“People invent categories in order to feel safe. White people invented black people to give white people identity...Straight cats invented faggots so they can sleep with them without becoming faggots themselves.”
James Baldwin & Nikki Giovanni, A Dialogue (1973)
“Have you ever wished you were queer?” Rufus asked suddenly.
Vivaldo smiled, looking into his glass. “I used to think maybe I was. Hell, I think I even wished I was. But I’m not. So I’m stuck.”
Rufus walked to Vivaldo’s window. “So you been all up and down that street, too.”
“We’ve all been up the same streets. There aren’t a hell of a lot of streets. Only we’re taught to lie so much about so many things, that we hardly know where we are.
James Baldwin, Another Country (1962)
"Nothing can be hidden; secrets do not exist."
James Baldwin, Just Above My Head (1979)
PART ONE - WITNESS
1
Several years ago, I was introduced to a woman at a friend’s party. She and I got along famously, and at one point in our conversation, she said she wanted to introduce me to her husband who would be arriving any moment from work. She excused herself, and about a half hour later, they approached me together as I was finishing a conversation with our host. Holding a fresh drink in her hand, she presented her husband to me with great flair. “And this,” she said warmly, “is Edgar!”
I took in the shock-white hair, the thin mustache. Edgar and I shook hands, and I smiled and made my eyes friendly, yet blank – making a herculean effort not to reveal that not only did I already know her husband, but less than a month before I’d had sex with him.
He wasn’t an actor by profession, but he might have won an Academy Award for the performance he gave that evening. Edgar managed to actively engage in, but not overdo, the enthusiasm of making a new acquaintance. He feigned surprise while his wife shared details that she’d just learned about me as if hearing them for the first time. The three of us stood together for several minutes conversing and making small talk, and as we spoke, I searched for the desperate plea behind his eyes, the “Oh-shit-this-can’t-be-happening” look of panic that I myself was trying desperately to suppress. It wasn’t forthcoming. In fact, he was so placid, so relaxed, that at one point I began to doubt myself and to question whether I’d gotten him mixed up with someone else: an actor in a porn film, or perhaps a gay twin. Anything other than what I knew to be true: he was a man, married to a woman, who had sex with other men.
She was a woman whom, by the way, I already liked, and couldn’t help feeling I’d somehow betrayed, even though when I met her husband I’d had no idea, at least at first, that he was married. He and I never had more than a brief conversation in the sex club, and when the subject came up, he was already dressed and preparing to leave. He gave me an email address if I ever wanted to “hook up again,” and a cell phone number to use during the day, but, he cautioned, “If you text me, please be discreet.”
Now I watched as they left to greet other friends. We said a momentary goodbye, promising to exchange numbers before the evening was over and meet for dinner sometime. I began a pleasant exchange with the man beside me, but I could only offer him half an ear, still unable to shake the unreality of what had just happened. When I heard Deborah’s laughter from a group of people in the kitchen, and observed Edgar standing alone, I made my way over to him.
Edgar didn’t acknowledge me when I stepped up to the table; he was busy foraging through the remnants of several trays of food. I watched as he reached for a plate and napkin, examined something that resembled a tiny quiche, and popped it into his mouth.
We stood together for a few moments before he spoke.
“Great party,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
He asked, “How long have you known Andy?”
“A few years now,” I replied. “I used to work with him.”
“We used to be his neighbors. In fact,” - he added olives and a few slices of brie to his plate - “my wife sold Andy this apartment.”
“Really?”
“Deb got him a great deal. So, if you ever need a realtor, you know where to come...”
“I do now, “ I said. “Thank you. I’ll remember that.”
“Sure. Anytime.”
We smiled inanely at each other, nodding and nodding, until, unable to bear the unspoken conversation, I finally offered, “Look, Edgar - “
“Don’t worry about it, guy,” he said, winking and with a tight little laugh. He even clapped me on the back and massaged my shoulder briefly with one hand. I marveled at his boldness, or whatever it was that was passing for boldness. But a slight twitch of his mouth and the way his eyes searched the room furtively let me know he was aware of who was standing near us. Fortunately, as everyone else had already eaten, we had the entire table to ourselves. He lowered his voice only slightly and nibbled on something else from his plate.
“You handled it fine,” he said. “I appreciate that.”
“Does she know?”
“Know what?”
“That you’re – “
“I’m not gay, if that’s what you’re implying. No, I don’t think so. Maybe. Who knows? We don’t talk about it.” He laughed it off, but I sensed he was slightly annoyed at my inquiry.
“You gave me your number,” I reminded him.
“I remember well. You didn’t call.” The harassed look left his face, and he leaned in, his mouth inches from mine. Now I was aware that someone might be staring at us. “Look,” he said, ‘my wife and I have been married a very, very long time. So before you convict me and send me to the gallows for my crime, just know: she’s not exactly innocent herself.”
“What does that mean?”
“We’ll leave it at that. ”
I didn’t know what to say, so I blurted, “I like her a lot.”
“Good,” he said. “I like her, too. That’s why I married her.”
“I feel guilty.”
“Why? You didn’t know I was married when we met.”
“This isn’t the first time this has happened to me,” I said, and explained to him how I’d taken a course after college, and how the teacher, on the last night of class and over drinks, described the man she was divorcing at the time. When she said his first name, his line of work, and made a joke about a fairly remarkable tattoo of his in a fairly remarkable place, I realized that I not only knew but had slept with the man and his tattoo. More than once.
She said, “If you only knew what this man is like, you’d know why I’m divorcing him,” and I thought to myself, I know exactly what he’s like. I know about the little tuft of hair on his lower back that he scratches when he stands to pee. I know that he can be tender in one moment, and then in the next jump up and wash himself at the sink after sex. I know the beer he drinks, what he likes on his pizza, and the corny outgoing message on his answering machine. Donald, whom I had met at the gym, “wasn’t gay”, like Edgar and, like Edgar, had also given me his phone number.
