By Josh Lee 

I was around 10 when I stumbled across the music video for George Michael’s Outside. It was the first time I’d seen anything that was gay. I didn’t really understand what two men kissing meant, but I believed in it more than the heterosexual world I’d seen on TV. I’d known that I was in some way different to the rest of my family from as far back as I could remember, and that music video helped me understand what was different before I could articulate it for myself. It gave me something to identify with – even if it wasn’t age-appropriate material.

Some of this is specific to the poor black American experience, but issues of hypermasculinity, poverty and the experience of being made to feel like a second-class citizen are found in black communities all over the world

As I got older, LGBTQ+ representation became more commonplace. While the people I saw on soaps and in newspapers had the same orientation as me, they never looked like me. Media was white, and gay media whiter still. For a long time I thought being gay was a white thing, and I was an anomaly. George Michael’s music had helped me come to terms with a part of who I was, but it wasn’t until my late teens that I could reconcile my sexual and racial identities.

Watching Moonlight, I reflected on the years I’d spent not understanding myself and the time I’d wasted being too scared to ask questions, and how one film could lay all the answers I’d needed during my childhood at my feet. When you strip away all the messages of hope and reconciliation and fear and love that Moonlight contains, what’s left is a simple, powerful affirmation for queer black men. We exist. We’re supposed to exist. That’s not something we can always learn from the whitewashed, heterocentric media we’re brought up with.