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  • “Stay Down”: Moonlight and Negative Affect as an Analytic
  • Antonia Randolph (bio)

Violence can be intimate and revealing. People reveal much about themselves when they give or receive a beating. So it was when Kevin hit his lifelong friend Chiron in a Miami schoolyard in the second act of Moonlight.1 They shared another type of intimacy the night before when they confessed feelings of despair and loneliness to each other on a beach. These vulnerable emotions created a space to risk touching, leading to a kiss that melted into Kevin slowly masturbating Chiron to orgasm. Chiron and Kevin had always created space for each other, finding ways to be alone and talk even in a larger group of neighborhood boys. Thus, every punch that Kevin landed on Chiron’s jaw resounded with betrayal and remorse, not just physical pain. Kevin urged Chiron to “stay down,” his eyes pleading forgiveness for what bullies had pressured him to do. Instead, Chiron jutted his chin out and held Kevin’s gaze, as though he wanted to sear the scene into his mind: his beloved friend’s punches and the jeering faces of the bullies urging him on. The beating showed Kevin, who had a confident social ease throughout the movie, to be a creature of social approval, turning on his friend when his peers demanded it. The beating also showed Chiron’s mettle; he did not turn away from his friend’s betrayal or from the cruelty of the boys who goaded him. [End Page 67]

Analyses of Moonlight do not dwell on Chiron’s bullying, finding it trite or otherwise irrelevant to the broader story of his life.2 However, Chiron’s bullying plays a key role in establishing him as queer, that is, a character with same-sex attractions. The first scene of the movie features a group of boys chasing Little (Chiron’s nickname when he was a child) into a crack house, throwing objects at him, and calling him a “faggot.” It is through bullying that we know that society sees Little as gay. The film does not give Little stereotypically effeminate mannerisms as a shorthand to signal that he is gay, nor does Little show sexual desire for boys other than Kevin.3 Little falls in the middle of the gender presentation spectrum of boys who grow up to have a same-sex identity: neither effeminate nor hegemonically masculine, merely odd for a boy—a loner who is uninterested in sports.4 The bullying is constitutive of Little’s understanding of himself—he asks Juan and Teresa, the surrogate parents who look after him when his drug-addicted mother cannot, whether he was a “faggot.” Juan tells him that he may discover that he is gay, understood here to be a sexual identity, but not to let others call him a “faggot,” understood to be a slur referring to a debased masculinity and a debased sexuality.5 In other words, we never hear Chiron name his sexual identity, we must take the bullies’ word for it.

What to do when negative affect, like violence, bullying, and the torment they cause, is so present in a film that has been heralded as a welcome portrayal of the lives of Black gay men?6 I argue that the ubiquity of negative affect in the film is a key for making sense of Moonlight. Examining the scenes and characters with negative charge offers an alternative way of understanding the film’s world. Using negative affect as an analytic suggests that Moonlight is a film about the forces that shaped heteronormative Black masculinity in the post-Civil Rights era, not a film about Black gay men. Although the film shows same-sex attraction, attachment, and sexual behaviors, it is not a gay movie in terms of reflecting Black queer male sociality, particularly “Negro faggotry.”7 Instead, Moonlight can be read as an updated hood film that innovates in its portrayal of the eroticism and attachment that can exist between Black male friends without resolving those feelings into a conventional sexual identity.8 In other words, Moonlight shows the queer intimacy of street culture without offering self-avowed gay male characters or...

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