I remember thinking at the time how strange it was, this experience the three of us shared but would never share. Don was almost old enough to be my father, my teacher a few years younger. Perhaps it was presumptuous of me, but the whole thing felt like something out of a James Baldwin novel. I imagined how the world might perceive us: The white man, the white woman, "the black boy". Perhaps James wouldn’t have written about it, but I imagined he might have been interested in at least one aspect of the story; how Don, white, working-class, and “straight”, would have explained himself to his ex-wife if she had met us on the street together, as lovers. Given who we were, and where we were, there would have been no other explanation for our relationship. I thought of Giovanni’s Room and what the situation said about the three of us, the sexual and racial questions it raised, and not in faraway places like Paris, but in America.
Edgar seemed amused by my story, perhaps even slightly impressed. “Wow,” he chomped a cracker. “That’s quite a little tale.”
“I don’t know what any of this means,” I said.
“Why does it have to mean anything?”
“Maybe it means that men are liars or that I’m a whore. Or both.”
“Or that we’re all human, and things aren’t always black and white. You may not believe this, but I started sleeping with men so I wouldn’t cheat with women. And I can say in over twenty-five years of marriage I have never been unfaithful to my wife with another woman.”
“So you could never love a man romantically?” I asked, defensively. I knew better, but I couldn’t help feeling reduced. “Is that why you think sleeping with a man isn’t cheating?”
Edgar caught my tone, and said carefully, “I didn’t say that.”
He looked over my shoulder and raised a mini-quiche to his wife still in the kitchen. I turned and saw her smile at us, nodding vigorously and beckoning for him to bring the food. He made a small pile in his napkin.
“I’m being summoned avec quiche,” he said. “Before you judge me, however, just know – my wife and I haven’t had sex in over fifteen years. But we’re friends. You’ll know one day how much that matters - maybe it is all that matters. Nice talk, guy. You take care.” He winked, and walked away. When I reached for a mini-quiche after Edgar left, not because I was hungry but to have something to do with my hands, I realized he’d taken the last one.
2
The party had thinned, so I found a chair, and sat down, alone. I could hear Edgar’s voice in the kitchen, and while I knew he’d joined a conversation that had begun a half hour ago and that had absolutely nothing to do with me, his laughter, rising above the others, felt mocking, cruel. It was a hardy laugh - assured and carefree, as if nothing could ever intrude on its happiness. I was still deeply unsettled by the proceedings, but from the sound of his voice, he’d emerged from our exchange completely intact.
I imagined a scene in which I walked into the kitchen, positioned myself in the center of the convivial crowd and, after smashing all the mini-quiche in captivity, told Deborah everything I knew about her husband. I knew that wasn’t going to happen; I had no desire to hurt her, but the thought did invite me to examine where my anger came from.
Edgar wasn’t laughing at me, of course, I knew that, but I imagined that at one time in his life he might have laughed at men like me - out gay men, faggots. I also knew a man like Edgar would never be called a faggot, at least not to his face, as I have been. And if someone did call him one, he would just introduce them to his wife.
Edgar, and men like him, get all the pleasure of being gay, while risking none of the humiliation, none of the consequences. And there are consequences. If someone votes against gay marriage or denies a gay person employment, what does he care? That won’t stop Edgar from getting a blowjob on his lunch break. And even though I knew I was being unfair, because I didn’t know Edgar’s politics, what I did know was that sissies are getting their asses kicked every day in the brutal, macho world we live in. Gay and transgender men and women are scorned, sometimes murdered, because of the silence of Edgars. If everyone truly knew how many Edgars there were on the planet, engaging in same-sex experiences, the world would change overnight.
I’ve known Edgars since I was a teenager. Most gay men do. I met my first Edgar in the public bathroom of a nearby community college. What I remembered was his lumber-jacket, his hunting boots, and his breath, which smelled of stale tar from too many cigarettes. And whether fueled by sex-positive adventurousness, insecurity, untreated sex addiction, or all the above, my life had been my research when it came to the subject of men.
My fascination at men’s ability to compartmentalize their sexuality had fueled the most outrageous situations: there was the Sikh taxi driver I made out with in his cab after a conversation about his grandkids back home in India (yes, I still paid the fare); the repair man who came to fix the heating unit in my old apartment and got naked because he was separated from his girlfriend at the time and “bi-curious”; the concierge at a hotel in Paris who came to my room after his shift at 3:00 am, and showed me pictures of his dog and three kids while we sat in bed until morning; the attendant in the hotel in Dallas who asked if I needed fresh linens and ended up in the shower with me; the man I met in Oregon, who gave me his home phone number. His wife answered the phone when I called, and when he arrived at the hotel the next day, he greeted me with, “By the way, Becky says hi.” The Turkish man in a convenience store in London who, when he didn’t have the items I asked for, invited me to look for them with him in the storeroom; the married man who held my hand under a blanket the entire two hour flight to Atlanta. It seemed the only encounter I hadn’t had was with the pizza delivery guy; and only because he was usually double-parked or had to be somewhere in thirty minutes or less.
I live in New York, and I’ve been to the places where the two black men share the white one, where the Puerto Rican man thrills the Asian man who fondles the Jewish man. And I am able to testify personally that the conversation about men and sexuality is not about one race, or one culture, one orientation or political affiliation; it’s about men, gay men, bisexual men, straight men. Men loving and fucking each other, in private, “getting down” in private, and - most of the time and in far too many places - lying about it; to their families, to each other, to themselves. And I'm not even including the millions of men who would love to be held in another man's arms but are afraid that this constitutes homosexual desire. Or the men who obsess about homosexuality, who go to places where men have sex, and sit, sullenly denying themselves. They get to have none of the pleasure, all of the guilt.
Patriarchy and our narrow definitions of masculinity require this fear, these lies. I’m not interested in reviving discussions here about men on the “downlow”, talk-show topics meant to sensationalize or fetishize the experience of men who love other men, for entertainment or derision. What I am interested in, however, is courage and resistance, and what it means when a man breaks his silence and tells the truth about the masculine myth; about why John Wayne is ultimately a fraud, what homosexuality means to the cult of whiteness, and what men really do in the dark.
