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The Queerness of Touch: Mutual Recognition and Deep Intimacy in Moonlight

2022; Michigan State University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/qed.9.issue-1.0059

2327-1590

Marlon M. Bailey,

Latin American and Latino Studies

DeShawn and I were best friends throughout our middle-school years. We talked on the phone almost every single day. Often, I would sneakily call him after I was supposed to be in bed, and we would talk all night or until both of us fell asleep on the phone. DeShawn and I walked to and from school together every day. Because his house was on the way to Beaubien Junior High School on the Northwest side of Detroit, when we walked home from school I would usually stop by his house and hang out with him before I continued home. While hanging out, DeShawn would often lean on me and place his chin on the top of my head. Looking back on those moments, I realize that we would find a variety of creative ways to touch each other in sensual and sometimes erotic ways.I remember that once while we walked home on a cold snowy afternoon, my ski cap kept falling over my eyes. As Deshawn lifted the cap above my eyes, he looked at me and said, “You are so cute.” I have never forgotten that moment. Although I knew I liked guys, I never felt sexually attracted to DeShawn. Once in gym class when it was time for everyone to shower, I waited until he was out of the shower before I went in because I didn't want us to see each other naked; I was not ready for that kind of mutual recognition. I don't know if he had sexual feelings for me, but I don't believe he was ever into guys, even if he was into me.DeShawn saw me; he touched me. This friendship—this deep intimate connection—went on for more than two years. During the latter part of our junior high school years, though, rumors that I was gay were circulating everywhere. DeShawn always defended me, but when a love letter I wrote to a guy that everyone knew was gay found its way to DeShawn, he abruptly stopped talking to me. We never really talked ever again. Forever present in my emotional memory, that relationship with DeShawn influenced my viewing experience of the film Moonlight; the movie tells part of a story with which I viscerally connect, a part that I never had the language to narrate, until now.The film, Moonlight, is based on Tarell Alvin McCraney's play, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. It was directed by Barry Jenkins. Moonlight vividly and sensually portrays Chiron's socio/erotic/sexual journey within and through intersectional forms of structural vulnerabilities, such as poverty, homophobic bullying, and familial abuse, which produce violence and trauma for him daily. The film gives us a multidimensional view of a Black queer man growing up in an urban social geography, in a moment in which he is learning about himself, his sexuality, and his human need to love and be loved. Much has been written about Moonlight, from a wide variety of perspectives, and these perspectives have been useful to my thinking about this film. Yet less has been written about how the film emphasizes the relationship between the ocular and haptic dimensions of the lives and subjectivities of Black men. As a Black queer theorist and ethnographer, I am interested in how this film helps us imagine new possibilities for deep intimacy between Black men in our daily lives.Through Chiron's story, Moonlight illustrates a journey through and experiences of misrecognition and betrayal, a journey of navigation between joy and loss in an anti-Black and anti-queer world. Yet the final moment of the film provides a glimpse of hope for redemption through touch. Thus, I ask: At the end of this journey, what are the possibilities for mutual recognition and redemption between Black men? I am interested in what Moonlight tells us about deep intimacy and mutual recognition between Black men, primarily through touch, or what I call “touching as seeing.” By mutual recognition, I mean the way in which Black people—in this case mostly Black men—see, recognize, and connect with each other in moments of need, appreciation, and love, particularly under conditions of anti-Blackness and anti-queerness, regardless or perhaps even because of their sexuality. Although touch is a means of experience and a sign of connection and recognition, I view the act of touching broadly, and what I mean here is that I am not interested solely in the actual act/practice of “touching.” I am also interested in how looking can be a form of touching. Such looking and touching is one of the most fascinating and beautiful features of the cinematography of Moonlight. Moreover, I draw on Moonlight to push for a recognition and embrace of queer sociality and the sexuality of Black men, whether one identifies as gay or not.What can Moonlight tell us about the need for deep intimacy (and mutual recognition) between Black queer men? What does the film tell us about the multidimensional context within which Chiron lives? Moonlight vividly and sensually captures Chiron's struggle to find himself through a pursuit of deep intimacy and love with other Black men through intimate looks and touch. Not only do we see Chiron endure bullying as well as mental and physical abuse from his mother (who suffers from a substance use disorder), we also see his short-lived, but loving and affirming, father/son experience with Juan, and his Black queer socio/erotic/sexual journey with his friend