• Send us Mail
  • Follow us on Twitter
  • Join our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe to our RSS Feed
  • Search Site

Polari Magazine

  • Home
  • Up Front
    • Editorial
    • Clementine: The Living Fashion Doll
    • Polari Safari
    • WTF? Friday
    • Bulletin Board
    • Polari Facts
  • Features
    • Interviews
    • Features
    • Gallery
    • Opinion
    • Heroes & Villains
  • Community
    • Oral Histories
    • Coming Out Stories
    • Relationships
    • IDAHO
    • LGBT History Month
    • Blogs
  • Reviews
    • Books
    • Film and Television
    • Music
    • Stage
    • Visual Arts
    • Classics: Books
    • Classics: Film and Television
    • Classics: Music
  • About
    • About Polari Magazine
    • Contributors
    • Contact

You are here: Polari Magazine / LGBT History Month / LGBT History Month Heroes – Day 10

LGBT History Month Heroes – Day 10

10 Feb 2013 / Comments Off / in LGBT History Month/by Christopher Bryant

To celebrate LGBT History Month, 2013, Polari is publishing a daily series of LGBT Heroes, selected by the magazine’s team of writers and special contributors.

LGBT History Month Hero James Baldwin

James Baldwin – Novelist & Essayist
by Christopher Bryant
………………………………………………………………………………………….

James Baldwin was born in 1924, and he grew up in Harlem with seven younger brothers and sisters. When the Second World War started, the opportunities for a black man in New York City were somewhat improved, and while he worked a series of jobs, Baldwin started to explore both his sexuality and his need to be a writer. He started work on a novel when his stepfather died in 1943. A friend showed the drafts to Richard Wright, author of Native Son (1940), who then recommended Baldwin for a literary grant. Baldwin continued to work various jobs to support his family, and he started to write book reviews that were invariably angry, and aggressive, because he found fault in everything that he read. By the time he was twenty, Baldwin had explored bisexuality, and decided his inclinations were primarily homosexual.

Baldwin did not accept the idea that people could fit neatly into social and political categories, and this defined his writing. In his first major essay ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, published in 1949 and written from a self-imposed exile in Paris, he questioned the idea that a minority writer must use his art for political ends. In the same year, in the essay ‘Preservation of Innocence’, he argued that representations of homosexuality in the contemporary novel were not about love but the fear of sex between men: “A novel instantly demands the presence and passion of human beings, who cannot ever be labelled”.

Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It On A Mountain, was published in 1953, and as a result of its critical and commercial success he was branded the new “Negro novelist”. And so when he was pressed by his publishers for a new novel, he wrote a love story about a white man who is caught between two lovers – one a woman, the other a man – and set it in the American colony in Paris. 

Giovanni’s Room (1956) is an elegiac book, full of pain, about the struggle of one man, David, to come to terms with his sexuality, and how in that struggle another man, Giovanni, is ruined. His American publisher rejected the book. In the mid 1950s, big publishers shied away from stories about homosexuality. In the wake of the McCarthy witch hunts, and a new era of homosexual panic, gay stories went underground to the cheap paperback market, which tended toward the racy, the scandalous, the pulp.

Baldwin would not be deterred, and because of his persistence Michael Joseph published Giovanni’s Room in England. This forced his agent at William Morris, Helen Strauss, to once again submit the book to US publishers. It was finally picked up by Dial Press, at which point Baldwin dropped Strauss who, he later said, had told him to burn the book.

Baldwin continued to weave stories about homosexuality into his fiction, but in his essays he was always the black spokesperson. There were, as a result, two James Baldwins, because in the political struggles of the 1960s his sexuality was pushed to the side. After his death there was, as Christopher Bram notes in Eminent Outlaws, a “degayification” of Baldwin. In the eulogies at his funeral, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka celebrated him only as a black writer, and not a gay one. His essays were favoured over his fiction, and he was enlisted into one cause, which is an irony considering that in ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’ he wrote that literature was in danger of being reduced to one note if led by minority politics.

