Untied (How Does It Feel?)

Early in Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989), the line “baptize me in coconut oil and cum” reworks the language of Black Protestant ritual into a queer invocation of spirituality and desire. Read alongside Joseph Beam’s anthology In the Life (1986), this paper argues that Black queer cultural production draws from, subverts, and reconfigures Black religious forms rather than existing outside them. It reads Tongues Untied as both an extension of and response to Beam’s earlier call for Black gay self-representation in In the Life. Their titles signal this relationship: Tongues Untied invokes Pentecostal glossolalia and the refusal of silence, while In the Life names Black queer community in language resonant with sanctified existence. Through testimony, Riggs and Beam mobilize Black Protestant rhetorical forms to voice Black queer life during the AIDS crisis. Together, these works stage Black queer expression as a liturgical practice of voice, body, intimacy, and communal witness in a moment of imminent death.