Kevin, as an expansive and complicated process that involves far more dimensions than just the “act of sex.” I want to suspend a consolidation around gay identity for the moment and consider Black male subject formation that is about how Black men come to their sexuality through a range of experiences. Therefore, rather than arriving at a consolidated gay sexual identity or a gay penetrative-sex scene, Moonlight captures the complexity, and frankly the messiness, of Black men's homosocial, erotic, and sexual journeys without portraying a clear and fixed linear path to sexual identity. McCraney and Jenkins illustrate and highlight the path to and process of Chiron's and Kevin's sexual selfhood rather than portraying a gay or straight arrival. Although so much critique has focused on the limits of what McCraney and Jenkins illustrate in the film, and although that is clearly important, I want to highlight what the story represented in the film as well as how it helps us imagine something different.One of Moonlight's most beautiful scenes shows Juan teaching “Little” how to swim. Chiron sees Juan, a masculine neighborhood drug dealer who reveals a soft spot for Little upon meeting him, as a father figure. We observe a mutual recognition between two Black people, a boy and a man in this case, with Little recognizing Juan as a father figure and Juan recognizing Little as, perhaps, the son he does not have. Yet, the film masterfully forces us to confront a contradiction: on the one hand, Juan sells drugs to Little's mother, Paula, the very substances that are not only killing her but also destroying Chiron's relationship with her. On the other hand, Juan is Little's teacher, his protector, and his savior—his “other father,” in place of the one he has never known, as far as we can tell. Like a father and teacher, Juan holds Little gently and coaches him: “OK. Let your head rest in my hand. Relax. I got you. I promise. I won't let you go. Hey man. I got you. There you go. Ten Seconds. Right there. You in the middle of the world.”1 Here, not only does Juan help Little learn how to trust him as Little lets himself go in Juan's arms and allows only Juan's touch—his hands and arms—to remain between his body and the ocean, but Juan also recognizes Little and connects with him through touch, demonstrating love, affirmation, value, and protection for Little. I suspect that Little feels fully human only during the fleeting moments of these interactions with Juan.In his January 2017 Uplift article, “Why Men Need Platonic Touch,”2 Mark Greene argues that men crave the human touch but are cut off from it, causing them to suffer from “touch isolation.” Because men are not trusted physically and are not supposed to be vulnerable, many go through too much of their lives without experiencing the comforting, affirming, and loving sensation of touch, particularly from other men. Greene also suggests that sexualization and homophobia are barriers to touching between men in particular and help to create the touch isolation that many men experience. I suggest this condition is compounded for Black men, whose touch isolation is underpinned by anti-Black racism, white supremacy and homophobia. Throughout the film, Juan touches Little as a father would in teaching his son how to swim, demonstrating love, care, and protection for him, until the former's untimely death. In the film Juan just disappears, unfortunately, reflecting the ways in which some young Black boys and men experience their fathers of origin; the latter just disappear, if they were ever in their lives in the first place.Chiron's other lifesaving and life-sustaining relationship is with Kevin, the only man who ever touched him in an erotic, sensual, and sexual (or a deep intimate) way. Chiron's and Kevin's relationship is filled with desire, fear, eroticism/sensuality, betrayal, intimacy, love, and redemption. We can only speculate or imagine that Chiron and Kevin have penetrative sex, but we do not see this, and that is intentional.Yet, we do see a sexual experience between these two men portrayed. At a point in the film when Chiron is no longer a little boy, Chiron and Kevin are on the beach, getting high, and laughing and talking. The skillful cinematography illustrates how Chiron and Kevin look at each other. As a viewer, I see the recognition, rooted in desire, a desire to look deeper. Further into their conversation, the screen directions say, “Kevin reaching a hand to Chiron's neck, placing his open palm there deliberately, with feeling . . . their eyes meeting here, Kevin slowly working his hand along Chiron's neck, small movement, with feeling.” As they look into each other's eyes and their faces and lips move slowly, but deliberately, closer to each other, and as Kevin continues to slowly and sensually stroke Chiron's neck, Chiron grows weak and begins to surrender physically; they kiss. Kevin eventually masturbates Chiron, bringing him to orgasm.By any measure, this was a grippingly beautiful scene; it was sensuous, loving, nurturing, erotic, and deeply intimate—the scene was hot! It should be noted, however, neither Chiron nor Kevin is represented directly as gay in the film. Many audience members saw gay sexual contact between Chiron and Kevin and assumed gay identities, at least for one of them. The scene also captures deep intimacy through mutual recognition and touching as seeing. Although these are different examples of touching as seeing, just as Little had to trust Juan to allow him to hold his body in