DiAna’s Hair Ego. 1990. USA. Directed by Ellen Spiro. Digital projection. Digital preservation courtesy of the filmmaker. 29 min.
Meet DiAna DiAna, a cosmetologist in Columbia, South Carolina, who personally oversees the education of her tight-knit black community on AIDS transmission and safer sex. DiAna and her partner, Dr. Bambi Sumpter (Gaddist), turn their beauty salon into the primary hub for the South Carolina AIDS Education Network (SCAEN). The reach of DiAna and her partner is astounding: they host Tupperware parties where they graphically detail safer sex practices with elders, they keep a permanently accessible basket of condoms for customers, and they weather the resistance from the conservative powers that be in their town. Ellen Spiro’s marvelous, inspiring portrait of DiAna’s life and work is a vivid record of heroism in action.
Tongues Untied. 1989. USA. Directed by Marlon Riggs. Digital projection. Digital restoration. 55 min.
“Black men loving black men is the revolutionary act.” DiAna’s Hair Ego is paired (as it often has been historically) with Marlon Riggs’s 1989 masterwork and radical manifesto, Tongues Untied. Riggs works with poet Essex Hemphill to create a kaleidoscopic image of queer blackness in America, before deliberately and systemically dismantling the limiting constructions of its perception; no one in Tongues Untied is invulnerable. Hemphill’s poems also address the AIDS crisis directly: The title of this series is derived from one of his eloquent requiems, “Now we think as we fuck. This nut might kill. This kiss could turn to stone.” Riggs and Hemphill speak directly and offer an optimistic gesture to the national populace (the video was shown on PBS in 1991): the opportunity to listen.