“I’d Do Anything for You (in the Dark)”

Centrally drawing upon the work of Calvin Warren and Sylvia Wynter, I perform a meta-criticism of critical reviews of Barry Jenkins’ 2016 film Moonlight to explore two related concepts: the myth of being and the darkfaggot. I argue these reviews unwittingly adhere to the myth of being, an ideological structure instituting subjects as sovereign co-identifying beings contra the non-be-longing of the ontologically unsovereign black. These reviews by black critics inherit the myth of being’s differentiating imperative such that their assignment of a queer identity to Moonlight functions to reproduce an intramural structural position of otherness I term the “darkfaggot.” The darkfaggot is an idea of redoubled non-be-longing—that is, non-be-longing and non-existence—whose function is to mystify the black’s starvation of being that conditions the satiation of the human subject’s hunger to be-long. In the end, I decipher Moonlight’s non-answer of the “identity question” as an implicit argument about the impossibility of black be-longing, and thus black queerness as a mode of be-longing, within totalizing conditions of dispossessive violence.