Moonlight manhood

[Spoiler alert: some details about the movie “Moonlight”.]

Last night I finally watched the movie “Moonlight”. 

I think it’s one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen. It presents profound coming-of-age themes made more complicated by male homosexuality in the marginalized black community. There are many instances and explicit scenes of bullying but the violence is never gratuitous. And despite the almost constant presence of violence, the movie is incredibly delicate and poetic. The soundtrack probably contributes to that, interspersing pieces of classical music in many of the most intense scenes. There’s so much gentleness, despite or alongside or opposing the violence, so much gentleness in an environment dominated by so much toxic masculinity — so much gentleness even, or especially, from some of those macho men. There’s the theme of the lost/absent (dead) dad and surrogate father figures — a theme which is so important, and so sensitive, for me. There’s one of the loveliest scenes of sex between two teenage boys that I’ve ever seen. And some of the loveliest tenderness between two grown-up black men trying to accept and/or come to terms with their homosexual love/attraction. 

I like to interpret the title of this film as a possible definition of manhood: manhood as moonlight, as something that needs the shadows and the gentle light of the moon to be brought out wholly; and also manhood as something that comes and goes, that waxes and wanes, like the phases of the moon; something that can be present even when it isn’t visible, like the new moon; something that can shine a bright but gentle light on the world around it, like the full moon. Manhood as moonlight as it integrates into itself “other” parts expressing itself also through something that is usually considered the “feminine”, as the moon is — which is maybe why I see & feel my AMAB European (gender)queer ex-lover as the Moon.

As remote as the experience of black (gay) men from southern U.S. ghettos is from my own experience, this movie, the coming-of-age of Little/Chiron/Black, feel very close to my own in some ways. Maybe all men could relate to it, if only they let themselves do so. After all, it’s two AMAB people who are important in my life (my closest climbing buddy here in Colorado, a cis-man; my European (gender)queer ex-lover) who said to me, “There isn’t one man on Earth who doesn’t struggle with his masculinity”. I guess I’m one of those men, too. One of my many parts or identities is a boy navigating, and sometimes struggling with, his masculinity. 

As I took a shower after watching the film last night, I was able to relax and let go in a way that is hardly ever accessible to me. I let the water pour over me, I just felt, I let myself feel, physically, bodily. And I hugged myself and stroked my upper-body, my arms. With love. With a love that I’m hardly ever able to give myself. Unconditional, I think, and somehow coming both from inside of me and outside of me, as if it were me but also someone else hugging & stroking me. Or maybe I was letting the little child in me, the boy in me be shown & given the love he needed and wasn’t given when he was growing up. And I experienced my own self, my boyhood, my manhood differently: in some way, as I caressed my upper arms I felt my own manhood like I had never experienced it before, as if the bodily/physical experience were the effective means to actually feel my manhood at a deeper level and in a way that didn’t suffocate or erase the other parts of my (gender-) identity. It was wonderful, truly lovely, so sweet and gentle and yet so powerful and profound and liberating. 

Part of me is a man, or is growing into a man, into some “form of man”, but it doesn’t have to erase or suffocate the rest of me, the other (gender-) identities in me — and I’m not alone in my struggles or battles to accept my masculinity. The whole of me will never be a “man”, but parts of me can be.