This program puts the work of Marlon Riggs in conversation with that of other artists reflecting on, affirming, and celebrating their identities. In Relatives by Julie Dash, Ishmael Huston-Jones recounts family history in a cinematic duet with his mother. Isaac Julien’s This Is Not an AIDS Advertisement counters clinical government PSAs about AIDS with an uncompromising defense of romance and desire, while in Non, je ne regrette rien Riggs weaves together the testimony of five black gay men about being HIV positive and overcoming the silence and stigma around the disease. Thomas Allen Harris’s Splash is a poetic reflection on his ambivalence around issues of representation, gender, and ethnicity framed by remembrance of childhood desire. Brontez Purnell writes that his “fake autobiographical” 100 Boyfriends Mixtape “is the story of a hundred different failed relationships condensed down into the story of one relationship, and the drama around it.” Framed by Essex Hemphill’s poetry, Riggs’s Affirmations defiantly exalts erotic love.