Beyond Risk: Marlon Riggs, Black Queer Pleasure, and the Governance of Sexuality In the U.S. AIDS Crisis

Background and Purpose: Social work has an ethical and scholarly obligation to examine how racism, homophobia, stigma, and institutional neglect shape sexuality, health, and well-being across historically marginalized communities. Yet scholarship on HIV/AIDS has often framed Black gay male sexuality primarily through risk, pathology, surveillance, and behavioral compliance, leaving comparatively less attention to pleasure, intimacy, and belonging in Black queer life. This paper addresses that gap through an interpretive historical case study of Black gay filmmaker, cultural critic, and university professor Marlon Troy Riggs. Focusing on Tongues Untied (1989), selected interviews, and public commentary produced during the U.S. AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, the paper asks: (1) How does Riggs’s work reveal the public governance of Black gay sexuality through stigma and risk discourse? (2) How does Riggs position pleasure, intimacy, and desire as mechanisms of identity formation, critical consciousness, and resistance? and (3) How does his cultural work illuminate and contest the regulatory logics through which Black gay sexuality was made legible during the AIDS crisis?

Methods: This study uses an interpretive qualitative historical case study design. Riggs functions as an instrumental case through which the cultural politics of Black queer sexuality and pleasure come into view. The analysis draws on publicly available primary and secondary sources. Primary materials include Tongues Untied, selected recorded interviews, and Riggs’s public commentary. Secondary materials include scholarship on Black gay men’s sexual health and pleasure, HIV/AIDS, stigma, intersectionality, queer historiography, neoliberalism, and biopolitics. The analysis attends to language, imagery, tone, narrative structure, and recurring tensions around desire, intimacy, legitimacy, and governance.

Results: Riggs’s work reveals that Black gay sexuality during the AIDS crisis was governed through racialized discourses of danger, deviance, and disease, while Black gay men were simultaneously denied full social recognition, safety, and belonging. At the same time, Riggs refuses the reduction of Black gay life to pathology or risk. Across his films and public commentary, pleasure emerges not as private excess, but as a socially mediated site of identity formation, communal longing, and political critique. Tongues Untied in particular insists on the public visibility of Black gay intimacy, tenderness, humor, and erotic specificity in a cultural moment that sought to render such life shameful or disposable. Riggs’s archive also shows how desire was shaped by structural exclusion, racialized vulnerability, and patriarchal codes of masculinity, while still functioning as a resource for critical consciousness and resistance.

Conclusions and Implications: This paper contributes to social work scholarship by showing that sexuality during the AIDS crisis cannot be understood adequately through risk and regulation alone. Riggs’s cultural work demonstrates that Black queer pleasure was never outside power, yet neither was it reducible to power’s terms. Instead, it operated as a contested but generative site through which Black gay men negotiated intimacy, belonging, survival, and political refusal. For social work research, education, and practice, these findings underscore the need for approaches to sexuality that move beyond pathology and behavioral compliance to engage pleasure, self-definition, and structural inequality as central to health and well-being.