6. Moonlight, Adaptation, and Queer Time

Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016), based on an unpublished play by Tarell Alvin McCraney (and on both writers’ lives growing up in a rough Miami neighborhood), illustrates the queer potential of adaptation. Although the film received an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, this essay demonstrates the value of reading the film as an adaptation. Doing so helps us to see the film’s essential queerness, which has to do not just with its focus on a gay character but with its construction of time and space, its resistance to—and revision of—conventional narrative patterns. The analysis also suggests a strategy for approaching other adaptations—not as a contest between two competing works to see which one is more authentic, but as a collaboration among artists, readers, commentators, spectators.