James Baldwin was an African-American and gay writer whose novels and essays captured the conflicted spirit of late 20th century America. Bent Alaska presents his story as part of our celebration of Black History Month 2012, with thanks to GLAAD and the Equality Forum.

James Baldwin

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

James Baldwin (born August 2, 1924; died November 30, 1987) was an African-American and gay writer whose novels and essays captured the conflicted spirit of late 20th century America.

It is often the outsider who divines truth most clearly. James Baldwin, to whom many doors were closed by virtue of his poverty, his race, and his sexuality, was a prophet and truth-teller whose writing searingly delineates the soul and image of 20th century America.

In 1953, the publication of Go Tell It on the Mountain heralded the debut of a major literary voice. James Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical novel depicts much of the writer’s painful early life. Like Baldwin, John Grimes — the novel’s bright, sensitive protagonist — battles poverty and suffers at the hands of a brutal stepfather in Harlem. Like Baldwin, John Grimes becomes a precocious storefront preacher at the age of 14.

As a gay African-American, Baldwin struggled with his identity in a racist and homophobic society. His disgust with the racial climate in the post-World War II United States impelled him to move to Europe, where he wrote Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953) and his other early major works: the essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955) and the play The Amen Corner (1955). His second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), published at a time when few other writers dared to publish gay-themed works, deals explicitly with homosexuality, telling the story of David, an American living in Paris, and his relationships men, particularly Giovanni, an Italian bartender David meets at a gay bar in Paris. Giovanni’s Room was ranked 2nd on The Publishing Triangle’s 1999 list of the best 100 gay and lesbian novels.

After Baldwin returned to the United States in 1957, his writings increasingly reflected his engagement in the struggle for African-American civil rights. He explored black-white relations in a book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and in his novel Another Country (1962). The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin declared that blacks and whites must find ways to come to terms with the past and make a future together or face destruction.

Both racism and homophobia had an effect on reception of Baldwin’s work. In a 1991 journal article, “Critical Deviance: Homophobia and the Reception of James Baldwin’s Fiction,” Emmanuel Nelson writes:

Reviewers and critics… seem generally comfortable with Baldwin’s non-fiction prose but are often uncomfortable with his fiction. While a number of legitimate, critically sound reasons might explain this discomfort, an obvious fact remains: Baldwin almost entirely avoids the subject of homosexuality in his non-fiction, whereas he insists on speaking about it in much of his fiction. It would be naive, then, to assume that the gay content of his fiction is not at least partly responsible for the mixed criticism it has provoked.

Critically engaging Baldwin’s fiction proves to be too much of a challenge for many white heterosexual critics, although there are notable exceptions…. But to many the task of examining the perspective of a novelist who is both Black and gay is too taxing on their imaginative resources. Homophobia, sometimes mixed with racism, shapes their responses to a considerable degree…. What is more intriguing is the reactions of several African-American heterosexual critics to Baldwin’s fiction.

One such critic was Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. As described by Lynn Orilla Scott in  “Baldwin’s Reception and the Challenge of His Legacy” (a critical essay in a collection on Baldwin edited by Harold Bloom):

Around the same time Baldwin was being condemned by white liberals for his black militancy, he was being condemned by black militants for his homosexuality. The most notorious example was Eldridge Cleaver’s attack on Baldwin in Soul on Ice…. Charging Baldwin with waging “a despicable underground guerrilla war…against black masculinity” and calling “homosexuality a sickness, just as are baby-rape or wanting to become the head of General Motors,” Cleaver expresses in virulent form a homophobia representative of some segments of the black community. (p. 105)

Scott goes on:

In the history of twentieth-century American letters it would be hard to find another figure more simultaneously praised and damned, often by the same critic in the same essay, than James Baldwin…. Baldwin’s work has presented problems to readers from almost every perspective — liberal, black nationalist, feminist, and homosexual — and to some extent each of these constituencies in their inability to accommodate Baldwin’s complexity has helped to marginalize him….

What these narratives of disappointment suggest is that James Baldwin did not tell the story that various critical constituencies wanted him to tell. (pp. 108-109)

Following the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X in the late 1960s, Baldwin became increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of a positive relationship between the races. He returned to Europe and lived out his remaining years in the South of France, where he died in 1987.

Baldwin received many awards during his lifetime, including France’s highest civilian award, Commander of the Legion of Honor, presented by President François Mitterrand in 1986.

In this excerpt from the Claire Burch film The James Baldwin Anthology (2002), Baldwin delivers a speech at University of California Berkeley in about 1979. Watch:

For more about James Baldwin, visit his website, LGBT History Month page, or Wikipedia article.

Photo credit: James Baldwin, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Miami Dade College, 6 July 1982. Miami Dade College Archives, through Wikimedia Commons. Used in accordance with Creative Commons licensing.