![]() ![]() But I think I would have encountered an altogether different Baldwin if I had first come across his name in a different context. My youthful state of romantic insecurity is not the subject of this essay. Baldwin called “Giovanni’s Room” a book about “what happens if you are so afraid that you finally cannot love anybody,” and that is as true a description of me as a teenager as any I could hope to find. But the story is not, strictly speaking, about being gay. David is gay and Baldwin was gay, so my mother’s response was hardly surprising. The novel’s protagonist, David, is white, and Baldwin once told an interviewer that David could have been white, Black or yellow: “In terms of what happened to him, none of that mattered at all.”īut neither did I realize that my love for the novel might communicate anything about whom I loved. It never crossed my mind that Baldwin might be Black because the novel does not contain a single Black character. She did and thought it was my way of coming out as gay. ![]() I loved it so much that I gave it to my mother and asked her to read it. I loved it-its intensity, its honesty, its moral complexity. I was a skinny 17-year-old Indian boy with braces, and I picked up a slim novel called “Giovanni’s Room” and finished it in a week. The first time I read James Baldwin, I didn’t know he was Black. ![]()
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