Decades After His Death, James Baldwin Is the Queer Black Writer You Should Still Be Reading

Trailer for the 2016 Academy Award-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro.

Earlier this year, as part of an online book group, I read James Baldwin's riveting and searing The Fire Next Time. Published in 1963, the book is in two parts: “Letter to My Nephew on the Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” in which he ponders just how free Black people are, and aren’t, in America, and “Letters From a Region in my Mind,” which is his lengthy discussion focussing mostly on his fractured relationship with religion.

It is the first book in decades I read with a pen in hand, underlining furiously and making notes. It is not loaded with truth bombs; it flies in like Oppenheimer’s baby and attempts to tear asunder with fierce eloquence preconceived notions of Black/White relations. His letter to his nephew ends with the stunners: “(Integration) means: that (Black people), with love, shall force our (White) brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.” This is followed by “…the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early.”

Photo by Allan Warren

No, these are not sexy reads from this ground-breaking, award-winning queer novelist, poet, and essayist. This is political work, social admonition, a civil rights call to arms. Incidentally, I purposely use the word “queer” instead of “gay,” though he certainly was that, for its political context. Baldwin wrote much more towards social politics as a gay man, than he wrote gay literature for gay people. 

His sexuality, similarly to Baryard Rustin’s situation, caused an ouster from the inner sanctum of Martin Luther King’s and other civil rights organizations. While he did participate in events like the 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 Selma march, his voice would rise at other times on his own time, and not by invitation from those leaders.

At the 1963 March on Washington, pictured with Charlton Heston, Marlon Brando (Sydney Poitier in background, and Harry Belafonte behind Brando; Photo by U.S. Information Agency. Press and Publications Service.

"We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” This is probably Baldwin’s more oft-quoted and well-known statement. He’s speaking as a Black man to the White universal “you,” but it’s often reinterpreted from a gay perspective towards straight oppressors. While gay and bisexual references and characters pepper his writings, his 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room was his only truly explicit gay love story, of sorts. 

If you’re wondering how this book was published in 1956, it’s because he had moved to Paris ten years or so prior and established himself with that city’s more accommodating array of artists, thinkers, and cafe denizens. He was born in Harlem in 1924, but his move overseas in ’48 to escape the physically threatening and mind-numbing racism of America allowed him a freedom to write and live that would have possibly killed him had he stayed.

Baldwin wrote with unapologetic truth to power, bordering on invectives. He had a singular mind that was challenged, and most importantly, challenged right back. Watch the following clip from a 1968 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show in which he responds so passionately to charges from a White man who questions the need to “always make it about Black and White.”

"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

He died in Paris in 1987, and his legacy lives on. Some have said, with the Black Lives Matter movement, with discussions of privilege and race necessarily exploding everywhere, that his writings and thoughts have had a resurgence.  In 2017, Scott Timberg wrote in the Los Angeles Times "30 years after his death, James Baldwin is having a new pop culture moment….(He) is not just a writer for the ages, but a scribe whose work—as squarely as George Orwell's—speaks directly to ours."

In June 2019, Baldwin was one of the inaugural fifty American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument (SNM) in New York City's Stonewall Inn.

A misquote at an Indianapolis  George Floyd protest. The actual quote is “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Photo by NotSoAngryAnymore - https://imgur.com/a/5u2YPdh, Copyrighted free use.

The 2018 film version of his novel If Beale Street Could Talk was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and for which Regina King won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. And when Billy Porter, who is working on a Baldwin biopic, won Best Actor in a Drama Series for Pose he quoted Baldwin in his acceptance speech: “It took many years of vomiting up all the filth that I had been taught about myself and halfway believed before I could walk around this Earth like I had the right to be here."

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