This is important in thinking about how whiteness responds to love shared between black people as it was shown on the recent MTV Movie and TV Awards. I was told after the film from someone white that they thought Juan was going to harm him, clearly the subtext of that was the idea that the harm would be sexual. Both times something that stood out to me were the white audience reaction to black on black love, when Juan entered the abandoned house, white people gasped as if he should be feared or that his intention was to harm Little. Leaving the Ritz in Philadelphia’s Olde City, I learned that Donald Trump was leading in the results from the general election. The second time I saw it, it was election night. I first watched it in Chicago and then in Philadelphia. I watched Moonlight in its entirety twice in two different theaters in two separate states. He does something with the simplicity of truth and the honesty of love. I’ve never experienced a poetic realness in the way that McCraney imagines it in the context of his plays. I went on to purchase the Brother Sister plays and delved into the mind of this creative and the generational love and pain of the characters and the Yoruba spirituality within the words of this monumental playwright. Within my new obsession with McCraney’s works I learned of his affinity with the trine, this is noticed in how the film narrative is broken up in three, Little, Chiron, Black. I was mind-blown at the truth and sorrow of queerness and blackness intermingled in a Katrina-like moment in the south. I learned of him when I went to see a production of "Marcus or the Secret of Sweet" at a local theater. Tarell Alvin McCraney made magic when he penned the unpublished play I n Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.
Later he teaches him how to swim in such a graceful way that made me feel the intimacy between these two black men yearning for connection in a world that deifies isolation. From him sharing how his difference has made him into the complexity of his adulthood, being dark-skinned and having roots in Cuba.
You see in the series of scenes to follow a person imperfect and yet capable of perfect moments.
Juan enters the house and tries to convince Little to join him. Early on in the film Little runs into an abandoned house after being chased and bullied by a group of boys.
It showed me that our rituals are real, our lived experiences show that everyday. Looking in Chiron’s eyes while he receives a call from Kevin tells us a story of love, unconventional in today’s heteronormative world but real and not imagined in my experience.
Moonlight is pedagogical because it teaches with nuance, sincerity and without spectacle that black "love is love is love" as Lin-Manuel Miranda said at the Tony Awards. That kisses will be part of the love repertoire of the world in ways we can't imagine or have forgotten today. Ok well in this case, a kiss placed on the lips between two presumably masculine black men will be the new affixed norm. One day, I declare it! A kiss between two men, hetero, cisgender or queer will not be shocking.