No Homo!: Is Moonlight Gay?

A friend of mine recently tried to convince me that the 2017 Oscars Best Picture Moonlight was not about the main character, Chiron, being a gay man. He argued that they had played the gay scenes heavy-handedly, and when I asked what the movie was instead about, he seemed to cop-out by saying it was about Chiron exploring several different parts of herself. To be clear, I fully agree that the movie was multi-faceted; I simply believe that the greatest intersection explored throughout the movie (almost certainly capturing the most screen-time) was between Chiron’s being a black man and a gay man. Of course, if you’ve seen the movie for yourself, you probably have your own opinion of what the movie is about. I just find it difficult to argue that Moonlight is not a movie you will find under the LGBT category of Netflix in a month or two (especially when "is moonlight gay" is the 3rd Google autocomplete option when you start typing it out).

In contrast, Tucker Carlson of Fox News recently decried Moonlight’s Oscar win for being too “politically correct,” and implied that only Hollywood could love a film like that. In Tucker’s view, the film was too gay (and likely also too black) to have fairly won an Oscar, whereas in my friend’s opinion, the gay themes of the movie weren’t strong enough to make it a gay movie. These seem like opposing viewpoints, and in some ways they are, because I don’t consider my friend to be a socially conservative person. However, it’s important to note that both of these views work toward the same end. One of the central takeaways from both arguments is that there is need to suppress the gayness of Moonlight as it contributed to its winning an award; my friend’s argument marks the gayness of the 2017 Best Picture as forgettable, and not relevant to the film’s winning such a high-profile award; Tucker forcefully suppresses the movie’s “politically correct” aspects by condemning their merit to take home the gold.

In theory, it could be difficult to see Moonlight as quintessentially gay when compared to a movie like Brokeback Mountain, which was nominated for best picture in 2006. It was more sexually explicit than Moonlight, and didn’t deal with many intersections of oppression considering that the main characters were white. One could say that each of these movies portrays, and furthermore serves, a different gay experience. Perhaps the intersectionality of Moonlight compromises between the two experiences of being black and gay, making it difficult for some audiences to take the two in tandem, as I believe they were meant to.

Moonlight’s victory at the Oscars was certainly a triumph for every gay in America, but our society still has a lot to work on in terms of embracing, in this case, homosexuality, and more broadly, queer sexuality. Neither Brokeback Mountain nor Moonlight are universal gay films; as it stands, any sufficiently mainstream gay movie is exclusionary in some way. This is not to mention that lesbian films have yet to achieve the same success as gay movies, along with films centering their themes on being bisexual and trans. In my mind, despite the success of Moonlight, which absolutely deserves celebration, many aspects of the reception of the movie prove that there is still squeamishness and misunderstanding among moviegoers and LGBT movie subjects.