Awkward, Black and Queer
Parallels of Innocence and Alienation in Moonlight (2016), Real Life (2020) and Boarders (2024).
Moonlight, Real Life and Boarders.
Film, literature and television.
I’ve watched/read all three prior to releasing this post, but it was the release of the second season of Boarders that willed me to write again.
I watched Moonlight years after its release, I read ‘Real Life’ at the end of 2023 and I sat ecstatic in front of my projector to binge Boarders in its inaugural season at the beginning of last year. All this is to say that I have had ideas brewing about all three projects, and have shared them excitedly with friends over late night episodes, on Facetime as I turned the page to finish another chapter and alone as I watched Moonlight on my laptop.
Season 2 of Boarders was like an epiphany, I was struck with inspiration, ready to return from my (very brief) hiatus. Immediately, the first parallel that came to mind, was that each project gave significant representation to awkward, queer black boys - Chiron in Moonlight, Wallace in Real Life and Omar in Boarders. Watching Omar and the development of his character in Season 2 reminded me of Wallace and Wallace reminded me of Chiron; that’s how I ended up here.
I didn't want to write about queer characters just for the sake of it, I think it would be lazy to do a comparative analysis of three characters only based on that. There must be more and it forced me to interrogate what made me conjoin these characters; across all three mediums, between all three characters, the theme of innocence is resonant. The innocence of Chiron, Omar and Wallace appear in varying forms but it is there. The creators of the former two illustrate them as innocent in spite of their queerness. Alienation is the commonality between all three characters, their queerness creates a wall between them and the world around them, leaving them isolated even from the people who love and care for them the most.
The Characters and the Minds behind them
Moonlight (2016):
Moonlight is a coming of age film, centred around the character Chiron. It is told in three Acts, each Act reflects a pivotal stage in Chiron’s life. There is Act 1: ‘Little’, in which Chiron is a grade-schooler. Act 2: ‘Chiron’, where he is a teenager and Act 3: ‘Black’, where he is an adult. Barry Jenkins is the filmmaker and director of Moonlight, he brought to life Tarell Alvin McCraney’s never seen play, In Moonlight, Black Boys look Blue.
Real Life (2020):
In Real Life, we are plunged into the mind and daily life of Wallace - a black, gay, graduate student. Through Wallace, the reader is forced to not only reckon with but also accept the ugly parts of life, because that’s what ‘real life’ is.
Boarders (2024):
A British television series, Boarders is both a comedy and a drama. It follows 5 inner-city black teenagers who were granted scholarships to a private school in the ‘sticks’. The creator, Daniel Lawrence Taylor, stated that he gained inspiration for the series from an article about 5 young black boys from London who were given scholarships to a private school and their experiences of it. The article encouraged Lawrence Taylor to reflect on his time at an elite, predominantly white and middle-class university. And thus, the series was born. The character that captures our attention in this post is Omar. His innocence is found in his exploration with his romantic interest Dilton and his alienation is emphasised through the lens of this ‘relationship’. The questions and nerves he has in this queer dynamic are ones that cannot be answered or assuaged by those surrounding him.
What is innocence?
(1): freedom from guile or cunning : simplicity
(2) : lack of worldly experience or sophistication
Jenkins, Taylor and Lawrence Taylor toy with these different iterations of innocence in their respective works. Chiron possesses both forms of innocence, whilst Wallace embodies the first definition and Omar the second.
Portrayals of Innocence through Omar and Chiron:
Omar and Chiron, in his youth, find themselves sharing the latter definition. This innocence plants a smile on my face each time the characters come across my screen. Their innocence is interwoven with their burgeoning queerness. Their exploration of their sexualities are not hyper-sexual nor do they involve sexual exploitation from older men. Their explorations are presented as innocent; they are given the chance to be coy, to fumble in the dark and laugh at getting things wrong.
