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3 - Racial and Sexual Difference

Douglas Field
Affiliation:
Staffordshire University
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Summary

As the first openly queer major African American writer since the Harlem Renaissance, Baldwin's life and work paved the way for gay black writing. Prior to Baldwin's pioneering work, according to Joseph Beam, black American literature had been suffering ‘a kind of ‘nationalistic heterosexism’. Beam's claim is corroborated by the testimonies of gay black artists such as Randall Kenan and Isaac Julien and also by a growing number of scholars who have challenged the critical divisions that have treated Baldwin's race and sexuality as somehow unconnected. As Andrea Lowenstein noted in a pioneering essay in 1980, ‘One wonders whether, if Baldwin were either black or gay, more reviewers might be able to actually address his work itself’. Instead, Lowenstein argues, Baldwin's ‘double minority status is so “threatening” that what is finally reviewed in the end is the critics’ own fears and projections’. Since the 1990s, however, with the emergence of queer theory and then black queer theory, critics including Emmanuel Nelson and Robert Reid-Pharr have highlighted the ways in which Baldwin's work explores the complex traffic of race, sexuality and masculinity, in particular foregrounding the ‘double minority status’ that Lowenstein addressed in Baldwin's racial and sexual identities. As Yasmin DeGout argues, Baldwin's fiction ‘reveals him to be progenitor of many of the theoretical formulations currently associated with feminist, gay, and gender studies’.

Despite his reputation as one of the most important gay black writers of the twentieth century, Baldwin himself rarely employed the terms gay, homosexual and bisexual. While his second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956) is rightly considered to be a major work of American homosexual literature, Baldwin instead stated that it ‘is not about homosexuality’. I argue in this chapter that Baldwin's comment in fact fits squarely with his complicated views on sexuality. ‘The word gay’, Baldwin told Richard Goldstein in 1985, ‘has always rubbed me the wrong way. I never understood exactly what is meant by it’, a view that he also forcefully echoed in an interview with James Mossman:

those terms, homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, are 20th-century terms which, for me, have very little meaning. I've never, myself, in watching myself and watching other people, watching life, been able to discern exactly where the barriers were. (CWJB 54)

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James Baldwin
, pp. 44 - 56
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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