When I finally saw the film Moonlight—now nominated for six Golden Globes, including Best Motion Picture-Drama—I couldn’t watch it with any sense of comfort or detachment. After about 45 minutes in the theater, I realized I’d been sitting with my fist balled up against my lips. I sat frozen like that until the lights came on.
I came of age on Chicago’s south side as a young, black, queer person who often felt vulnerable about my place in the world. It’s similar, but not identical to what Chiron experiences, with the character coming of age in Miami’s impoverished Liberty City neighborhood. Like him, it didn’t take me long in life to realize that I was “different,” thanks in part to childhood bullies, bystanders who didn’t intervene, and callous authority figures who often looked the other way.
There’s a hidden danger, I’ve learned, in living and coping this way. When your identities are labeled dangerous or undesirable, those soul-murdering messages get internalized as a call to jettison your “bad” parts. And often we do—for the sake of survival. At a certain point, constantly policing your marginalized identities can mean running farther and farther away from yourself. In the purging, a message resounds: “I, in my truest state of being, am not worthy of love.”
But what I appreciated most about the film was how—in its simplicity, and in the way it prioritized intense emotion over extended dialogue—Moonlight encouraged me to continue grappling with a question: If I strip away my self-protecting veneer, who am I underneath?
The hard work involved in arriving at an answer may take Chiron months or years—perhaps a lifetime. We don’t get to witness him doing this work before the film ends. But it’s labor he’s worthy of doing—and that we’re worthy of doing for ourselves.