As a writer, Baldwin’s politics went far beyond the face value in which politicians trade. In 1961, Robert Kennedy proposed that the country was changing, and that in perhaps forty years a black man could be elected president. Baldwin questions why black man would want to be president, and continues, “what really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro ‘first’ will become the first Negro president. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he will be president of?” Baldwin wrote as an outsider, but he looked to a future in where the struggles of race and sexuality would no longer be about social and political categories, but about the complexities of being human.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest
Tags: everybody's protest novel, giovanni's room, go tell it on a mountain, james baldwin, lgbt history month 2013, richard wright, toni morrison

Related Posts

Did you like this entry?
Here are a few more posts that might be interesting for you.
Related Posts
LGBT History Month Heroes – Day 12
LGBT History Month Heroes – Day 14
LGBT History Month Heroes – Day 15
LGBT History Month Heroes – Day 5
Our LGBT Histories: Music – Day 18
Our LGBT Histories: Music – Day 15
Our LGBT Histories: Music – Day 10
Our LGBT Histories: Music – Day 26
Our LGBT Histories: Music – Day 1
Our LGBT Histories: Music – Day 9

Search Polari

Latest Posts

  • Polari Magazine 2008-2014December 3, 2014 - 6:16 pm
  • Tearing Up Their Map: An Interview with LambDecember 2, 2014 - 2:45 pm
  • Future Islands • GigDecember 2, 2014 - 1:41 pm
  • Puppets with Attitude (at Christmas)December 1, 2014 - 6:30 pm
  • The Aesthetic of Voyeurism: Interview with Antonio Da SilvaDecember 1, 2014 - 1:25 pm
  • Broke With Expensive Taste • Azealia BanksNovember 28, 2014 - 3:59 pm
  • Royalty Strutting on an American College Stage: Miss and Mr. Gay ISU 2014November 27, 2014 - 2:59 pm
  • Bright Light Bright Light: Everything I Ever WantedNovember 26, 2014 - 11:15 am
  • Jaime Nanci And The Blueboys: ‘Toy’ TalkNovember 25, 2014 - 4:09 pm

About Polari Magazine

Polari Magazine is an LGBT arts and culture magazine that explores the subculture by looking at what is important to the people who are in it. It’s about the lives we lead, not the lifestyles we’re supposed to lead.

Its content is informed & insightful, and features a diverse range of writers from every section of the community. Its intent is to help LGBT readers learn about their own heritage and to sustain a link between the present and the past.

Polari is designed to nurture the idea of community, whether that be social and political, or artistic and creative. It is your magazine, whether you want to read it, or whether you want to get involved in it, if you're gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, or queer.

Polari Magazine is all these: it's a gay online magazine; it's a gay and lesbian online magazine; it's an LGBT arts and culture magazine. Ultimately, it is a queer magazine.

Latest Posts

  • Polari Magazine 2008-2014December 3, 2014 - 6:16 pm
  • Tearing Up Their Map: An Interview with LambDecember 2, 2014 - 2:45 pm
  • Future Islands • GigDecember 2, 2014 - 1:41 pm
  • Puppets with Attitude (at Christmas)December 1, 2014 - 6:30 pm
  • The Aesthetic of Voyeurism: Interview with Antonio Da SilvaDecember 1, 2014 - 1:25 pm
  • Broke With Expensive Taste • Azealia BanksNovember 28, 2014 - 3:59 pm
  • Royalty Strutting on an American College Stage: Miss and Mr. Gay ISU 2014November 27, 2014 - 2:59 pm
  • Bright Light Bright Light: Everything I Ever WantedNovember 26, 2014 - 11:15 am
  • Jaime Nanci And The Blueboys: ‘Toy’ TalkNovember 25, 2014 - 4:09 pm

Twitter

Tweets by @PolariMagazine

Archive

  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • July 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • May 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
© Copyright - Polari Magazine - Wordpress Theme by Kriesi.at
  • scroll to top
  • Send us Mail
  • Follow us on Twitter
  • Join our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe to our RSS Feed
Website Privacy & Cookies