[5] The film blends documentary footage with personal account and poetry in an attempt to depict the specificity of Black gay identity.

Riggs experienced this in San Francisco, California within the Castro District, in which he states, "I was immersed in vanilla" and witnessed the absence of the Black gay image.

Other elements within the film include footage of the Civil Rights Movement and clips of Eddie Murphy performing a homophobic stand-up routine.

Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan cited Tongues Untied as an example of how President George H. W. Bush was using taxpayer's money to fund "pornographic art".

[9][10] News of the film's impending airing sparked a national debate about whether or not it is appropriate for the federal government of the United States to fund artistic creations that offended some.

Riggs stated that ironically, the censorship campaign against Tongues Untied actually brought more publicity to the film than it would have otherwise received and thus enhanced its effectiveness in challenging societal standards regarding depictions of race and sexuality.

[15] At the same time, the national broadcast of Tongues Untied was applauded by many others who resoundingly defended the work, among them Norman Lear's People for the American Way.

A nine-day retrospective curated by Ashley Clark was launched at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and was entitled Race, Sex & Cinema: The World of Marlon Riggs.

[17][18] In May, 2019, the Peabody Awards honored Marlon and Tongues Untied with a tribute, which Billy Porter of the award-winning FX series Pose presented.

In conversation before the event with Vivian Kleiman, he noted that he saw Tongues Untied when it was broadcast on PBS, and the film changed his life, and gave him his voice at an early age.

[20] New York Times critic-at-large Wesley Morris wrote "Tongues Untied is Riggs's unclassifiable scrapbook of black gay male sensibility (a hallucinatory whir of style, memory, psychology)....