3
This essay is not intended only to be about men and sex. But to understand what is missing from Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro, and how James Baldwin has been received and, too often, misconceived on the American literary landscape and in our cultural imagination, one must talk about men and sex, about faggots and shame. What this essay is about is my great appreciation for the black gay American writer named James Arthur Baldwin, his journey from America to France, his testimony, his brilliance, and his swashbuckling bravery which spellbound a nation, and which demanded and continues to demand that we face the truth about who we were, who we are. Hundreds of pages written about him would still only scratch the surface, and I know whatever I’ve written here will be incomplete. But I want to contribute to the conversation that has been revived about his life and work at this time, to share my perceptions on my extraordinary black gay brother - and testify to what I see when I look out my window, (what James called "the view from here"), on American men, masculinity, sexuality and race.
This essay is also about my appreciation for, and great reservations about, the recently released film I Am Not Your Negro, which I admire, but which I also find at times disappointing and exasperating; and which I believe must be examined for its participation in the same macho hypocrisy and homosexual denial that Baldwin spent much of his life trying to deconstruct.
It is not my intention in this essay to put James Baldwin in a box to suit anyone’s political agenda, including my own. Some people have a problem using the word gay to describe Baldwin. (Baldwin himself had reservations about the word.) And there is a case to be made about keeping the details of Baldwin’s sexual life private; he was a private person, as he made clear in several media appearances and interviews. But Baldwin became more open about his sexuality in later interviews, and society’s relationship to the homosexual changed a great deal between 1956 (the year Giovanni’s Room was published) and 1987 (the year of his death). I believe that now, thirty years later, it is possible to appreciate Baldwin’s homosexual experience and identity, to examine how that experience relates to his gifts as an artist, and how it defines his aesthetic, all without exploiting him.
There are also those will argue that James Baldwin was bisexual, drawing from his words, “I’ve loved some men, I’ve loved some women,” and recalling the times when he spoke in talk-show interviews, such as the one featured in Peck’s film, about “my wife, my children.” It is my belief, in moments like this, Baldwin was speaking more rhetorically than literally. Baldwin used the rhetorical voice throughout much of his written work and speeches, which is one of the reasons why his work was so inclusive and also so destabilizing. Describing what “we” do to the negro in America, for example, he wasn’t pointing a finger at us, exactly, but rather, helping us point a finger at ourselves. I cannot prove, and will not attempt to try, that Baldwin didn’t have experiences at some point in his life with women. I believe, if these experiences happened at all in any depth, they were formative, part of his early years and not sustained in his adult life. It is the assumption of this writing that he led a predominantly homosexual life.
I worked for an AIDS organization in my mid- to late twenties, and on our intake form, in the space where we asked men about their sexual orientation, I remember distinctly the category “men who have sex with men.” Someone knew that for the men who came in for services, particularly men of color and working-class men, the word “gay” was an identity some of them outright refused to identify with. And yet the sexual behavior they were engaging in would have been defined by many as gay. I am less interested in James Baldwin as a “gay” man, although that word will be used throughout this piece, but rather as a man who was “queer” - a word which also has its limitations and from which some people recoil, but which defines for me anyone who stands outside the hetero-normative circle.
Because, within the construct of heteronormaity, not unlike the construct of whiteness, being “a little queer”, like being “a little black”, means that you exist, on some level, outside the tribe. There is no room for nuance. Heteronormality demands the perfect “straight” ideal. Therefore, it is the awareness that you exist outside the circle, not necessarily whom you sleep with, that defines the queer experience. Within that definition it is quite clear that Baldwin, whether he considered himself “gay” or “bisexual”, was a “queer” man.
In a 1984 interview with Richard Goldstein, senior editor of The Village Voice, Baldwin says:
“The word ‘gay’ has always rubbed me the wrong way. I never understood exactly what is meant by it. I don’t want to sound distant or patronizing because I really don’t feel that. I simply feel it’s a world that has very little to do with me, with where I did my growing up...”
Goldstein asks whether he thought of himself as being gay, and Baldwin responds,
“No. I didn’t have a word for it. The only one I had was “homosexual” and that didn’t quite cover whatever it was I was beginning to feel. Even when I began to realize things about myself, began to suspect who I was and what I was likely to become, it was still very personal, absolutely personal. It was really a matter between me and God....It hit me with great force while I was in the pulpit. I must have been about fourteen. I was still a virgin. I had no idea what you were supposed to do about it. I didn’t really understand any of what I felt except I knew I loved one boy, for example. But it was private. And by the time I left home, when I was seventeen or eighteen and still a virgin, it was like everything else in my life, a problem which I would have to resolve myself.”
Goldstein asks later in the interview, “Do you have a special feeling of responsibility towards gay people?” He then reminds Baldwin that his public writing is partly responsible for elevating the gay experience into the realm of literature. Baldwin replies,
”Towards that phenomenon we call gay, yeah, I feel special responsibility because I would have to be a kind of witness to it, you know...The sexual question and the racial question have always been entwined...If Americans can mature on the level of racism, then they have to mature on the level of sexuality.”
It is remarkable that a black writer from Harlem, nominated for the National Book Award (and who might have won had Ralph Ellison not won the year before for Invisible Man - many agreed that Baldwin deserved it, but there was no way two black men could win in a row), follows up his first novel with a second one about a “straight” white American man in Paris who falls in love with an Italian man, who is gay and once married himself.
Baldwin’s American publishers rejected it, told him to burn the book, but he refused and published it in England. I am stunned by the amount of courage it must have taken, the self-knowledge and confidence that James must have had to insist on this, to trust his vision. That he could not be shamed or bullied into not publishing Giovanni’s Room is essential to the Baldwin legend and legacy. “They told me 'you can’t afford to alienate the audience,'” Baldwin told Quincy Troupe in his final 1987 interview. “I told them fuck you.” What it tells us is that just as he had to write Go Tell It On The Mountain about his experience as a black boy growing up in Harlem and the black church, Giovanni’s Room was a story he had to tell also, about his experience as a gay man. There was no compromise.