Lawrence Taylor and Jenkins succeed in endowing their characters with a youth and innocence that is typically withheld from young black boys concerning their sexuality. In both Omar and Chiron’s cases, there is this ‘lack of worldly experience or sophistication’ when it comes to their first sexual encounters with the same-sex. Omar gets blushy and nervous when it comes to thinking, much less discussing his any potential relations with Dilton. He gets the chance to be himself, even if it is awkward, short-lived and ill-fated. There are no malignant forces such as disapproving parents, or predatory older men lurking in the corner. Throughout his exploration he makes mistakes, he says the wrong things, he alludes to Dilton’s past experiences when he probably shouldn’t. It makes sense because this is a teenager with no past history regarding same-sex relationships and sex. He is bound to get it wrong at some point and this innocence is comforting.
Similarly, Chiron’s innocence, in terms of his sexuality, is guided by curiosity. As ‘Little’, he asks his mentor and the local drug dealer Juan, what is a ‘faggot’ and whether he is one. This trails into Act 2, where Chiron has his first sexual encounter with a fellow teenaged boy, Kevin. Kevin and Chiron’s interaction is innocent, it is marked by a lack of experience but also a curiosity. A desire for the two to connect intimately, building a space for themselves that is free from Chiron’s mother who is a drug-addict and the constant demand for Chiron to assert himself as a hyper-masculine man. In this Act, Chiron is allowed to just be around Kevin. It was refreshing to see a queer relationship be a source of comfort in a young, black teens’ life instead of a point of tension and frustration.
However, the caesura in the second Act, and the film by extension, is seen when Chiron loses his innocence. He is terrorised by hyper-masculinity, particularly the aggression attached to it. This terror is constant, characterised in human form by his bully Terrel. Viewers often place the loss of innocence at the point when Chiron lashes out at Terrel, repeatedly beating him with a chair at school. But I think it occurs just before that, when Kevin complies with Terrel’s instructions to beat up Chiron.
This scene opens the chasm between Kevin and Chiron. The latter’s innocence was highlighted in his interactions with Kevin, but the aggression and harm Kevin inflicts on Chiron rips the safety net that had blanketed the two. There is no more curiosity or shared whispers and giggles of nerves. They are now bonded by a traumatic experience that leaves them irrevocably changed. Their innocence has been lost and this is only furthered by Chiron's understandable outburst of violence, it represents his descent into the cruelty of the world around him, falling into what is expected of him.
Taylor’s portrayal of innocence through Wallace:
Taylor conveys innocence through Wallace in a different manner. Wallace’s innocence is not due to youthfulness or a lack of lived experiences. As a reader, I felt Wallace’s innocence was his form of protest. The protest was his ability to remain unchanged in the face of strife in all areas of his life, from sexual abuse in his early years to disappointments in friendships to a dismal romantic life. Wallace is positioned as the victim, and rightfully so. All the forces in his life culminate to debase him, to make him feel worthless. And as a reader, it left me overcome with pity. I had the urge to protect Wallace from the ugly that ‘real life’ had shown him, to whisk him away to a world where he is respected and cared for.
“Wallace could have wept for the boy he’d been at seven or eight…”
-Real Life, Ch1
Wallace’s innocence is drawn from his lack of influence. He is a passenger in his own life, his affairs are not his to control or demand.
“The world leaves him behind, streaks out ahead of him”
-Real Life, Ch7
As members of the queer community, we have either witnessed firsthand or heard countless tales of children whose parents failed to protect them, whose unconditional love changed its definition once they were informed of their child’s sexuality. Taylor, Jenkins and Lawrence Taylor are effortless in evoking a similar sense of responsibility from me that I always feel for those children for their characters too. There is a feeling of duty to care for them because they are innocent and this should be preserved.
I have the most plaudits for Taylor, he was able to make me feel as if I had peeled back the layers on Wallace and had found the ‘real’ him, a shell of a boy trapped in the body of a grown graduate student. I found myself, when I first read it last year, scribbling annotations of advice and counsel for Wallace, even though he was canonically older than me.
