Who will find out the secret and what will they do with that knowledge? Indeed, a lot of queer narratives play out like detective stories. With characters forced out of the closet and their secret used against them. In the films set before the 1969 Stonewall riots, coming out is an unwise, if not unthinkable, decision.

Though Moonlight​ couldn’t be more different from those two aforementioned films, all three share a significant similarity: none of these films stages a coming out scene. But Moonlight​ is set in the present and the twenty-odd years leading up to it. ​ They both take place in pre-Stonewall America. Indeed, two of the most notable queer films from this century are Brokeback​ Mountain (2005) and Carol (2015). As we are prone to do when talking about films depicting minorities, we compare it to those that came before them. But Barry Jenkins’s film Moonlight​ (2016) has proven to be an indestructible raft (but not by any means “tear”-proof). As if clinging to a lifeboat of fair representation, critics and audiences look for holes in the raft – sometimes discarding it entirely, or patching it up with forgiving praise. So when a film comes out that depicts marginalized figures it’s passed under the kind of scrutiny that a lot of other films evade. If mainstream cinema is upheld to the task of democratically representing its viewers then it often fails. Hibbert) and Juan (Mahershala Ali) in Moonlight