Consider: this wasn’t a writer who added a little short story about homosexuality to be buried in the back of a collection, or who created an ancillary gay character in a novel. This was his sophomore fictional effort - even riskier. Many people have enjoyed success with a first novel, but it’s the second novel that proves whether the first was a fluke. Baldwin’s reputation was at stake, because a writer’s reputation is always at stake. I cannot think of a single black writer of his generation, or perhaps any other, who did something so bewildering to those who supported him, literally risking his entire literary career. Giovanni’s Room was written in a certain time and place and psychological mind frame that no longer exist, pre-“Will and Grace”, of course, before Stonewall, before homosexuality was removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973. For a promising black writer, who could easily have written a second book about Harlem life, to jump off a cliff like this, was a brazen act of either self-destruction or self-love.
Writing Giovanni’s Room meant that, whether or not he acknowledged it explicitly in the press, he was coming out as queer to somebody. Giovanni’s Room isn’t about seedy sexual goings-on, a gay “Peyton Place”. It’s a love story. But it’s also about the absence of love, or rather the inability to love; what sexual fear, and fear of homosexuality, and - more important - fear of vulnerability, does to men, how it turns us into monsters. What makes the book deeply compelling, is that Giovanni’s Room is not only about homosexuality, but male hypocrisy, clear from the last lines: “The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope, and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking towards the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.”
I chose to begin this piece with a sexual liaison and a lie, because I needed to construct the role the “faggot” plays, and the silence that surrounds him, how he is too often a footnote in American culture, particularly black American culture. The demonization continues, of the singers, the writers, the actors, the dancers, who have given their lives, their talent and their beauty, and whom we still cannot recognize as gay. And, while I am careful not to fall into the trap of suggesting that black Americans have a special pathology when it comes to homophobia (although there are specific reasons why a black man, in a racist society, may feel he cannot be vulnerable), I must also acknowledge the role of the black church in perpetuating hatred against gays, as instanced by gospel singer and pastor Kim Burrell’s vitriolic sermon leaked last year. (Paradoxically, some black gay men have thrived in the black church, and found community; usually, as long as they stay in the closet.) Burrell's rant was disturbing, but not an aberration: that sermon, from which I will quote later in the piece, could be heard in many a church, white or black, on any Sunday morning.
What James appreciated, perhaps above all, and from a very young age, was the importance of family. And he knew that anything that tears apart the family will eventually bring down the house. For the white homosexual activist who wants to end sexual inequality, the conversation has to include race. For the black revolutionary who wants an end to racism, fear of homosexuality has to be faced. True black liberation cannot be achieved until both homophobia and sexism are challenged and eradicated from our community.
If you’ve read him, then you know that there were a few things in the world that frightened James Baldwin, but a conversation on race and sexuality wasn’t one of the them. He understood, as exemplified by the opening quotation, the relationship between the nigger and the faggot, cultural creations, societal demons; and who better to understand it than the man who wakes up one morning to find that he is both. James was fearless in this aspect, perhaps even more so towards the end of his life, appreciating what silence does to the spiritual body. His final novel, Just Above My Head, appreciates the connection between lying about homosexuality and lying about family sexual abuse and rape, how they rend the fabric of the biological family, the church family, of society. James Baldwin, our elder brother, looking after his flock and “raising us”, demanded that we be better because he loved us, he loved us. What made him so brave was not necessarily his orientation or how he named it, but his refusal to ignore the sexual question and his understanding that examining it was integral to the healing of racism in America.
This is part of the triumph of I Am Not Your Negro and part of its disgrace; while it deconstructs the American sexual fear, for example, that refused to acknowledge Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte as sex symbols, the film also refuses to deal with the sexuality of his subject, or that Baldwin is indeed a “sexual” icon of a different kind. The man who spent his life demanding we tell the truth to each other and to ourselves deserves, at least in his own movie, to have the truth told about him.
Which is why this essay exists: I’m tired, frankly, of hearing people I respect saying that it doesn’t matter who James Baldwin slept with, that wasn’t the point. And in their insistence that Baldwin’s “gayness” is only a matter of his sexual experiences, meaning something to be footnoted, kept in the dark and private, they refuse to acknowledge that a black American gay aesthetic exists, that James’s homosexuality is also to be found in the inflections, the mannerisms, the approach, the humor, the sarcasm, the sass, the theatricality, the heroism. And it’s not just to be found in the “gay” books, either: The Fire Next Time was written by the same queer man who gave us Giovanni’s Room.
James Baldwin, coat on his shoulders, sunglasses, lit cigarette in one hand, fabulous and fabulously articulate, stands beside Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers, brilliant men all, activists who responded with clarity and courage to a sick, unjust world. But we need to know what made James special, how like these men he was, and at the same time, why he was different. Some black activists and white politicians and - it was rumored - even the Kennedy brothers, referred to him behind his back as “Martin Luther Queen.” It is almost inconceivable that homophobia kept one of the leading proponents on race relations in America from speaking at The March on Washington in 1963, the same year The Fire Next Time was published. We need to appreciate what it meant for Baldwin to take on the mantle of speaking truthfully about the subjects of sexuality and race to a country in denial about both, and what it meant for him to keep witnessing anyway when people turned on him later, humiliated him and denigrated his work and his contribution, or when his later testimonials were considered by some in the seventies and eighties to be passé. We abandoned him, but he never abandoned us.
What is ultimately at stake is this: If you can acknowledge James Baldwin fully for what he was, then your admiration of him may lead you to a place of compassion and understanding for what you have been taught to fear in your own life. And ultimately this may save your life, or someone else’s. It’s not very complicated - if you admire Baldwin for the entirety of who he was, you may embrace your gay son, your lesbian daughter, rather than try and destroy them. You may come out of the closet with pride, rather than destroy yourself. If you can admit how much you’ve valued Baldwin’s work and relied on him, as you’ve relied on King and Malcolm X, then you can admit that the black homosexual has a place beside you in the church pew and in the pulpit; not locked outside the church doors.
