Gay Bears: James Baldwin

“But people can’t,

unhappily, invent

their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.

Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”

Gay Bears: James Baldwin: In 1956 Baldwin published Giovanni’s Room, one of the first American novels to deal with the topic of homosexuality. The narrator of the story is David, a white bisexual American ex-patriot living in Paris. Giovanni, David’s Italian lover, is condemned to be executed as a murderer. David is torn between his fiancée Hella and his lover, and his confusion mirrors that of many gay men during the 1950s. “But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.” Giovanni’s Room was an act of daring, and drew criticism for its frankness — even from critics who only three years earlier had lavishly praised Baldwin as the new voice of Black America.

“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”

“Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, 
should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.”

“If dirty words frighten you...I really don’t know how you have managed to live so long. People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describing something dirty.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin:  James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America, and their inevitable if unnameable tensions.^[1] Some Baldwin essays are book-length, for instance The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976).

Baldwin's novels and plays fictionalize fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures thwarting the equitable integration of not only blacks, but also of gay and bisexual men, while depicting some internalized obstacles to such individuals' quests for acceptance. Such dynamics are prominent in Baldwin's second novel, written well before gay equality was widely espoused in America: Giovanni's Room (1956).^[2] Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, is said to be his best-known work.

The difficulties of his life, as well as his abusive preacher stepfather, led Baldwin to become a part of the church. At age 14 he attended meetings of the Pentecostal Church and, during a euphoric prayer meeting, he converted. Soon, as a junior minister at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, he drew larger crowds than his stepfather did. At 17, however, Baldwin came to view Christianity as falsely premised and later regarded his time in the pulpit as a remedy to his personal crises.

Baldwin once visited Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam, who inquired about Baldwin's religious beliefs. He answered, "I left the church 20 years ago and haven't joined anything since." Elijah asked, "And what are you now?" Baldwin explained, "I? Now? Nothing. I'm a writer. I like doing things alone."^[8] Still, his church experience significantly shaped his worldview and writing.^[9] Baldwin reflected that "being in the pulpit was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked."

Baldwin admonished Christianity for, as he explained, reinforcing the system of American slavery by palliating the pangs of oppression and delaying salvation until a promised afterlife.^[11] Baldwin praised religion, however, for inspiring some American blacks to defy oppression.^[11] Baldwin once wrote, "If the concept of God has any use, it is to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God can't do that, it's time we got rid of him".^[12] Baldwin publicly expressed himself as not religious.^[13] At his funeral, a mostly a cappella recording of the adult Baldwin singing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" was played.

Baldwin's lengthy essay "Down at the Cross" (frequently called The Fire Next Time after the title of the book in which it was published)^[31] similarly showed the seething discontent of the 1960s in novel form. The essay was originally published in two oversized issues of The New Yorker and landed Baldwin on the cover of Time magazine in 1963 while Baldwin was touring the South speaking about the restive Civil Rights movement. Around the time of publication of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin became a known spokesperson for civil rights and a celebrity noted for championing the cause of black Americans. He frequently appeared on television and delivered speeches on college campuses.^[32] The essay talked about the uneasy relationship between Christianity and the burgeoning Black Muslim movement. After publication, several black nationalists criticized Baldwin for his conciliatory attitude. They questioned whether his message of love and understanding would do much to change race relations in America.^[32] The book was eagerly consumed by whites looking for answers to the question: What do blacks really want? Baldwin's essays never stopped articulating the anger and frustration felt by real-life black Americans with more clarity and style than any other writer of his generation.^[33] Baldwin's next book-length essay, No Name in the Street, also discussed his own experience in the context of the later 1960s, specifically the assassinations of three of his personal friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

While he wrote about the movement, Baldwin aligned himself with the ideals of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1963 he conducted a lecture tour of the South for CORE, traveling to locations like Durham and Greensboro, North Carolina and New Orleans, Louisiana. During the tour, he lectured to students, white liberals, and anyone else listening about his racial ideology, an ideological position between the "muscular approach" of Malcolm X and the nonviolent program of Martin Luther King Jr..^[38] Baldwin expressed the hope that Socialism would take root in the United States.^[39]

By the spring of 1963, Baldwin had become so much a spokesman for the Civil Rights Movement that for its May 17 issue on the turmoil in Birmingham, Alabama, Time magazine put James Baldwin on the cover. "There is not another writer," said Time, "who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South."^[40] In a cable Baldwin sent to Attorney General Robert Kennedy during the crisis, Baldwin blamed the violence in Birmingham on the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland, and President Kennedy for failing to use "the great prestige of his office as the moral forum which it can be." 

Baldwin's writings of the 1970s and 1980s have been largely overlooked by critics, though even these texts are beginning to receive attention.^[34] Several of his essays and interviews of the 1980s discuss homosexuality and homophobia with fervor and forthrightness.^[35] Eldridge Cleaver's harsh criticism of Baldwin in Soul on Ice and elsewhere^[36] and Baldwin's return to southern France contributed to the sense that he was not in touch with his readership. Always true to his own convictions rather than to the tastes of others, Baldwin continued to write what he wanted to write. As he had been the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, he became an inspirational figure for the emerging gay rights movement.^[35] His two novels written in the 1970s, If Beale Street Could Talk and Just Above My Head, placed a strong emphasis on the importance of black families, and he concluded his career by publishing a volume of poetry, Jimmy's Blues, as well as another book-length essay, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, which was an extended meditation inspired by the Atlanta Child Murders of the early 1980s.