James Baldwin:
By: David Wade Chambers
Tags: Racism, Writing Tips, Black, LGBTQ, James Baldwin

JOURNALIST: When you were starting out as a writer, you were black, impoverished, and homosexual. You must have said to yourself, “Gee, how disadvantaged can I get?” BALDWIN: No, I thought I had hit the jackpot. It was so outrageous, you had to find a way to use it. (From Hilton Als, The Enemy Within, 1998)

For many years James Baldwin was my favorite writer. When I read his second novel Giovanni’s Room in 1960, my last year of college, I was startled and intrigued by its explicit homoerotic content. No surprise, then, that I quickly devoured his earlier novel Go Tell it on the Mountain which was a semi-autobiographical telling the story of a young boy’s discovery of his sexuality. The book was destined to become an American classic.

A few years later, his third novel, Another Country, came out with a broad spectrum of sexual, racial, artistic, and even political themes depicting men and women, straight and queer, black and white, noteworthy for its emotional intensity and its sprawling look at the intricacies of gender and race. For the most part, the critics didn’t like Another Country as much as I did.

At about the same time, Baldwin published a book of essays, first appearing in The New Yorker, entitled The Fire Next Time. These essays dealt with the prominent role of race and racism in American history as well as taking a look at race and religion in American life. Some have spoken of this as signifying the point at which Baldwin made his break with religion, after initially planning a life as a Pentecostal preacher.

I personally interpreted The Fire Next Time very differently. Indeed, one paragraph had a profound effect on my thinking. Baldwin wrote “if the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.” Instead of seeing these words as marking a break with Christianity, at the time I saw it rather as a break only with fundamentalism. It is possible to interpret his words as forming a clearer commitment to the God of the New Testament as compared to the vengeful and often angry God of the Old.

Whatever may be said about such religious issues, the centrality of sexuality so apparent in the novels did not seem to carry over into Baldwin’s non-fiction. Michelle Gordon, Senior Lecturer in African American Studies at Emory suggests, “for a long time, when [Baldwin] was talked about by scholars, it was not really about his sexual orientation.” In fact, their discussion of the impact of sexuality on his writing did not really get under way until 10 to 15 years after his death in 1987.

Perhaps this scholarly reticence came in some measure from Baldwin’s own reluctance to talk about his sexuality. Even when Baldwin did discuss sex and gender, the tone struck often maintains a certain distanced quality.

Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.” (from Conversations with James Baldwin, 1961–1987)

When asked if being gay was an aberration, Baldwin made it very clear that such views were an indication of narrowness and stagnation. Baldwin was open about his homosexuality and relationships with both men and women. Yet he believed that the focus on rigid categories was just a way of limiting freedom and that human sexuality is more fluid and less binary than often expressed in the U.S. It was his essays that helped establish Baldwin as one of the top writers of the times. … Baldwin offered a brutally realistic picture of race relations, but he remained hopeful about possible improvements. “If we…do not falter in our duty now, we may be able…to end the racial nightmare.” His words struck a chord with the American people, and The Fire Next Time sold more than a million copies. That same year, Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time magazine. “There is not another writer — white or Black — who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South,” Time said in the feature. — — — — — Anonymous in GoodReads

If you click on this link, you will hear a reading of an essay in which Baldwin discusses the nature of the artist’s (read writer’s) responsibility to society.