But what seems to be happening with the lives of too many black artists and political figures, and what I have witnessed with Baldwin’s legacy, is that people are allowed to pick and choose their Baldwin, like toppings at a salad bar - your Baldwin, her Baldwin, my Baldwin. And what you don’t like, what you can’t integrate because of your own sexual fears and agendas, you simply throw out because you don’t accept it. And a movie like I Am Not Your Negro, which is complicit in compartmentalizing its subject, lets you get away with it.
Now, you can’t get away with it if you read the literature itself. And you sure ain’t getting away with it if you read Another Country, Giovanni’s Room or Just Above My Head. If you read enough of Baldwin, not the writer and activist, but the spiritual teacher, if you “hear” enough of his sermons - and they are all sermons - then you will see the connection between the master beating the black slave, and you coming home and beating your gay child. That’s the harder conversation. This is why some people only want The Fire Next Time Baldwin, as if James Baldwin wrote only one book. Baldwin’s work is used to further black, radical consciousness, which is exactly as it should be used. But for too many of us, black and white, the conversation ends there when it needs to go much further.
Some in the late Sixties, for example, encouraged Baldwin towards an ideological trick bag (for him) of hating white people, unable to appreciate his intimate relationships with "whites" throughout his life. (Baldwin made it clear repeatedly in his work that he considered whiteness to be a construct to be abolished, a moral choice one made. The white people he loved, while of European descent or actually European, were, arguably, committed to ending "whiteness" as well.) Lucien Happersberger was a lifelong friend, and occasional lover of Baldwin’s: Pat Mikell in her testimonial on Baldwin, The Last Days, confirms that James told her Lucien was the great love of his life. It has been suggested that his relationship with Happersberger was the inspiration for Rufus and Vivaldo in Another Country, but, racial identities aside, it is not easy to determine who inspired who. (When it came to being the “savior” and the “saved”, it seems Baldwin and Happersberger took turns. The relationship was equal parts devotion and exasperation.)
David Leeming was Baldwin’s personal secretary for years, as well as close friend and biographer; Mary S. Painter, to whom Baldwin dedicated Another Country, was both his confidante and, at times, emergency patron; and Orilla “Bill” Miller, described in the film, a white female teacher who was a mentor to Baldwin when he was a child, played a critical role in his development as an artist. Baldwin said of Miller in The Devil Finds Work: “It is certainly partly because of her, who arrived in my terrifying life so soon, that I never really managed to hate white people - though God knows I have often wished to murder more than one or two…She too.. was treated like a nigger, especially by the cops, and she had no love for landlords.” When Baldwin, as a teenager, became a preacher and committed himself to the church, he went to Miller and told her that he could no longer go to movies, read too many books, or - implied in all of this - continue their friendship. Miller told him at the time, “I have lost a great deal of respect for you.” Many years later, Miller told Baldwin she was somewhat mortified by what she had said, but James, now in his sixties, expressed his gratitude in the correspondence between them. The words haunted him at the time, he told her, but because of her courage, he was eventually able to stop preaching the gospel of the church, and start preaching his own.
Critiquing America’s racial problems required that Baldwin speak in strictly racial terms: “black vs. white”. But you can see from his appearances how the limitations infuriated and exhausted him, and how dreary he found them. This may be why he ultimately made his home in France. Eldridge Cleaver, in his scathing critique of Baldwin in “Notes on a Native Son”, took a more polarizing, less nuanced approach to his work, and condemned him for being an “Uncle Tom”. But truly to appreciate Baldwin’s work means loving past what is comfortable, maintaining a sense of discovery, a genuine love for all people, and always listening, moving beyond black and white. That’s what made his table so welcoming.
My being devoted to Baldwin’s work does not mean that I am unable to appreciate its flaws. Baldwin occasionally plays his own macho games in his novels: In Giovanni’s Room, do Jacques and Guillaume, for example, have to be portrayed as such desperately aging queens? It was also deeply disappointing that in response to Eldridge Cleaver's attack in No Name In The Street he wrote: “I felt that he used my public reputation against me both naively and unjustly and I also felt that I was confused in his mind with that unutterable debasement of the male - with all those faggots, punks, and sissies, the sight and sound of whom, in prison, must have made him vomit more than once.” I choose to see this less as a capitulation by the writer, however, and more as a desperate attempt to stay relevant and in response to bullying; Baldwin is responding to the macho side of the Black Power Movement.
A case can be made that Baldwin the novelist does not submit himself to the rigorous standards of Baldwin the essayist. In the later novels, Baldwin as scenarist seems impatient to get the story told, as if he has already envisioned its cinematic potential. Scenes occasionally play out as if they were abbreviations for a play or screenplay (he wrote both). Given his impossible schedule as a spokesperson and celebrity author, Baldwin was overwhelmed, and so this particular writing has a breathless, “reach-the-finish-line” quality. While Go Tell It On the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, most of Another Country, and all the essays, have the distinct mark of literature - every work containing some paragraph or line that reveals his genius - there are also sections of the later fiction, particularly his sex scenes, which read like popular “potboilers" by writers of the time: Irwin Shaw, Sidney Sheldon or Harold Robbins.
This can be particularly disconcerting for the reader who, in the very next paragraph, encounters - or rather collides with - Baldwin the activist, the preacher, the essayist, describing some aspect of the human condition, and intruding on the narrative with his usual fiery brilliance. Add to this, finally, the occasionally ponderous style, brought on by the need to write ‘the great American novel” or an epic, even when the story might succeed with a simpler construct, as the essays almost always did. Baldwin sometimes defeats the reader in these works by demanding the kind of attention often required in very long church sermons - there is always a payoff, of course, but one must work to get it. (Baldwin confided to a friend later in his career that he sometimes feared that he had lost the ability, or discipline, to write simply, and without so many sub-clauses.)
If this complex stew is too much, you may throw up your hands in exasperation, as some readers did, with Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone, Just Above My Head and parts of Another Country. But I love Another Country for what it attempts, whether or not it completely succeeds, and the extended first chapter is a masterpiece. I am moved by the relationships that are forged across racial, sexual, gender lines. Baldwin is in everyone’s head: black, white, straight, gay, male, female - every character is sympathetic. Whatever the book's excesses, it is written with great love; and it stirs primal emotions in this reader, particularly in its rendering of the disintegration of Rufus Scott.
