Out Spotlight LXXXII

Today's Out Spotlight is author James Baldwin. American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist and civil rights activist.

Most of Baldwin's work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century in the United States. His novels are notable for the personal way in which they explore questions of identity as well as the way in which they mine complex social and psychological pressures related to being black and homosexual well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups was improved.

When he was an infant, his mother, Emma Berdis Joynes, moved to Harlem, NY, and while he was still young, his mother married a minister, David Baldwin, who adopted him. The family was poor; and Baldwin and his adoptive father had a tumultuous relationship. Growing up he attended the prestigious DeWitt Clinton High School in New York. At the age of 14, he joined the Pentecostal Church and became a Pentecostal preacher. At 17 years , Baldwin turned away from his religion and moved to Greenwich Village, a New York City neighborhood, famous for its artists and writers. Supporting himself with odd jobs, he began to write short stories, essays, and book reviews, many of which were later collected in the volume Notes of a Native.

During this time he began to recognize his own homosexuality and he also became fully aware of the implications of being black in America. Everyday exposure to unacceptance left him deeply wounded. In 1948, disillusioned by American prejudice against blacks and homosexuals, Baldwin left the United States and departed to Paris, France, with forty dollars in his pocket and no knowledge of French. He would live as an expatriate for most of his later life. He also frequently stayed in Turkey during the 1960s.

A prolific artist, Baldwin published twenty-two books during a career that lasted nearly forty years; he wrote formal essays, fiction, drama, and poetry. In his early collections of elegantly written essays--such as Notes of a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name --he combined autobiography with trenchant cultural analysis to create brilliant critiques of American race relations.

In one of his early essays, "The Preservation of Innocence" published in Zero, an obscure and now defunct Moroccan journal, in the summer of 1949; (it did not appear in print in the United States until 1989), one of very few nonfiction narratives in which Baldwin explicitly talk the subject of homosexuality--he defends the naturalness and legitimacy of homosexual desire and suggests that homophobia is a consequence of heterosexual panic. Hostility toward homosexuals, like racially motivated hostility, signals a radical failure of imagination and an inability to acknowledge the fullness of one's own humanity. These early insights anticipate his subsequent treatment of gay and bisexual themes in his fiction.

"Outing," a short story published in 1951, was Baldwin's first fictional text that thematizes homoeroticism. A story of sexual awakening, it centers on two adolescent boys, Johnny Grimes and David Jackson, who spend much of a day together on a church picnic. As the day progresses, Johnny becomes increasingly conscious of his sexual feelings for David--feelings that excite as well as terrify him. The narrative ends on a hauntingly ambivalent note, as Johnny gains a heightened awareness of his emerging sexuality that holds new possibilities as well as perils.

Baldwin develops this theme of adolescent homosexual awakening more elaborately in his first and perhaps his best novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Though arguably a record of Baldwin's own attempt to come to terms with his own life. Go Tell is much more than merely autobiographical.

This theme of sexual identity dominates Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room. Its all-white cast of characters and its candid treatment of homosexual romance disappointed many of Baldwin's readers, yet Giovanni's Room eventually helped secure Baldwin's central place in gay American literature.

Giovanni's Room focuses on David, a young American in Paris. There he falls in love with Giovanni, a handsome Italian. But David, unable to accept his own gay self, abandons Giovanni, who helplessly seeks refuge in the Parisian sexual underworld. In a rather sensational turn of events, Giovanni murders Guillaume, an employer who humiliates and exploits him; soon he is caught, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. The story begins on the eve of his execution and, in an extended flashback, David reconstructs his relationship with Giovanni and his own role in contributing to Giovanni's current plight. In David's recollections, Baldwin forcefully dramatizes the central dilemma of the protagonist: He is caught between cultural expectations of heterosexual conduct, which he himself has internalized, and his private sexual desire for other men. David fails to resolve the dilemma; because he is unwilling to accept his sexuality honestly, he is unable to live and love authentically.

Long before the Stonewall Riots of 1969 helped liberate the gay literary imagination in the United States, he boldly made his sexuality a vital part of his artistic vision. Even more important, by insisting on honest and open explorations of gay and bisexual themes in his fiction, he made a sharp break from the established African-American literary conventions. Through such a radical departure from tradition, he helped create the space for a generation of young African-American gay writers who succeeded him.

While he was an influence on others, he also had influences who helped shaped him and his writings. One source of support came from an admired older writer Richard Wright, whom he called "the greatest black writer in the world." Wright and Baldwin became friends for a short time and Wright helped him to secure the Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Award. Baldwin titled a collection of essays Notes of a Native Son, in clear reference to Wright's novel Native Son. However, Baldwin's 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel" ended the two authors' friendship because Baldwin asserted that Wright's novel Native Son, like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, lacked credible characters and psychological complexity. However, during an interview with Julius Lester, Baldwin explained that his adoration for Wright remained: "I knew Richard and I loved him. I was not attacking him; I was trying to clarify something for myself."

Also in 1949 Baldwin met and fell in love with a seventeen-year-old runaway,Lucien Happersberger and the two became very close, until Happersberger's marriage three years later, an event that left Baldwin devastated. This relationship and loss brought much into his writing.

Another major influence on Baldwin's life was the African-American painter Beauford Delaney. In his book The Price of the Ticket, Baldwin describes Delaney as "the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognized as my teacher and I as his pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow."

And while Baldwin was influenced by those around him, he was an influence on others at the same time. Baldwin was a close friend of the singer, pianist and civil rights activist Nina Simone. Together with Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry, Baldwin is responsible for making Simone aware of the civil rights movement that was forming at that time to fight racial inequality. He also provided her with literary references that influenced her later work. He also had an influence on the work of the french painter Philippe Derome which he meets in Paris at the beginning of 1960s And Maya Angelou called Baldwin her "friend and brother", and credited him for "setting the stage" for the writing of her 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

On November 30, 1987 Baldwin died from stomach cancer in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. He was buried in New York.