Colorblind: The Color of Love

This post is extremely close to my heart, because it is a guest submission from a professor whom I love and admire. Frederick Aldama is a prolific artist, academic, and mentor. He is one of the champions of Latinx discourse, especially from a nuanced creative lens. Aldama's work and advocacy creates safe spaces for LGBTQ students and scholars of color, recognizing these intersectional identities with love and empowerment. In his brief commentary on Moonlight, posted below, Aldama highlights the salient message of this moving film: love. 

Acceptance and validation of LGBTQs of color is more than adding more colors to a flag. It's about speaking up against the senseless murders of our trans women of color as loudly as those who applauded the "courage" of Kaitlyn Jenner. It's about boldly challenging stigmas against homosexual men of color, such that they do not feel relegated to a harmful subgroup/counterculture crooked room. It's about advocacy that does not make a disabled LGBTQ individual of color feel as if one identity is of more hierarchy. It's about using person-first language when addressing identity, learning someone's pronouns, and stating, "I see you, and I honor you." It's remembering that love is a human right. 

Thank you for your words, Fede. Abrazos.

Notes from the LatinX Underground

Frederick Luis Aldama

Barry Jenkins’s film Moonlight (2016) rattled me to the core—and this like no other film in recent memory. His masterful lensing, editing, and sound composing make for an exquisite envelope to carry his story and message. That in spite of living in a world ripped apart by the violence and shaming of LGBTQ people of color, there can be affirmation. There can be love. 

The film will live with me forever. However, there are five scenes I’d like to highlight:

1. When the child Chiron sits at the dining table at the home of Blatino (Cuban African) Juan and asks:  “am I a faggot?” Without belittling Chiron, Juan tells him that “faggot” is used to make gay people feel bad. It’s a moment that conveys the deep growing of their bond—a kind of surrogate father figure son that’s entirely based on truth.
2. Juan asks for Chiron’s trust then teaches Chiron to swim and float in the ocean; indeed, as Chiron grows up and increasingly becomes the target of violence and sham for being a gay teen then man of color, the ocean becomes his refuge. In both scenes Jenkins and the actors and their careful choreography of body posture and gesture convey the solidification of an extraordinary relationship between Juan and Chiron as a love between parent and child.
3. As a teen, Chiron experiences his first intimate encounter with Kevin, and at the ocean’s edge. Jenkins’s use of the long take coupled with the gentle lapping of the waves on the beach and the whispered moans of pleasure clear a space of refuge for the realization of desire between two teens of color.
4. Jenkins powerfully reminds us of the violence directed toward gay men of color in a scene where the bully Terrell coerces the teen Kevin into punching Chiron. Jenkins uses the long take, anti-clockwise circular pan, harsh light of midday, and stretched and remixed jazz music score to intensify our anxiety and visceral response to this harrowing scene of violence.
5. Jenkins’s masterful lensing, editing, and scoring of one of the film’s final scenes: after Chiron reunites with Kevin as young men, in a wordless moment Jenkins conveys the deep love they have for one another.

In the most exquisite of ways, Moonlight shows the world that gay men of color belong. That we are integral to the human species. It powerfully reminds us of the scientific fact: in life, sexuality identities with its corresponding attractions and behaviors are not fixed one way or another.  That LGBTQ people of color also yearn for human connection. That we, too, need the social glue of love.  And while this is it’s lasting message, Jenkins and his creative team don’t shy away from truths: the violence and shaming of LGBTQ people color within and outside of our families and communities. Put simply, Jenkins (and cowriter Tarell Alvin McCraney) put their finger on the very pulse of all life: the need for all of us to be able to grow attachments, trust, recognition, affection—love—if we are to evolve as a species.

In closing, let me mention my recent creative foray into this arena. In my debut book of fiction, Long Stories Cut Short: Fiction from the Borderlands I create stories of Latinx characters of all kinds—from straight macho papas and abuelos to empowered motorbike riding Latinas to LGBTQ Latinxers.  No matter the sexuality identities, the Latinx characters all seek the kind of attachments and affirmations that can and do evolve into love.  One way or another, these stories show how the building of trust between people allows for the growing of this attachment where love can flourish. Like Jenkins, however, there stories also remind of the fear in the world that ends up violently targeting and shaming those of us who have a more fluid sense of sexual existence; they remind that today’s ripped-at-the-seams social tissue prevents all of us from having access to spaces where reciprocal trust, attachment, affirmation, and love can grow. The stories distill and recreate a real world where Latinxers are systematically denied the essential right to be acknowledged as human. In one story, the protagonist ends a laundry list of things he can’t live without with this line: “My panocha—and that means “vagina”: if you’ll permit me to add this sixth.” And with this, the protagonist speaks for all of us who simply ask for recognition, affection, affirmation, and love in all the complex ways that we exist in the world.