I Am Not Your Negro is right in its basic premise: we need James Baldwin now more than ever. HIs work is the way out, the way through, the place that connects the white man, the black man, the black woman, the white woman, the homosexual, the transgender woman, the black church, the American sexual dilemma, the American family. I’ve chosen to place a special emphasis on the novel Another Country because it masterfully encapsulates all Baldwin’s themes and is one of the greatest demonstrations in all his fiction of his desire to encourage dialogue across the lines of sexual orientation, gender, class, and race - the perfect embodiment of his “welcome table.” I will leave readers to find their own synopsis, as I would like everyone to discover the novel as I did, in particular the extraordinary conclusion of the first chapter.
By telling us the truth about his own experience again and again, he invites us to tell the truth about our own. He presents us with the ultimate challenge and opportunity at his welcome table to meet each other, perhaps for the first time. It’s all there in his writings. But it’s not enough, nor has it ever been, just to look. If you’re reading James Baldwin you have to see. And if you truly are willing to see, then you will hear the great question that resounds through all his work: Can I get a witness?
4
I decide to go to a leather bar on Saturday night because I need to get out of the house, out of my head. As I get dressed, I listen to a podcast of Anderson Cooper on CNN. John Berman standing in for Anderson is interviewing Greg Phillips, the man leading the investigation of the three million fraudulent votes which President Trump claims were cast against him. Berman confronts Phillips with research on voter fraud, indicating how rare it is to the extent claimed by Phillips. Berman finally asks,
“You say you’re not here to prove intent. What are you here to prove?”
“Our hope is to create an environment where we can develop a dataset....Look, if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. And I’ll man up and say I’m wrong.”
“Look, the ship has sailed on that, Gregg,” Berman tells him. “The ship has sailed on ‘if I’m wrong, I’m wrong.’ You came out six days after the election saying three million people voted illegally and now the president of the United States is citing your comments and your efforts to say that there has been mass voter fraud in this country. That moment has passed for you.”
“Obviously you just want to fight and not listen.”
Later in the conversation, Kayleigh McEnany defends Phillips’ right to make his claim. I don’t need a TV screen to know it is her. Kayleigh and I have a long-term relationship. I’ve listened to her now, for what feels like thousands of hours, defending Trump on CNN. “We cannot call it a lie until we know in fact that he doesn’t have the evidence,” she says. “We haven’t seen the evidence and we need to give him time to produce it.” Berman explains that with that logic someone can claim there is life on Mars, and no one can say it is a lie until someone disproves it.
I think of the process of mystification. Later in the podcast, we are informed that Pence is the highest official ever to attend a pro-life event, the March for Life. Counselor to the President and spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway also attends, and gives the crowd encouragement: “Let me make it very clear. We hear you. We see you. We respect you. And we look forward to working with you.”
The conversation shifts to Steve Bannon’s calling the media the “Opposition Party.” One of the panelists, Hillary Rosen I think, says, “We are the adversary, that is correct. That’s what we’re supposed to do. We are not their best friends, and that is true whoever is in office. We’re not supposed to go out of our way to try to harm them, but the point is, we are not a party, but we are in opposition, by nature, our job is to be holding powerful people accountable. And so, this idea that we are supposed to just sit and listen to them...’keep your mouth shut and listen.’ That’s not our job.”
I stand in the living room in a towel, dripping. Outside cars pass in a sea down 145th street. The evening is particularly quiet for a Saturday. A police car moves through the empty streets, flashing lights, blue and red. I think of the women’s marches, and try to imagine whether Conway and Pence could really repeal Roe v. Wade. It doesn’t seem possible, but a Trump presidency didn’t seem possible either.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, Kellyanne Conway as Serena Joy, the ex-televangelist, defender of the religious right. Conway has that perfect alchemy of blonde, easygoing warmth and measured speech that for some masks her emotional violence, her ruthlessness. It’s all in the tension in her neck. I think about Ofglen, the Handmaid; how all of this has been prophesied by writers like Atwood and Octavia Butler and George Orwell. I think about James Baldwin saying over and over in speeches, "This isn't about race. It's about the life and death of our country." A friend posted a quotation from The Handmaid’s Tale on Facebook the other day: “That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on."
It is only a few weeks into the presidency and President Trump has begun the process of building the wall between the US and Mexico. The president of Mexico cancels his visit to the White House. If Trump’s cabinet is any indication of his intentions, I was wrong, as many of us were, in thinking that Trump was really a moderate in disguise as a Tea-Party Republican. There is almost no diversity in his cabinet, not even the usual attempt at tokenism that most people of color find insulting. I was enraged by the roles of Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Alberto Gonzales in the Bush administration, but at least they were there. I am stunned that some working-class white people, and not only white, still believe that the man they elected reflects their interests.
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. They are discussing Trump’s travel ban. The Daily News Saturday edition has a picture of the Statue of Liberty with a tear coming down her face. “Well, what did we expect?” a friend reminds me on the phone. She is impatient with Democratic bewilderment at this point, including mine. He said he was going to create a ban, and he created one. Now we have to organize, she says.
I worked at a bookstore for a year, and remember when my colleague Jeremy came from the shelves one day, furious. A customer had asked if there was something he could recommend for her daughter’s seventh-grade book report. The daughter, twelve, had brought home The Diary of Anne Frank, but the mother was returning it. She felt the book was too violent, too much of a downer. She wanted a historical book, but something perhaps with a happier ending.
“I wanted to say,” Jeremy fumed, “Why don’t you just tear the last ten pages out, asshole? Then you’ll get your happy ending.”
I thought about this the other day when I was buying something to drink in the bodega near my home. A black man, who is always there, was standing in the middle of the store, joking with the Arab men behind the counter. “Don’t worry,” he said, laughing. “If Trump comes after y’all niggers, you’ll be all right. I’ll hide you in my basement. You motherfuckers can be part of my underground railroad.”
