ABSTRACT
Moonlight counters dominant representations of Black masculinity through its presentation of a Black gay man. The film also achieved great commercial and mainstream success within an industry that, when it tells queer love stories, has tended to prioritize white LGBT narratives, notably in the LGBT films of the 1990s and 2000s, which tend to adopt universal narrative strategies that erase the specificity of queer characters of colour. In the critical reception of the film, many writers lauded the film’s pioneering depiction of queer sexualities in minority communities and the sensitive portrayal of the struggles of a gay adolescence. The film’s focus on the intersectionality of Chiron’s identity also serves to highlight histories of the cinematic representation of Black queer people, notably in the New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s and the work of Marlon Riggs. Nonetheless, there is some debate about whether Moonlight might be more usefully classified as LGBT cinema or queer cinema because of debates around the film’s elision of sex, the ending and Chiron’s presentation in Part III of the film as the epitome of heteronormative masculinity. Nonetheless, the work of critical race and queer theorists, notably E. Patrick Johnson, points to a third term, ‘quare’. The term accounts for Chiron’s identity as a Black, queer, and working-class man in complex ways and foregrounds the importance of the emotional intimacy that closes the film.
