It is once Chiron confronts his mother’s abandonment near the film’s end that he is slowly able to allow his performative mask of masculinity to drop. “You can’t survive if you don’t know when these niggas fucking with you,” he says. We see this when he teaches one of his young drug dealers a lesson in masculinity, by bullying and mocking him. The adult Chiron is a far cry from his child and teenage selves, but not in any liberated way. As a child he struggles to even speak to peers or adults because he is so used to being judged his teenage years are filled with isolation. It is the idea of life’s most necessary experiences - of love, affection, closeness - being indefinitely delayed or completely restricted that haunts Chiron in Moonlight.
It is in moments of representation like this that I find myself asking: how much less painful would coming out have been for bodies like mine, my brother’s, and Chiron’s, if we had only seen people like us represented consciously in the mainstream? Who could we have loved if we had been brave enough, if we had been shown and reassured? How much more accepting might our families, neighborhoods, or schools have been? Kevin is surprised by the formerly sensitive Chiron’s new hardened, tough demeanor, and asks, “Who is you, Chiron?”Īs viewers we understand that Chiron is no less sensitive, but that he’s built himself “strong” to stop others from getting close or from attempting to hurt him. It is near the film’s end, when an adult Chiron meets with Kevin, his estranged high school crush. When I think of the time lost between my brother and I, of the emotional mayhem we failed to confide in each other about, a scene in Moonlight provides me with an explanation. For a long period of time I stopped writing, and tried to understand why I had erased myself in my own work. Even in my writing, I realized that while many of the characters in my stories were queer, they were also white. I moved across country, went to riots during movements like Nuit Debout in Paris, and wrangled with my queerness at every turn.
He arrived and told me, “You just need to grow up and deal with this.” As time passed, our distance widened. I once called him during a break in my freshman year of university, to ask him to pick me up from our home, because I’d gotten into an argument with our mother about my sexuality. This was the first moment in cinema I had seen a black man reassuring a potentially gay, black male that his existence was worth taking pride in.įor years we retreated away from one another. Ultimately my brother and I not only struggled with the homophobia that was embedded in Jamaican culture, and with the larger culture’s media that failed to empathetically portray our realities - we also struggled simply to love and support each other. When my mother received the news I watched her cry on the basement floor, begging for God to change us. Everything that I’d been told about my future as a “good black kid” shattered when I was 15 years old, and came out to my mother months later my older brother would come out as well. As a child, I was considered gifted because of my love for books and conditioned to think that obedience equaled safety in America. With every viewing since then, I see both the glaring differences and similarities between my journey and Chiron’s. When I saw Moonlight as a gay, black man at the age of 22, I was shaken to realize that this was the first moment in cinema I had seen a black man reassuring a potentially gay, black male that his existence was not only valid, but also worth taking pride in. Can’t let nobody make that decision for you.” Juan responds, “At some point, you gotta decide for yourself who you gone be. Chiron then asks Juan if Blue is his truer name. During an outing to the beach Juan recalls a woman in Cuba giving him the nickname, Blue. Young Chiron is dealing with the homophobic bullying of his peers, a mother battling drug addiction, and uncertainty about his sexuality, when Juan, a neighborhood drug dealer, decides to become his mentor. Even two years after its release, there is a scene in it that still reaches me. The 2016 film Moonlight is about Chiron - a black boy gradually becoming a man in America’s ghettos - coming to terms with his sexuality in three chapters. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.