Moonlight is an apparent meditation that compels us to ponder the everyday violence(s) that Chiron (protagonist) navigates and negotiates throughout his life. The film lays blank the corrupting and contaminating parcel of masculinity – its toxicities, its brutalities, its unrelenting bromide. It certainly is not a romantic story. It is a story of robbed innocence, of a timid, virtually smashed adolescence to barren adult life. During a world that will otherwise see a boy like (Chiron) disappear, he becomes someone that insists on carving out a life for himself. 

It was an incredible first attempt at bringing to the stage the lifetime of a queer black man. I’ve never seen a feature capture love between black men in such a holistic manner. Tenderness, warmth, fondness and most  importantly vulnerability took center stage with all the leading males in Moonlight. What made this so impactful was how Barry Jenkins was ready to prioritize these traits in Chiron, Juan and Kevin, yet also realistically depict their complicity and participation with a stereotypically, hyper-masculine environment. This really striked me as I truly felt that I understood as I watched these characters develop and share intimacy with one another.

That said, there are measured places where the ball may have dropped. I was a bit bothered with the choice of a de-sexualized Chiron in his life. Was that necessary for larger, heterosexual audiences to better receive him? I felt that it was a disservice. There are already too few images of black men who love (and have sex with) other men shown on screen. Too often queer black men are rendered sexless by way of over-stereotypical and comedic portrayals of “gayness” or are represented as closemouthed and predatory down-low characters struggling to love and accept themselves and their partners. Showing Chiron and Kevin as masculine, yet ready to be vulnerable, intimate and sexual would have been a transgressive representation of gay blackness. My second contention was the portrayal of Chiron’s drug-addicted mother. The transition from the concerned, working parent to the angry and unstable drug abuser was a rather fast one and didn’t provide the audience with much back story. While recognizing that there are many women (and men) in those conditions, especially in deprived communities, it still would have been helpful to determine more nuance, particularly seeing that, that caricature of black women failing as parents has been trotted out before.

Jenkins has created a lyrical and sometimes tame film throughout that his protagonist barely speaks, and nonetheless Chiron’s evident depths stay profound in spite of his generally bleak existence. The director’s filmmaking radiates poetry in his storytelling and visual aesthetic, making a film that resonates with the viewer inside their mind and heart. Not solely is Moonlight an emotional and intensely personal image, it’s conjointly an awfully necessary work of art. Given its subject material, it had every potential to become simply another coming-of-age tale, another story regarding homosexual life or black individuals in America. Of course, it’s all of those things in their means. These subjects stay essential to culture and don’t need to be marginalized. But Moonlight has an undeniable power in its willingness to simply accept such issues as simply another component of life. Jenkins addresses such matters by instilling them into a singular human experience and making them not the main subject of the film, but the detail about the life he examines.

With Pride month having taken place in June, one also had to reflect on the insurrection of hate crime against the LGBTQI community, we have to take note of the discrimination taking place daily in our country as well as the rest of the world. In his inauguration speech, former president Nelson Mandela promised to “build a society in which all South Africans will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts…a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.” South Africa’s constitution was the first in the world to safeguard individuals from discrimination because of their sexual orientation. The country was also the first in Africa to legalize same sex marriage. But after a spate of murders, “gay” people say more needs to be done to prevent hate crimes.

“We don’t appear to be getting it right. There is an enormous gap. We need to invest our energies into prevention, into conversations, into dialogues.” South African law does not classify hate crimes differently from alternative crimes, therefore there aren’t any official statics to turn to as evidence. Prejudiced and transphobic violence has been reported in all told regions of the world. It ranges from aggressive, sustained psychological bullying to physical assault, torture, kidnapping and targeted killings. Sexual violence has also been widely reported, as well as alleged “corrective” or “punitive” rape, during which men rape women assumed to be lesbians on the pretext of attempting to “cure” the victims of homosexuality.

Violence takes place in all sorts of settings: on the road, in public parks, in schools, in workplaces, in private homes, and in prisons and police cells. It might be spontaneous or organized, perpetrated by individual strangers or by extremist groups. A frequent characteristic of many anti-LGBTQI hate crimes is their brutality: murder victims, as an example, are usually found mutilated, severely burnt, castrated, showing signs of regulatory offence. Transgender persons, particularly those involved in sex work or in detention, face a particularly high risk of deadly and very cruel violence. Torture and abuse of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex individuals have, also been extensively documented.

South African must adopt and implement more laws and policies to push equality for the LGBTQI community and protection against the discrimination and violence they face, and with this month’s review, one will higher perceive the need to find and understand their identity so they can thrive within it.

Moonlight’s uniqueness as a production about a queer black youth can’t be overstated, and it skillfully filters rhetoric through realism, as when little (Alex Hibbert) is pursed aggressively into an abandoned crack house by his playmates. It’s a stark bit of staging that reflects a much bigger, sadly credible “ghetto” trajectory.