Queer Cinema World Tour is our regular feature taking you to destinations behind your favourite LGBTQ2S+ film moments. This week we’re visiting Miami, Florida, the setting for 2016’s Moonlight.
Moonlight established several benchmarks when the poetic coming-of-age drama seduced audiences back in 2016. The low-budget film was the first with an all-Black cast to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and one of a handful of LGBTQ2S+ films marketed to a mass audience.
In three distinct chapters, set in three different time periods, we watch Little (Alex R. Hibbert), a shy bullied boy, grow into the homo-curious (and also bullied) teenager Chiron (Ashton Sanders), who in turn grows up to be the drug dealer Black (Trevante Rhodes), who lives in Atlanta.
Though tough on the outside, Black seems caught up in memories of his tender teenage relationship with Kevin (played as a child by Jaden Piner, as a teen by Jharrel Jerome, as an adult by André Holland); in the film’s poignant third chapter, Black returns to Miami to investigate what there was, and perhaps still is, between them.
Set partly in crackhouses and alleyways, where Chiron must sometimes go looking for his drug-addict mother (Naomie Harris), the Miami of Moonlight is not a Miami most tourists are familiar with. But many of the filming locations are worth visiting—and many have changed dramatically since the film’s 1990s time period.
The Liberty City neighbourhood where young Chiron lives was also the childhood stomping grounds of Moonlight’s director Barry Jenkins, and of Tarell Alvin McCraney, the writer/actor whose semi-autobiographical play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue is the basis of the script. Separated from Little Haiti and other waterfront neighbourhoods by the Interstate 95 expressway, it was a middle-class Black neighbourhood in the early 20th century that had declined in the 1960s and ’70s only to bounce back over the last couple of decades. The neighbourhood is home to the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center (6161 N.W. 22nd Ave., Miami—notably near the intersection of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard and Moonlight Way), which hosts several performance-oriented events throughout the year, including a jazz festival, a blues and soul festival and theatrical performances. Liberty City is also home to Sandrell Rivers Theater (6103 N.W. 7th Ave., Miami), where the resident company is M-Ensemble Company, Florida’s longest-running African American Theater organization. The Miami Gay Chorus also does shows here.
The Historic Hampton House (4240 N.W. 27th Ave., Miami) is the only “Green Book” venue—that is, a designated safe space for Black people before the Civil Rights Act of 1964—that’s been turned into a museum for “sharing the unique experience of the segregated era.” In the 1960s, the building was a jazz club where Sam Cooke, Nat King Cole, famed bisexual Josephine Baker, Ella Fitzgerald and Sammy Davis, Jr. among others performed there. Closed in 1976, a 2015 restoration project turned it into a museum that commemorates The Green Book era and is also one of the venues taking part in Miami Art Week, which usually occurs in December.
Early on in Moonlight, Little is saved from bullying by Juan (Mahershala Ali), who teaches him to swim at Historic Virginia Key Beach Park (4020 Virginia Beach Dr., Miami), an island just south of Miami Beach. Originally reachable only by boat from downtown (you can drive there now), the park was opened in 1945 “for the exclusive use of Negroes.” After desegregation, the park fell into disuse, though it was a haunt for gay men and nudists through the 1980s. It underwent a revival in the early 2000s, and you can now go there for a historic walking tour or to visit Miami Seaquarium (4400, Rickenbacker Cswy., Miami).
The spark between teenaged Chiron and Kevin takes place near the water’s edge in South Beach, a flashy area. Knowing that the two young men were likely out of their element there enhances the experience of watching the film. Though both Chiron and Kevin were lost in their own thoughts and feelings as they smoked a joint on the beach, they were walking distance from some of America’s best nightlife of that era, both straight and gay. Hotspots like Paragon—one of the biggest gay clubs at the time—Warsaw Ballroom and West End are gone now, but the legendary Twist (1057 Washington Ave., Miami Beach), which opened in 1993, is still a major party destination. There’s also Nathan’s Beach Club (1216 Washington Ave., Miami Beach), a gay dance and drag bar that reopened after a facelift in 2023. In the early 1990s, police raided three South Beach clubs, including Twist and Paragon, arresting patrons in what was seen as a crackdown on the community.
Things have definitely evolved. These days, South Beach is home to shameless spots like Hôtel Gaythering (1409 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach), an adults-only gay hotel and sauna that declares itself to be “homey yet sexy, chic yet masculine.” Definitely beyond the teenagers’ comprehension, but perhaps adult Chiron and Kevin might book a room?
In chapter three of Moonlight, when Black returns to Miami to see Kevin after a decade of estrangement, they meet in a booth at Jimmy’s Eastside Diner (7201 Biscayne Blvd., Miami) to suss each other out. The gay-friendly establishment, which has a decor sure to transport patrons back to the ’60s, is known for its breakfasts. It was recently bought by Italian restaurateur and soccer club owner Tonino Doino. The restaurant is in Miami’s MiMo District, which runs along Biscayne Boulevard between Northeast 50th and 77th streets on Miami’s Upper East Side. Its cool modern architecture and cute boutique shopping mark it as an up-and-coming neighbourhood to visit.
Moonlight does not reveal what happens to Chiron and Kevin after they reunite. Director Jenkins leaves us hanging. But if they were to couple up in Miami, viewers can imagine them leading far more openly gay lives than their childhood selves could have ever imagined.
