The film Moonlight is extraordinary for many reasons, but to me it is most so for two. First, it considers black boys to be precious, at a time when news stories perpetually make it seem as if the United States considers them to be utterly expendable. Second, it acknowledges the effects that the stalking ghosts of premature death and incarceration have upon gay black masculinity – and it manages to do so without ever diminishing the lives full of complex humanity that black gay men still manage to have in America while navigating that reality.

So often, gay lives in America are coded as white, and the forces that shape the lives of queer people of color – say, how immigration affects being Chicano and gay in Calfornia, or how police surveillance affects being black and gay in the New York – are ignored, as gay identity is usually swept up into whiteness. Moonlight eschews this reductivism entirely, brilliantly portraying in a lyrical story how love and connection attempt to take hold.

Moonlight review – devastating drama is vital portrait of black gay masculinity in America Read more

The fact that there are about a million and a half black men disappeared from American society by early death and incarceration is not a side issue to black gay men. It’s certainly no side issue to Chiron, Moonlight’s hero, who successfully seeks out a father figure, Juan (Mahershala Ali), only to lose him to an early death. And yet, Moonlight also shows how creative and brilliant black humanity is at being so much more than its pain. Director Barry Jenkins doesn’t dwell on Juan’s death as much as he does on the beauty of his embrace of Chiron in his arms in the sea, on his smile, on his joyful proclamation that you can find black people wherever you go in the world.

Another gift Jenkins gives not just to American cinema, but to American culture, is that he depicts black boyhood as something worthy of rooting for to succeed. It is not especially difficult to make white boyhood precious. In the 2014 movie Boyhood, director Richard Linklater encouraged the audience to hold as precious and unique Mason, a banal and totally average white American child who existed in an imaginary nearly all-white Texas. Mason and his friend engage in petty vandalism, and also drink and drive – and yet, Mason, “no angel”, was excused and held dear in a way a black child never would be.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about a Yale study where pre-school teachers were asked to watch videos of very young children to look for signs of trouble, and eye-tracking software revealed their eyes went for the black boys first and watched them the most. And why wouldn’t they? As consumers of non-fiction media in America, we are always being told that black boys are suspicious and that violence against them is justifiable.

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The same week Moonlight opened, a sign commemorating Emmett Till, murdered for whistling at a white woman, was riddled with bullet holes – a 14-year-old still considered suspect, six decades after being lynched. But white boys, like Boyhood’s Mason, are considered innocent by default. As we saw the same actor, Ellar Coltraine, grow up on film over 12 years, we were encouraged to see him as the future of America, worth protecting.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jharrel Jerome as Kevin and Ashton Sanders as Chiron in Moonlight’s second act. Photograph: David Bornfriend/film company handout

In Moonlight, we also see a boy, Chiron, turn into a young man over many years, though we only see him at three stages, each time played by a different actor. Jenkins and the actor who plays “Little” Chiron, Alex R Hibbert, are extraordinarily effective at melting your heart. We root for Little Chiron and his watchful eyes, whether he is avoiding bullies or tepidly checking out his friends as they compare penises. When he poured boiling water into the tub, my heart was in my throat that he could be hurt.

But what is more extraordinary, perhaps, is that Jenkins continues to retain our sympathies as Chiron develops into a less passive and more complex person

The breadth of Moonlight’s ambitions, and the deft way it deals with complexity is captured at the end of its second chapter, when something happens that chilled me both times I’ve seen it. Chiron (now portrayed by Ashton Sanders) approaches Terrel, a bully who had ordered Chiron’s friend Kevin to beat Chiron up, and smashes a chair over his head. The scene is stunning, not just as a surprise act of revenge from a character whom the audience has experienced as sensitive and sweet, but of how visually reminiscent it is of something that happened in real life. In 2015, a black man named Bayna El-Amin smashed a chair over a white gay couple in a BBQ restaurant in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.

When a video of the attack went viral without context, it led to calls for an investigation into whether the “thug” El-Amin had committed a hate crime against the white gay men. But the story was more complex. El-Amin identified as queer in some way, and claimed that the act was in retribution for a fight started by the white gay men he hit with the chair.

