As director Marlon Riggs explained, “Tongues United was motivated by a singular imperative: to shatter America’s brutalizing silence around matters of sexual and racial difference.” Quickly becoming a flashpoint in public debates around race, sexuality, and public decency, Riggs’ masterful experimental documentary clearly accomplished this goal. Movingly poetic, erotic, angry and beautiful, Tongues Untied destroys longstanding myths surrounding what it means to be a black gay man.