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

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...