notions,which presents a putative,neutral slances on popular American representations of African-Americans,Color Adjustment presents a cultural criticism of these images through an African-American perspective on race.Produced by Vivian Kleiman,the film is narrated by African-American actress Rudy Dee.Using contemporary interviews of t.v. actors,directors,producers,and cultural commentators,the documentary conveys personal reflections and academic analyses of such t.v.programs as Good Times and The Cosby Show.In 1992,he directed the film [Non,Je Ne Regrette Rien (No Reget),in which five gay African American men who are Hiv-positive discuss how they are battling the double stigmas surrounding their infection and homosexuality.It was commissioned as part of a series of documentaries on the AIDS crisis.In 1993,Marlon received an honorary honorary doctorate degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts.That same year, he experimental short Anthem was featured in a collection of short films entitled Boys' Shorts:The New Queer Cinema.Shortly after completing "Color Adjustment," Marlon began work on what was to be his final film Black is...Black Ain't, a project that was completed posthumously by co-producer Nicole Atkinson,co-director/co-editor Christine Badgley,and Signifyin'Works.Much of the final text of Black Is...Black Ain't was developed by Marlon one night in his hospital room."It was as it the film film were rolling before me,"and i was just transcribing;I was couldn't keep up."The film therefore contains many scenes of Marlon on his hospital bed.The documentary takes on the topic of African-American identity,including considerations of skin,color,religion,politics,class stratification,sexuality,and gender difference that revolve around it.In this film,Marlon meets a cross-section of African Americans graping with the paradox of numerous,often contradictory definitions of blackness.He shows many who have felt unconfortable  and even silenced within the race because their complexion,class,sexuality,gender,or speech has rendered them "not black enough,"or conversely,"too black."The film scrutinizes the identifications of "blackness"with masculinity as well as sexism,patriarchy and homophobia in black America."(University of California).Besides making documentaries and teaching at Berkeley,Marlon also wrote poetry from time to time,as evidenced in Tongues Untied,which contains several of his poems about his life experiences as a black gay man.In his poem "Tongues Untied," Marlon discusses the racism he encountered as a child while living in Georgia as well as coming out about his homosexuality.