boys don’t cry/moonlight: going to movies alone
(Moonlight spoilers)
It was an overcast morning, the Saturday or Sunday in October of 1999 when I drove to the Sunset 5 in West Hollywood to see Boys Don’t Cry. I would have just turned 23. I went alone. Nobody knew I was trans, so afterwards I could talk about the movie but I couldn’t really talk about the movie, if you know what I mean. I was still trapped, yearning for the kind of freedom Brandon so bravely pursued, yet so afraid of paying a price like the one he had to pay for trying to assert his identity in a hostile world.
I remember how devastating it was when Brandon’s identity was literally stripped from him, an act of murder before the act of murder, his face sinking as he knew he’d never be truly seen again. But I also remember the radiance of his smile when he was truly seen, when his existence was acknowledged and he was accepted and loved as himself.
It was an overcast Saturday today when I took BART into downtown Berkeley to see Moonlight. Now I’m 40. I went alone. It is strange to think that it was almost half my life ago that I went to see Boys Don’t Cry, to think of everything that has changed, and everything that hasn’t.
How my identity, hidden from the world then, is now alternately acknowledged and denied. Acknowledged by my friends and coworkers and by friendly acquaintances on the internet, but often denied, inadvertently or deliberately, by strangers and harassers. The way people carelessly call me “sir” or the way jerks tweet at me just to tell me that I’m not a woman. The way some asshole called me “buddy” in a hostile way during game 7 of the World Series. “The Cubs are gonna lose, buddy,” he said, leaving the bar after nine innings. “I’m not your buddy,” I shot back.
In his review of Moonlight for rogerebert.com, Brian Tallerico writes of the film’s main character,
Chiron’s eyes say so much that this young man has not been taught how to express. He is young, black, gay, poor, and largely friendless—the kind of person who feels like he could literally vanish from being so unseen by the world.
There is no question that Chiron’s life has been much harder than mine, but I do know this feeling of being profoundly unseen, and in his own way, he is trapped like I once was. But when, in one key scene, Chiron tells Kevin, a person with whom he has shared a complicated connection over the years, “You don’t know me,” Kevin sizes him up with a look that recalls everything that has happened between them and challenges Chiron, saying “I don’t know you?” In that moment, we know that he does, just as Chiron knows that he does and just as he knows that he does. I almost envied Chiron his connection with Kevin a little in that moment, his awareness of really being seen.
It’s been years and years since Chiron and Kevin saw each other last. So long that Kevin was reminded of Chiron and reached out to him because someone came into his restaurant and played “Hello Stranger” by Barbara Lewis on the jukebox.
Hello, stranger
It seems so good to see you back again
How long has it been?
It seems like a mighty long time
And in the film’s final moments, desperate for a genuine, close connection, Chiron tells Kevin that he’s never shared anything with anyone else like what he shared with Kevin, that in all those years nobody else has touched him and he hasn’t touched anyone.
And I think of how little real, meaningful touch there has been in my life, and how I still go to so many movies alone. Sometimes it feels like my life is the act of going to movies alone, and seeing onscreen, in films like Boys Don’t Cry and Moonlight, images of characters who are looking for visibility and acceptance and connection and love, while I’m still looking for all of those things myself.
Moonlight’s final image, after Kevin responds to Chiron’s plea by seeing him and loving him, is of a much younger Chiron, clearly visible in the moonlight. This makes sense to me because I believe that there is a way in which, when we find a real, mutual connection, it can reach into our past and heal us. I believe that someday there may be someone who walks with me through my memories of my childhood home, someone who I feel was there, seeing me clearly, every time the world made me feel invisible, someone who holds my hand in the dark at that 1999 screening of Boys Don’t Cry in West Hollywood.
Notes
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