On the train headed downtown to Chelsea, I look at the faces around me, New Yorkers: black, white, Latino, Asian, gay, straight, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, etc. Faces that irritate the hell out of me when I can’t find a seat, or when someone plays their music or a video game too loud, or eats something smelly or stands too close, or argues with their lover, or proselytizes. But these are my people, this is my tribe.
Young boys with boom boxes wait until the last minute before the doors close on the A train, knowing they have a truly captive audience; “Showtime! What time is it? Showtime!” Sometimes the music they play is grating and intolerable especially if you are trying to read, other times you look with wonder at their talent and grace. An old Latino man plays a small guitar and sings something melancholy in Spanish, or a group of men sit down in Kinte cloth and play African drums. A group of older black men sing The Drifters’ “Under The Boardwalk”, recalling Harlem Doo-Wop groups from the 50s and 60s. When I get off the train at 59th street, I am greeted by a cello and violin duo, students from Juilliard. There is so much talent in New York you get spoiled, taking it for granted that not everywhere in the world do you hear a tenor singing a Mozart aria on your way to work.
The local subway car I transfer to is quiet, until a man enters the train saying he’s hungry, asking for our help. Some people who ask for money are addicts, but not all. These days, people linger outside the turnstiles, waiting for others to come off the train and swipe them in with their unlimited metro passes. Riding the subway is almost three dollars now, and a lot of people just don’t have the money. It’s illegal to solicit a free train ride, but a knowing smile silently asks, “Do you need a swipe?” “Yes,” comes the reply, a nod, and then a humble “thank you”, as the person passes through the turnstile. The exchange takes seconds but it happens all the time now. I am grateful to participate in these small acts of kindness, when I can. Not earthshaking, I know, may not change the world, but kindness just the same.
I look at the faces on the train, think of the Trump travel ban, and imagine a few faces disappearing, then more. New York without the Arab woman wearing a hijab or the man in a keffiyeh, people detained, unable to enter the country until America is “safe” again. I imagine the Asian faces gone, because we are at war over a trade deal gone bad, or we’ve pissed off someone’s president because of a nasty tweet. Japanese in internment camps again. Latino workers, many of whom get up at the crack of dawn to work in restaurants, bodegas, hotels, kitchens all over the city, men and women from Mexico, Ecuador, Guatemala, El Salvador, all deported, staring at an America they once knew, now from the other side of the wall. As these faces disappear, the train becomes literally black and white, like a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, only it is New York City in 2018.
And, taking it to its logical conclusion, I eventually disappear myself. I’m not allowed to be on the street past midnight, because of what President Trump is calling his “Soul Curfews”. Blacks in all the major cities, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, have to be inside by 11:00pm on the weekends. If we are out after midnight, we can get arrested. Crime is down, as he promised it would be, and the curfew is only temporary, he promises, just long enough to “Make America Safe Again.” In Trump’s America, the train arrives at Times Square mostly empty. A white woman quietly sits reading a book, a white man manages his suitcases as he exits the train, and nods to a white couple, who smile back, snuggled into each other and their new romance. Every evening now there is a silence throughout the city, hushed and eerie, like Christmas morning - everywhere you look it is white as snow. Only the occasion isn’t Christmas morning, it’s Saturday night.
When I arrive at the leather bar it is almost one, and I discover I’m not the only person who needed to get out of his head. The bar is packed. By one o’clock, the height of the evening, there are so many men inside that it is hard to move. I prefer it like this. There are times when the place achieves an energy that is male and tribal, with the smell of too many people sweating in too small a space. Everyone has to move as if they were a mass, not individuals, just waves, part of some huge sea. It’s a leather bar, but you don’t have to wear leather, although many do. The music is hot, house music pumping hard that reminds me of Detroit, the part of the world I’m from, and the sexuality in the room is unmistakable. It is not unusual here to walk past someone, make eye-contact with them and begin to make out with them seconds later. Personally, I like making out with strangers, it restores my faith in humanity - it’s like a pervert’s version of everyone holding hands and singing Kumbaya.
There is a shadow side, obviously, to some of the behavior that goes on here, but I find the energy in the room empowering. No one is hiding their homosexuality or apologizing for it here, which is liberating in itself. And there are so few places in New York where gay men can go for sex that aren’t private, hidden, concealed. Giuliani dropped a cloak of shame over the city when he was mayor, and it’s never been lifted. He “cleaned up the city”, for which, I’m sure, there are many who are grateful. But the effects of what he has done to the gay scene, to sexual freedom in New York, which ultimately means to freedom of expression, are much more sinister.
Tourists come to New York and are appalled by the sexual scene, by our sense of shame. They aren’t surprised by American sexual shame, mind you, but that it is so prominent here in New York, still considered by many to be “The Greatest City on Earth.” Gay tourists from Germany, from France, from Italy, Spain and England arrive and are mortified by what they find. Some New Yorkers have argued that Giuliani did us all a favor, shutting everything down and protecting the city from the AIDS epidemic; but Europe seems to be handling it just as well, and they didn’t shut down all their bars and sex clubs. Europeans understand sex. Men sometimes just want go somewhere, drop ten or twenty Euros, have their fun, and leave. Unlike our bathhouses, which ask for your ID, demand you become an exclusive “member”, then pay for a room; where you can still get humiliated if you don’t follow the rules. And there are so many rules - signs are everywhere reprimanding men, signs that read “The occupancy of this room by more than one person is absolutely forbidden”, threatening to throw men out for having sex in the steam room, at a bathhouse! Go to your room, lock the door, get back in your closet, and stay in your closet. After all the years it took to come out of one.
Perhaps none of this would matter if I lived in Topeka, Kansas, but I live in New York City. It’s one of the reasons why I came here, in fact, to escape sexual shame, to meet gay men who were "living out loud". Yet, even here, in this bar, which is legendary, security will shine a light in your face if you are seen getting too carried away. They have no choice. If they don’t respect the public sex laws they will get shut down. Compared to the gay bars in Berlin and Amsterdam, New York City’s gay scene is sometimes about as racy as taking a group of school kids to Chuck E. Cheese.
