WL's Mainstream Gay Book Reviews - 23. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38462.Giovanni_s_Room

August 2^nd is the birth date of James Baldwin, noted African American Civil Rights Activist and author of this old gay fiction novel. I will leave this as the final book of my review series.

This is the quintessential classic mainstream gay novel, published in 1956, it is one of the most well-known and remembered narratives of the early LGBT literature. James Baldwin is also known as a pioneer in civil rights for both African American and LGBT communities that he belonged to. His non-fiction book, Notes from a Native Son, is considered one of the greatest autobiographical works about United States and African American race relations during the early 20^th century. I know there are countless other people with PhD in English Literature and Queer studies, who have written thousand-page dissertation on this book and the man, so my own reflections and review seems like a drop in the bucket, a child's finger-paint trying to imitate Da Vinci. Still, I cannot skip this novel, because it represents the foundation of many of our stories today, along with many of our darker realities.

The book is 176 pages long and 6 hours and 49 minutes on audible, so it’s a short reading. However, I do recommend you ready yourself as a reader for a tragic story based on pre-Stonewall and pre-gay rights era realities. I’ve read cute happy stories set in Victorian and Edwardian times or even “bachelor” stories of gay couples in what we’d consider unofficial marriages, but James Baldwin’s 1956 novel was written without any modern romantic notions or revisionism. There are no happy endings here for anyone.

David is a Caucasion American recounting what has happened to him during his time in France and how events have led to the death of another man named Giovanni, who we learn was his homosexual lover. David recounts his plan to marry Hella, a woman he met briefly before going into the details of his sexuality and his experiences. He relates his childhood relationship with a boy named Joey, who he had sex with the first time. Then, he relates how in order to justify his sexual actions with Joey, he bullied Joey during their youth. Throughout his life David knows he wasn’t a heterosexual, he knew he enjoyed sexual attraction towards men, but feared and feared it. When he became quite poor during his travels in France, he approaches an older gay man named Jacques, who he hopes could spare him some money. During their travels, they enter a gay bar in Paris owned by a man named Guillaume, where they meet Giovanni, the bartender. David and Giovanni strike a rapport, then later through Jacques prodding at a dinner with Giovanni, David gives in to his sexual desires and have sex with Giovanni in his dirty apartment room. The story flashes forward to the future in the south of France during an unusual snow storm, where David’s landlady say farewell to him. He is leaving the little room he had kept there. She reminisces with him about the joys of having family, telling him he should get married and have children. We learn at the end, it is the day of Giovanni's execution. We flashback at the start of part 2, David has moved in with Giovanni and the two enjoy a happy romantic relationship with one another. However, their happiness is cut short as David begins to question the viability of the relationship, ultimately question his gender-based role in context to Giovanni’s more masculine visage, feeling himself emasculated as his homosexual lover. Hella sends him a letter that she wants to marry him, David in fear and desperate need to prove his heterosexuality and manhood has a brief affair with another American woman named Sue. Giovanni during this time is fired by Guillaume as his bartender, having lost interest in him. David leaves Giovanni’s room and, with money from his father in America, begins to plan for future with Hella. David encounters Giovanni several times, including one where Giovanni is with Jacques, but he refuses to sacrifice his comfortable future for a relationship with another man, essentially sacrificing his manhood. Later on, Guillaume is murdered and it was found that Giovanni was the murderer. David never sees Giovanni again before Giovanni’s execution and the novel ends with Hella discovering his sexual interest in men, she leaves him being unable to accept his secret sexuality. At the end of the novel, David is haunted by his choices in abandoning Giovanni and destroying the one person who truly loved him without condition.