Taylor and Jenkins share in their ability to not just tell their consumers that their characters are multifaceted, but to show us. Jenkins does so by taking us on a journey through Chiron’s development, so we feel like we actually grew up with him. Taylor differed in his approach, he allows us into Wallace’s mind, creating the perfect schism between reality and the imagined. By reading Real Life, the reader occupies a pedestal. Wallace is so guarded, there are all these thoughts bubbling inside the character that are cornered off from his ‘friends’, that only we gain privileged access to. Taylor’s words allow us to see who Wallace performs as and who he actually is.
Alienation as the source of unity
Lawrence Taylor and Jenkins use Omar and Chiron to convey the idea that for queer people, there is a section of your life, that will always be a world away from your heterosexual friends and family because things are just simply different. And until you explore and understand what works for you, it is a lot of blundering around.
In Moonlight, Chiron has no one to go to concerning his feelings for Kevin. His mentor, Juan, gives him pointed advice on masculinity and navigating life as a young black man but he draws a blank when it comes to sexuality. This is no indictment of him either, how can you impart knowledge on what you have no knowledge on? In a similar vein, Omar confides in his fellow scholarship peers when he experiences his first male St Gilbert’s crush. He searches for guidance from all of them, including the only female in their group Leah, about their opinions on sex and how he should approach it.
Both characters are an ode to queerness and alienation. Although Juan is o tries to be that compass for Chiron he still exists on a different plane to Chiron. Despite their shared blackness, there are areas of Chiron’s life that he cannot protect him from, namely the questions surrounding his sexuality and the ridicule that attracts. As Jenkins states, Moonlight is a “cinematic portrayal of the lonely path many black gay men have walked.”
Similarly, Omar has overlapping identities with his friends at St. Gilbert’s. They come from the same area, they are of a similar socio-economic status and they are all black. But he exists on a separate plane to them. His sexuality alienates him from the shared experiences of teenage love and romance. The way that Toby, Jaheim and even Leah are able to exchange stories and advice in relation to their romantic and sexual exploits, leaves Omar sidelined. Not intentionally of course. Omar is able to give advice because he lives in a heteronormative world. Romance and sexuality is structured is around a heterosexual code that is spread across discourses. As a queer person, you are able to regurgitate advice and the expectations of heterosexual relationships because that is what you are exposed to; it’s all you know.
I think the characters supporting Omar and Chiron are very transparent in their lack of knowledge. This extracts an innocence from them all, a sense of unity that they are all fumbling in the dark together to question how heteronormativity aligns with queerness, if at all.
Wallace exists in more of a vacuum than Omar and Chiron. Perhaps it’s because Taylor sought to replicate his own, personal experiences through the character of Wallace. There are no marches, no bursting courage in the face of homophobic vitriol, there is no great love story that somehow makes it all worth it. Wallace lives a dull life, matched by an equally dull love life that constantly leaves him yearning for more. Unlike Omar and Chiron, in his younger years, Wallace has no one to express this yearning to. He has become jaded by the perils and the bruises of ‘real life’ that he became stagnant in a life that is subpar.
At least in Moonlight, Chiron has the opportunity to reconnect with his teenaged sweetheart. Jenkins leaves it to the audience to conjure up the endless possibilities that could transpire for Chiron and Kevin. However, Taylor is clear in his message that there is no silver lining, no magical love in the storyline of his queer main character.
This plurality is refreshing. I think the use of different modes of storytelling and representation of queer characters, in this case queer black men, emphasises the demand I made in an earlier post for queer people to still be treated as people, as a group that is not monolithic. A group that will have a variety of shared experiences. This was a lot of words to simply say it was nice to to see young black boys and men with emotions. To see them humanised, filled with innocence and guided by fear. Give us more media and art that allows them to be human!
Helpful Resources:
Brandon Taylor, Real Life (2020)
Gaylene Gould, Rhapsody in Blue: Barry Jenkins on Moonlight
Greg Sigur, Moonlight: Three Act Dramatic Structure
Moonlight changed something in me
Never heard of Boarders before! Gonna go check it out on BBC iPlayer 🤔