I imagine Vice President Pence, or someone like him, looking at the men around me now. This is the Gomorrah that they fantasize about when they pray for me or condemn me to hell. Men, backed up against walls, drinking, kissing, unfastening their belts. I look at the men on the dance floor, their shirts off, and I think about the musical Cabaret and the Weimar Republic. I wonder how many of these same men were listening to CNN as I was before they left the house, and if they too are afraid.
I think again about Pence, once Governor Pence, making it legal to discriminate against gay men and women in his state, Indiana, before he was selected as Trump’s running mate. Do the men around me realize it isn’t a very large leap from pro-life rallies and overturning Roe v. Wade to locking up homosexuals, first with the return of the Defense of Marriage Act, and soon after with random arrests for violating newly enacted “anti-sodomy” and “perversion” laws? My friend Gary thinks I’m being a little hysterical, sensationalist, fantastical. “That’s never going to happen,” he says. But Trump, Pence and Conway haven’t wasted any time with the travel ban: things are happening so fast, I wonder if we will still be on this dance floor, still making out in the bathrooms, when the police cars line up outside waiting for us like taxis waiting at the airport. Maybe I’m being alarmist, maybe Gary is right, but I wonder, was there someone like me thinking these thoughts in Berlin in 1933? When is paranoia not paranoia anymore?
The lights and music make us all seem so beautiful and free, and sometimes partying is the right answer, sometimes partying is a form of resistance. (I make a mental note to dedicate my next blow job to Pence and Kellyanne Conway.) When I think about Stonewall I realize, not for the first time, the debt we owe transgender activists of color, and all the men and women who revolted on that day. Like Anne Frank hiding, Stonewall today doesn’t just feel like a history lesson, but a living, breathing event. Where did their courage come from? I realize now that I’ve never known any other kind of gay life. I don’t know what it’s like to be drinking with friends one minute, and raided the next, the police at your door, a truncheon at your head, violated by those who are meant to protect you, because you’re a faggot.
Tonight I’m a little ashamed because I had lost weight, almost fifty pounds in the last six months, but in the weeks since the inauguration, I’ve been overeating from stress, putting it back on. What took forever to lose, seems to come back in a few days. I feel fat, and I really hate feeling fat around men. Fatness is feminizing in a macho world, it makes you appear vulnerable, out of control. Fat boys get teased in school, get called faggots. And part of the energy here, of the leather world, is invulnerability. On the phone earlier, my sister confronts me for fat-shaming myself. But I want to be special tonight, I have to be. A man reaches for me, two men are kissing beside him. A song comes on, a hard house beat, and the singer says the words over and over, like a mantra. Perhaps on another night the song would be fabulous, but tonight, and given what is happening in the country, I find the lyrics terrifying. As I stand to listen, an older man beside me is drunk, dispirited, not one of the chosen ones tonight. He swaggers a bit, gives me an exasperated look, and stumbles past me.
The voice sings, “We’re looking for the man who will make us rich and famous.” And again, “We’re looking for the man who will make us rich and famous” And again, “We’re looking for the man who will make us rich and famous.” And I understand, I finally understand, clear like the voice of God (I often hear God in house music): That’s Trump. That’s the man we’ve been waiting for. That’s why all this is happening. Because in the end we all, or enough of us at least to put him in the White House, wanted the man who would make us rich and famous. So we can be rich and famous. Just like him.
5
Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro arrives just in time for a Trump presidency. When Baldwin says in the film, “I am terrified by the moral apathy, the death of the heart which is happening in my country”, he might as well be speaking of the 2017 election. The funereal tone also feels appropriate; for many of us, as we’ve watched this presidency in its first weeks, it may seem that democracy itself is being eulogized.
The film uses Baldwin’s unfinished work Remember This House as a meditation on race and loss; Baldwin was contracted to finish the book while he lived in St. Paul de Vence, but he spent time writing Evidence of Things Not Seen and was later too sick to meet his contractual obligations. (After his death, his publishers sued his estate for the advance he had been given, an almost unheard action, especially against a writer of his stature. They were later shamed into dropping the suit.) As the film, which is taken from his unfinished manuscripts on the project, suggests, Baldwin knew that in order for his profiles on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Medgar Evers to be complete, he would have to come back to America to interview their wives, and, very important to him, their children - in the case of Malcolm and Martin, he specifically mentions their adult daughters.
Baldwin returned to America from time to time for speaking engagements and to teach during those years when he made his home in France, but the journey “home” wasn’t easy for him and produced, at times, great anxiety. While he desired to complete the book, and perhaps knew not only how important it was, but that he was the only one who could write it, it is very likely he knew that what was required was more than he was able to produce, in the storm that was his failing health, his social obligations, and the difficulty that all writers face: the enormous concentration it would require at this point in his life. The film is based on the thirty pages of notes which Baldwin left behind, an outline of the book that might have been. Peck’s triumph is that he manages to lull the viewer, through tone, beautiful imagery, and a director’s assurance, into thinking that the narrative is coherent, and not just fragments of an unfinished work.
I Am Not Your Negro assumes that we are already familiar with its three subjects. That presents less of a problem with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X who bring with them their own mythology and legend, but is unfortunate in the case of Medgar Evers. We understand from the movie that he was a civil rights activist and that he was assassinated in front of his family in his driveway; we also understand that Baldwin had a great affection for him, but that’s all we understand. (Baldwin met Evers, an NAACP field secretary, on a trip to the South after he'd reached out to James Meredith, the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi. After rioting and U.S. Marshalls had to be called in, Baldwin asked what he could do to help. Evers was advising Meredith at the time.)
What Baldwin's Remember This House really needs is a four-part series, an hour and a half on each of its subjects. Thirty pages of notes isn't a lot of material for a ninety-minute film, and Peck deftly fills in the gaps with other Baldwin works; the essay The Devil Finds Work; selections from Baldwin's posthumous collection, The Cross of Redemption, and several appearances where Baldwin is presented directly to the viewer, as a guest on the Dick Cavett show, and during a debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge University in 1965.
I Am Not Your Negro is most riveting in its ability to show America’s racism through media images. At times it suggests a racial take on Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s The Celluloid Closet (book by Vito R