Is chiron gay in moonlight

In some interpretations of the myth, Chiron hones his skills as a healer by treating his wound.

The writers and directors have done a great job encapsulating the nuances of being queer within a minority community that struggles with drugs and poverty. 

Moonlight is broken into three parts, or acts, following the main character as he goes from childhood to early adulthood. Black is a young adult selling drugs in Atlanta and has become notorious within his community.

While he can heal others, he can’t heal himself.

In astrology, Chiron represents your “mortal wound” — a pain that you suffered, often in childhood, that doesn’t seem to go away. The two are awkward. Moonlight, in many ways, is a meditation on the wounds inflicted upon Chiron by his mother, his classmates, and the largely disinterested institutions of the state.

The film depicts Kevin, Chiron’s childhood friend and eventual romantic interest, as the typical hypermasculine “player”, just to show him being kind and sensitive later on when it comes to Chiron. It challenges our beliefs and biases, asking questions on the intersectionality of an individual’s identity and how it affects the community these individuals came from.

These three personas are a continuation of Chiron’s life, but they are their own individual characters facing their own struggles. Just like Chiron, my environment and the expectations that came with it forced me to suppress crucial parts of myself.

Watching Moonlight, I suddenly felt represented.

However, Black receives a call from Kevin asking him to visit Miami. The previous internalized identity that Juan worked to support was being destroyed.

Chiron is now going by the name “Black” in the third part, as Kevin had given him that nickname before they became intimate. This scene is done in such a gentle way. This motif of untangling oneself from societal expectations is further explored as the movie progresses and Chiron grows up to become a drug dealer.

The town in which I grew up was not the kind of town where you could differ from the norm. The connection between these two boys reaches its peak during a night at the beach in which they share an explorative and vulnerable sexual experience. In Moonlight, Chiron finds a set of surrogate parents in Juan and Teresa (Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monáe), who teach him how to swim, how to make a bed, how to sit up straight, and how to live a life with dignity.

There’s a deeper resonance in the naming choice for those who follow Hellenistic astrology.

His three-part journey is a story of survival, but it is also a universal one of a life lived — an attempt not only to heal, but to explore.