Gay advocacy groups were interested in the case when it could have been about two white gay men hit by a straight black man, but lost interest when it turned out to be about a black queer man hitting back against white gay men who had started a fight. In different ways, the fictive, slight Chiron and the real life, brawny El-Amin show that it is possible to be black, gay and able to exact revenge against the person who is causing you pain by hitting them with a chair. These narratives muddle a clean victim-perpetrator narrative, do not go well for anyone involved, and are so human.

The person I saw Moonlight with (another queer person of color) cheered aloud when Chiron hit Kevin, then sighed when the police showed up, because he knew Chiron’s decision to defend himself was going to cost him dearly. (It also cost El-Amin, who was sentenced to nine years.) By the end of the scene, we don’t know for how long Chiron is going away for.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Heart-melting: Alex Hibbert as little Chiron. Photograph: David Bornfriend, courtesy of A24

In Moonlight’s third and final chapter, we do know that Chiron has gone away for some time (during which he meets someone who has now put him out on the block to sell drugs); that his friend Kevin was also incarcerated; that his father figure has died prematurely, and that his mother, Paula (Naomie Harris) lives under some kind of supervised control in a rehab center. When Chiron reconnects with Kevin, he is still on parole, and the experiences of confinement have heavily affected everyone – especially Paula, who is so broken by it she chooses to stay in the rehab center when she could leave because she can’t survive outside.

Even in the film’s uplifting moments, it is depressing that everyone in Chiron’s life is either dead or living under some form of state surveillance. Jenkins deals with this deftly, without being heavy-handed or dismissive, and makes the characters no less worthy of our support.

The first time I saw Moonlight, I was worried that it could create a dangerous takeaway message: that if black gay men want to lead full lives, they should try to escape from the violence of other black men and into the arms of whiteness. A reading of the film to that point could be saying that Chiron’s precious boyhood could not be trusted to other black boys and men and might better be nurtured elsewhere.

As the 1989 film Tongues Untied – still so relevant today – points out, it is common for black gay men to internalize a fear of one another and to buy into a push that we ought to flee into the arms of a white gay man. Like worshipping a Brad Pitt-like portrait of Jesus Christ in church, it is easy for black gay men to internalize society’s pressure to idealize white men and believe that salvation can be had by being closer to whiteness.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alex Hibbert and Mahershala Ali as Juan: a model of gay acceptance. Photograph: David Bornfriend, courtesy of A24

Since the shootings of mostly Latino queer people at the Pulse nightclub, I have consciously been trying to spend time in queer communities of color, meeting likeminded folks who also desire queerness in skin that looks like theirs. But even among us, it has been sad to learn how often black gay men tell me that out in the world, those like them won’t give them the acknowledging head nod on the street. Brothers have also shared their sadness that they think black gay men won’t date them because they’re waiting for a white boyfriend. So the first time I saw Moonlight, I worried the bullying Chiron received could fit into a flight towards white narrative.

But on a second viewing, my fears were allayed for three main reasons. First and most obviously, Chiron doesn’t flee into the arms of a white man, but to his friend Kevin. (Significantly though, like Juan’s partner Teresa, played by Janelle Monáe, Kevin is also light-skinned, teasingly calls Chiron “black” and only acted under the orders of the dark-skinned Terrel.) Second, Juan, Chiron’s father figure in the first chapter, lovingly deflects any sense of shame little Chiron could feel when he asks what a “faggot” is and whether he is one. Juan embodies some of the hardest masculinity in the film and is also a model of gay acceptance, slaying the canard that black people are more homophobic than white people.

Finally, Moonlight is an all-black world, devoid of respectability politics. While it tells the story of ambiguous sexuality, it does so with unambiguous blackness and without shame. When stories eschew the white gaze and exist entirely inside of blackness, the protagonists and antagonists are all black. When Marvel’s Luke Cage faces oppression from other black opponents and not from white people, this is not a denial of white supremacy. Similarly, seeing black kids beat each other up in Moonlight is not a call to abandon black masculinity as insufficient to cope with black homosexuality, but to wrestle with the reality of black gay men in its totality.