Black and Blue in Florida

Abstract

This chapter discusses the intersection of gay and black identity in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight. This sociological intersection is amplified by the film’s complex use of film genres such as the inner-city ghetto genre alongside an arthouse genre focusing on poetic modes of belonging as represented in Florida’s fecund landscape captured with stunning cinematography. This complication of filmic representation produces new and unexpected insights into a biography too quickly written off as a sociological fact or as an expression of identity politics. Instead, the film follows the coming-of-age story, told in elliptical fashion, of its main protagonist Little/Chiron/Black navigating the available symbolic options in search of a community. The film also reflects the complex settlement history of Florida in its multinational and global perspective.