The actor:	Trevante Adams
The character:	Black
The film:	Moonlight
The line:	“You’re the only man that’s ever touched me. You’re the only one. I haven’t really touched anyone since.”

By now we’ve gotten to the most romantic (#17) and most erotic (#14) lines of the 21st Century. This, as I alluded to a while ago, is the most tender.

Chiron and Kevin go back a long way, though by the time Chiron has moved to Atlanta, he has not been in touch with his unlikely friend and first sexual partner for years. Chiron in his late twenties is not all that different from Chiron when we first knew him as “Little.” He’s still stoic and taciturn, still reluctant to share much of himself with anyone else. Like Juan, the most meaningful father figure of his life, he’s made his way by dealing drugs. For a long, long stretch of the movie it feels like the last third of Chiron to develop or change in a meaningful way is the second third. Black is more outwardly confident than we’ve seen him before, but compared to most of the adult men we see in this film, he’s still low key.

Kevin, on the other hand, is a different man. Physically he’s different than he’s been before. As a kid, he’s husky, and even as a teenager he looks ill at ease with his own body. Now he’s handsome, tightly built, finally out of a series of awkward stages. His affect has changed too. Kevin was always a joiner, and a boisterous one at that. Some of his last contact with Chiron was physical contact, as in a series of blows that he was forced into and that Chiron refused to return. Now he’s almost as much a loner as Chiron is. Chiron is isolated by his responsibility, because it’s a lot easier to punish someone for a job poorly done if you’re not close with them. Kevin is isolated for more prosaic reasons. He’s had a kid with a woman he’s not with anymore; he cooks food at a diner. Kevin still mingles more than Chiron ever did, but that mingling does not come with the desire to belong anymore. He’s found out enough about himself to understand that the joiner went out with the baby fat.

In Atonement, there’s a scene where Robbie and Cecilia are speaking to one another while both are doing their wartime service. Their love from before the war, before Robbie’s arrest, still beats. But Robbie says, “If all we have rests on a few moments in a library three and a half years ago, then I am not sure, I don’t know…” The Robbie-Cecilia relationship would have been awkward before it turned impossible; Robbie knows the Tallis family because his mother works for the Tallis family. Their situation is West Sussex grace itself compared to Chiron and Kevin, both of whom are closeted to one extent or another and who grew up in years where that kind of relationship was impossible for either to commit to. In practical terms, when Chiron says those three sentences in a row, three long sentences for someone like him, there’s nothing he can expect to gain. All that he and Kevin have, sexually or romantically speaking, rests on a sandy beach handjob when they were teenagers. He has much more to lose from this encounter than to gain. No moment in Moonlight requires stronger guts than looking at this man, a stranger from the adolescent he knew, and telling him, “You’re the only one.”