from Giovanni’s Room

JAMES BALDWIN

Perhaps it’s my European wardrobe or the fact that I like to shake my money maker or that I try to be considerate of my women friends (always putting the seat down, for example), but I’m often asked if I am gay. Normally I respond that I don’t think so, for I certainly don’t seem aroused by male genitalia—but this answer doesn’t seem to resolve the issue. I’d like to believe that I would know by now, that the truth ’twould have outed long ago, but the whole orientation thing is so complicated, so fraught with conflicting signs, that it’s easy to doubt, to second-guess, and, finally, to third-guess the second-guesses and start the questioning over. If I say I’m gay, then clearly I’m gay, but if I deny it, I’m likely to be repressed (I grew up in the Midwest after all) and thus probably even more gay. Or so the vicious logic goes, thank you Dr. Freud.

You would think, then, that I could take some comfort in the notion that people’s sexual preferences are said to fall on a continuum of 1 to 10, with the numbers at either end representing complete, unequivocal commitments to a single gender and the middle ones representing leanings either way. But for those of us who probably fall somewhere close to the equator, the continuum is a source of both relief and renewed suspicion. Relief because our sexuality doesn’t seem deviant, suspicion because it’s not clear where the truth might lie. Seven, three? Four, six? Five? God knows. How would I know? Ah . . . but wait. Some people do seem to know, and not only those at the far, unambiguous ends of the spectrum. Take, for example, James Baldwin’s male protagonist in Giovanni’sRoom, who, early in the book, has his first sexual encounter— and it’s with a boy. He realizes that he’s gay but then tries to suppress it in the most painful account of unwelcome identity I’ve ever read. Baldwin’s characters (both here and elsewhere) struggle mightily with their conflicted sexualities, bringing to the page the pain and anguish of living a lie, or a truth you are unwilling to accept. It’s ironic that an author so adept at portraying the sexual identities of confused bisexual men would script the moment of realization with such lucidity and precision. But, sadly for Baldwin, that moment was the beginning, not the end, of the questioning.

I laughed and grabbed his head as I had done God knows how many times before, when I was playing with him or when he had annoyed me. But this time when I touched him something happened in him and in me which made this touch different from any touch either of us had ever known. And he did not resist, as he usually did, but lay where I had pulled him, against my chest. And I realized that my heart was beating in an awful way and that Joey was trembling against me and the light in the room was very bright and hot. I started to move and to make some kind of joke but Joey mumbled something and I put my head down to hear. Joey raised his head as I lowered mine and we kissed, as it were, by accident. Then, for the first time in my life, I was really aware of another person’s body, of another person’s smell. We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find. I was very frightened, I am sure he was frightened too, and we shut our eyes. To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it. I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding, intolerable pain came joy, we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be enough for me to act with Joey the act of love . . .

But Joey is a boy. I saw suddenly the power in his thighs, in his arms, and in his loosely curled fists. The power and the promise and the mystery of that body made me suddenly afraid. That body suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood. Precisely, I wanted to know that mystery and feel that power and have that promise fulfilled through me. The sweat on my back grew cold. I was ashamed. The very bed, in its sweet disorder, testified to vileness. I wondered what Joey’s mother would say when she saw the sheets. Then I thought of my father, who had no one in the world but me, my mother having died when I was little. A cavern opened in my mind, black, full of rumor, suggestion, of half-heard, half-forgotten, half-understood stories, full of dirty words. I thought I saw my future in that cavern. I was afraid. I could have cried, cried for shame and terror, cried for not understanding how this could have happened to me, how this could have happened in me. And I made my decision . . .