Movies: Essex Hemphill

Marlon Riggs, with assistance from other gay Black men, especially poet Essex Hemphill, celebrates Black men loving Black men as a revolutionary act. The film intercuts footage of Hemphill reciting his poetry, Riggs telling the story of his growing u...

A collage of erotic images and a call to arms, with a feverish hip-hop energy that celebrates the lives of African American men....

A look at what it's like to be gay and black in America....

African-American documentary filmmaker Marlon Riggs was working on this final film as he died from AIDS-related complications in 1994; he addresses the camera from his hospital bed in several scenes. The film directly addresses sexism and homophobia ...

Between 2014 and 2017, McClodden revived the work of deceased Black queer artists who were active during the 1980s AIDS epidemic, including the poet and activist Essex Hemphill. Here, McClodden remakes a scene from Marlon Riggs’s essay-film Tongues U...

Video performance of poetry by Essex Hemphill in performance with Larry Duckette, Brenda Files & Cordell Credle...