the water to teach him how to swim (as a father figure), here we see an older Chiron surrendering to and trusting in Kevin to touch him in an erotic and sexually intimate manner; two different but both necessary forms of touching as seeing—mutual recognition—between Black men.In his essay “Meditation on Barebacking” the writer Thomas Glave captures the importance of Black men seeing and touching each other.3 Glave writes, “[What] I have always most deeply craved was, is, that closeness. Presence. Feeling. Touch. The joy and thrill of being seen and seen, wanted. Being wanted: not at all easy to experience in this world . . . ” Chiron grew up without experiencing love or safety from family or his community of origin except with Juan and Teresa, who were not his family of origin. And Chiron also experiences touch and mutual recognition with Kevin. These examples highlight the willingness of Black people to touch, be with, and attend to each other when they mutually recognize one another, but too often anti-Blackness and anti-queerness (which is complicit with anti-Blackness) get in the way.After Kevin tragically betrays Chiron in high school, soon after the deeply and sexually intimate moment between them, Chiron lands in jail for defending himself against a bully, the bully who coaxed Kevin into violently assaulting Chiron publicly. Throughout the film, as he matures—from “Little” to “Chiron” to “Black”—he becomes bigger, more masculine. Chiron (aka Black) had to rebuild himself from scratch, to become hard, to survive life-long abuse, incarceration, and touch isolation. By the time Black hears from Kevin again, he is traumatized, and thus guarded, lacking the ability to be vulnerable, to love—to touch and be touched by anyone except for one man, Kevin, the only man who has “ever touched him” like that.Several years after the high school incident Kevin calls Black to apologize for what happened then—the betrayal. Kevin says, “I'm . . . sorry about that . . . about all that, Chiron [. . . after a pause . . . ] about all that shit what went down man . . . real shit dog, I am.”4 After all these years, Kevin apologizes to Chiron, now Black. In the film, it is clear that Black is still deeply pained about what happened, having held this pain in all these years. The apology represents evidence of the depth of the harm done by Kevin's violent betrayal, even though he was coerced by the high school bully. Furthermore, the apology is a form of recognition, which is the precursor to the two men seeing each other again. Just as Chiron did with Kevin years earlier on the beach when Kevin jacked him off, here Black begins to surrender to Kevin over the phone following the apology, which prepares them for their subsequent reunion.Black drives from Atlanta to Miami to see, to reconcile with, to mutually recognize, and to touch and be touched by Kevin again. Once in Miami, Black meets Kevin at a diner where the latter is a chef. Black enjoys “the Chef's Special” meal that his grade school friend prepares for him and then gives Kevin a ride back to his apartment. During the catching-up, flirtatious conversation, Kevin looks at his companion and asks, “Who is you Chiron?” Not knowing exactly how to respond to such a complex question, Chiron smiles and says, “I'm me.” Soon after, Chiron says to Kevin, “You the only man that's ever touched me [. . . long pause . . . ]. You're the only one [. . . long pause . . . ]. I haven't really touched anyone since.”5I depart from some Black queer theorists’ criticism of Moonlight. These scholars’ critiques are valuable, as they problematize the representations of Black gayness, femme masculinity, and the lack of Black queer sex in the film. These are valid critiques to be sure. Yet, I am interested in deep intimacy through touch between Black men, while abstracting from sexual identity in the context of anti-Blackness and anti-queerness. I find it useful to bring into focus representations of mutual recognition as a means of deep intimacy. On the other hand, what is important to me are possibilities, or how the film allows viewers to imagine different ways that Black men, Black people, can be with one another amid violence, pain, and trauma, revealing the possibilities for Black men, both sexually queer and straight, when “touching,” connecting with, and mutually recognizing one another. According to the Black queer theorist Freda Fair, queerness is an interpersonal formation that confronts structural harm.6Moonlight is a Black queer film not because its protagonist is a Black queer man; rather, it is such a film because the story that McCraney and Jenkins tell presents a counternarrative to Blackness, one that is counter to the anti-Black pathologization of Black people's practices and strategies of survival. Furthermore, this is a Black queer film because it deals in complexity; it reveals and embraces contradiction and it illustrates, and in some cases encourages us to imagine, forgiveness and redemption for/with each other—other Black people. Finally, and perhaps most important, this is a Black queer film because it strategically and creatively mobilizes touch as a healing practice from a queer place, one that brings into focus Black queer life—same-gender relationality, queer kinship, recognition, and redemption. Kevin's touch affects Little/Chiron/Black in several ways—mind, heart, and body. In the end, the best way to challenge and dismantle anti-Blackness and anti-queerness and the traumas that they produce is Black queerness.