The Guardian, January 5, 2019
In November I read Another Country by James Baldwin, a fictional book about a group of friends in New York City (and in France) who are making or breaking careers for themselves in creative fields: writing, acting, and music. The friends also navigate the boundaries between the black and white communities in New York, and between heterosexuality and homosexuality, American conservatism and liberalism.
In general Baldwin's writing seems contemporary: He feels pretty unjudgmental. His curiosity about many kinds of environments and conflicts, economic class as well as race and gender, is what I'd call "intersectionality." (Even if Kimberlé Crenshaw invented the term intersectionality after Baldwin's death.) And I like that he's interested in misogyny and gender double standards, for example, without seeming to be bored-but-dutiful about it.
As for gay life in the United States (and France), historically and contemporarily, I'm not an expert on it. That has not impeded me from forming opinions that are hopefully not stupid:
Baldwin doesn't seem to spend much time depicting the guilt and morality that are built up around gayness in modern American and European political discourse — maybe because e.g. Greenwich Village was not necessarily a Catholic or Baptist hotspot — in Another Country.
He presents sexual orientation as a 'threat' to traditional and mistaken ideas of masculinity and to traditional power relationships, rather than to morality. He writes about times and places where homosexuality was seen as weakness, and where a few men who were straight, or closeted, raped other men.
But when Baldwin writes about genuine same-sex relationships, between freely consenting adults, these are a mixture of romance and friendship with sex, exactly as the hetero relationships he writes about are. I think that this mixture is another aspect of bisexuality and gayness — that being bisexual or gay is no more 'sexual' than being straight — that often takes a long time for homophobic or half-informed people to grasp.
One worries that being this rational filter between prejudice and reality required a large sacrifice of time, thought and effort on Baldwin's part, but I have to confess I'm glad he was.
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| "Brooklyn Bridge and New York City skyline" Photo by Irving Underhill, 1911 via Wikimedia Commons |
As for gay life in the United States (and France), historically and contemporarily, I'm not an expert on it. That has not impeded me from forming opinions that are hopefully not stupid:
Baldwin doesn't seem to spend much time depicting the guilt and morality that are built up around gayness in modern American and European political discourse — maybe because e.g. Greenwich Village was not necessarily a Catholic or Baptist hotspot — in Another Country.
He presents sexual orientation as a 'threat' to traditional and mistaken ideas of masculinity and to traditional power relationships, rather than to morality. He writes about times and places where homosexuality was seen as weakness, and where a few men who were straight, or closeted, raped other men.
But when Baldwin writes about genuine same-sex relationships, between freely consenting adults, these are a mixture of romance and friendship with sex, exactly as the hetero relationships he writes about are. I think that this mixture is another aspect of bisexuality and gayness — that being bisexual or gay is no more 'sexual' than being straight — that often takes a long time for homophobic or half-informed people to grasp.
One worries that being this rational filter between prejudice and reality required a large sacrifice of time, thought and effort on Baldwin's part, but I have to confess I'm glad he was.
*
I guess that Baldwin's other prose might be more Gesamtkunstwerk-y than Another Country. It was written over a long time with painful effort. Also, there are so many sex scenes! awkward to read in public transit. But I liked it nonetheless.
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