raced and queered: the art of resistance
Anger unspoken becomes pain, expressed becomes rage, released becomes violence
- Snap! spoken word piece in Tongues Untied
***
Not too long ago, Queer McGill screened a film as part of their more-or-less-monthly Divergence Movie Night, entitled Tongues Untied. It’s a sort of hybrid documentary/art film shot in 1986, and it addresses the realities of racism and homophobia faced by black gay men in New York City around that time period. A lot of the film is made up of well-filmed performance art pieces by the group Snap!, and possibly others - the credits went by pretty fast so I didn’t get all the specifics.
The film was remarkably effective - probably one of the better examples I can think of that conveys a really strong message through performance and images rather than in a didactic style that relies on statistics or argumentation. I don’t know what I was expecting, to be honest, but the film really went deep for me, and I can still feel it hovering at the edges of my mind sometimes when I look at things going on in the world around me.
The two parts of the film that struck me the most are, in a way, polar opposites of each other: one showing how racism and homophobia, both from the world at large and the internalized sort, serve to isolate black gay men from each other, and the second showing the richness of the community that black gay men created for themselves in the 80s. Of course that lack of homogeneity makes sense; both of these things were (are) true, and their juxtaposition in the film is incredibly effective at conveying the multiplicity of realities within the spectrum of struggle.
The first, a particularly hard-hitting piece, involves a montage of phrases coming out of mouths filmed in extreme close-up, and repeated at different speeds and in different combinations, interspersed with a more linear narrative spoken by a single artist we see mostly from the torso up. Black men’s mouths say the words "punk," "homo" and "faggot" and white men’s mouths say "motherfuckin’ coon" and "niggers go home." The artist in turn speaks in sentences ranging from poetic to conversational - about his childhood, his understandings of himself as gay, his experiences with lovers. "Cornered by an identity I never wanted to claim, I ran fast deep inside myself where it was calm, silent, safe. Deception." He talks about the way that black men often won’t acknowledge other black men within the larger gay community, saying that it can be difficult "admitting we are worth loving each other."
In the second piece, I was really impressed by the way these men claimed femininity as their territory. This is particularly evident in the scenes of black men voguing on the streets in a performance structure that looks, to me at least, a lot like what I see breakers do today - the taking-turns style of competition without points or rules, with the aim of the game being to impress the audience and get applause and cheers for good moves before stepping aside to let the next artist in for a shot. (Hah! And whaddaya know… Wikipedia tells me that "Some dance historians even point out that breakdance and vogue evolved together in a state of mutual borrowing, with artists from both sides interacting with each other in New York City’s Central Park, West Side Piers, Harlem, and Washington Square Park during the 70s and early 80s." Neato. I had no idea.) They aren’t just striking interesting twisted-up poses; they are performing deft, rhythmic, spot-on mime-like imitations of "women’s" motions, such as putting on make-up, preening in the mirror, fixing hair, walking on a runway. Slick women’s high-fashion culture appropriated and given new meaning by black gay men on the street - if there ever were a way to de-naturalize conventionally commercialized femininity, this certainly is it.
I already knew that Madonna had stolen her vogue moves from black gay men, but I’d never seen the real thing being done by those men themselves - unless you count her backup dancers. But somehow the context makes all the difference. A slick auditorium stage or music video featuring the snowy-white Queen of Pop front and centre - uncomplicatedly embodying the very things the dance is intended to parody and question - simply doesn’t convey the same message as a New York City street corner used as a makeshift stage by the denizens of a very specific subculture.
The cultural process is fascinating. Without even daring to attempt an explanation of the processes of appropriation that create high fashion in the first place, it’s still mind-boggling to think of the high-end production of packaged femininity co-opted by street-level black gay dancers to express their own femininity while making a rather barbed statement about queerness and race… and that statement being in turn co-opted by a white pop star, removing its irony (though perhaps adding its own, however unconciously), putting it in a music video with a hit song that popularizes the dance - or a shoddy imitation thereof - among straight, white suburban teenagers all over the world, who pay big money to watch the star imitate the moves that imitated the moves that… wow.
All in all, I think the film’s strength lies in its ability to convey, on an emotional level, the magnitude of the oppression these men faced, and then to follow it up with images of their creativity and power. And here lies the message I walked away with… There’s something about these men daring to produce creative work and beauty amid the kind of violence, racism and anger that characterized their lives, that’s just an incredible show of strength. It’s more than simply surviving; it’s putting joy out into a world that’s determined to impose hatred and misery, that’s trying to tell people it’s not OK for them even to exist. To react to that kind of experience with an outpouring of beauty - not for the benefit or entertainment of the oppressors, but for the building and sustaining and nourishment of their own very rich culture and community - is an amazing and awe-inspiring act of resistance.
Prior to seeing Tongues Untied, I always had an academic understanding of cultural production as political resistance, but somehow I see it differently now, having watched it play out in this intensified way within a really specific microcosm. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, perhaps a film is worth a thousand books? (Which is saying something, coming from me…)
With that in mind, to segue smoothly into current events, I’m really looking forward to this coming Saturday, when the In/Visible Identities day is taking place - the third annual GLBT Ethnocultural Day, which features a full day of speakers layered on top of a full day of - you guessed it - films. Yay! You can check out my Mirror article on the Ethnocultural Day here, but one way or the other, I encourage you to just show up. I’m thoroughly impressed by their programming this year, and for films in particular, Nada tells me they really focused on bringing in hard-to-find works by independent filmmakers - the kind of thing you just won’t find elsewhere. Who knows… maybe there will be another gem like Tongues Untied, and this time, I won’t be seeing it 20 years after it was made!