This is not a happy story, the characters in gay relationships either die or end up social outcasts. James Baldwin’s story is powerful reminder that we are only a few generations removed from tragic stories like this being the norm for gay and bisexual men. On one hand, I feel sympathy for David, being a queer kid growing up couldn’t be easy, but the thought of him torturing his first lover and what is equivalent to a boyfriend (he mentioned they were extremely close to the point of sleepovers) as a school bully after consummating their love for one another with sex, made me feel ill. That already gave me a bad taste of tragedy, so I was getting ready for far worse story-lines to come. As David grew older, I just couldn’t find any sympathy with him or even rationally empathize with his internalized homophobic reactions to himself and others. If there’s one kind of homophobe, I hate more than others who believe their own truths to be the absolute, it is the homophobe, who is himself desiring homosexual love yet hate those of his own inclination due to his inability to manifest love. David is a horrible monster, a 20^th century Frankenstein of homophobia and closet mentality in my view. I am a modern gay man; I know the history of gay rights wasn’t easy and it is still dangerous to be in a same sex relationship even today in various parts of the world. However, I have grown up with a generation that lived their lives proudly and without fear; reading this book is like reading a gay horror story of my worst fears with a narrator like David.

Today, we know there is a future and potential hope despite all the negativity. However, David was blinded by his immediate fears and social stigmas to ever truly be happy. For who he is in the book, I hate David's character, I hate how callous and selfish he is, I hate his lack of imagination or acceptance in love, and most of all, I hate how if not for the twist of a few legal reforms, many of us could have become him. His argument to leave Giovanni felt so wrong and repugnant about him being the woman in their relationship, when he thought it. His abrupt departure from Giovanni after getting word from his fiance, Hella, who he kept in the dark about his sexuality until the end was cruel, especially after Giovanni revealed he lost his job and David cheated on him by having sex with a woman to prove his manhood. At the end, David did know that if you love someone, then the stupid gender roles of society about being a "man" or "manhood" is bullshit. To me, love isn't measured by a sexual position or act, it is the emotional ties that binds a couple together.

Yes, David's anxiety is a good portrayal of a truth that is confronted in homosexuality today, we still define ourselves with terms that are carryover from old heterosexual world of gender roles. Neither straight or gay couples should care about that, but we still do. I also find his innate aversion to non-gender conformity to be quite interesting, revealing in addition to his internalize homophobia, he also exhibited transphobia during his visit to the gay bars. He held contempt for the "girls", who he did not understand and did not want to accept as they were neither women nor men to him, but something that breaks social dynamics he believed in. When they tell tales of having sex with seemingly heterosexual men, he rejects it outright, ignoring it as mere ramblings and discounting them. For a man, who frequents gay bars so much, his rejection of not only his own sexuality, but the possibility that social constructs itself are flawed is a very tragic character flaw. Baldwin drew a connection in his novel, perhaps the first connection between chauvinism/toxic masculinity and homophobia, I think based on David's character.

Not all the story is sad and filled with horrible holdovers, there were plenty of happy scenes with great commentary on gay clubbing culture that can even be applied to today’s gay males. The gay bars of France are not so different from the establishment we have nowadays, nor are the simple romantic overtures of David and Giovanni’s lead up to sex and even a relationship that far removed with our practices. Though, I personally think Jacques little flirtations and slight quirks that were met with disdain by others in the 1950’s are overblown, most modern gay men would think Jacques is an old-fashioned queen compared to RuPaul. The depictions of french gay culture was done extremely well, the lack of criminalization of homosexuality under the Napoleonic code gave it vibrancy, but the innate homophobic culture and tone still made it a dangerous environment with potential social issues and cultural misunderstandings. Baldwin having lived in France for a part of his life gave the backdrop an American perspective, which I must admit as much as I hated David's sexuality and views, he did serve as a great lens to view mid-20th century France.

This is sometimes considered one of the first major gay novels, alongside EM Forster Maurice published in 1971, which was written decades earlier. Forster offered his title character freedom to be gay from his standpoint as a wealthy White Anglo-Saxon at the turn of the 20^th century through hiding in wilds of North America. Forster's protagonist, Maurice, could leave his world behind, be happy with his chosen male partner, and reject social convention, because he had the upbringing of wealth and privilege to give him that perspective. However, in a photo-negative, James Baldwin as a poor African American gay writer, who grew up in a broken home with a religious stepfather, perceived far less opportunity for freedom in his character David, even though he's also a white man, he had far less means and was living in poverty similar to Baldwin in France, in the middle of the 20^th century against a backdrop of repression despite a sense of freedom. Under Baldwin's experiences, David grew up with a masculine and sexist mindset that poisoned him to alternatives for happiness. They're very much stories written as antithesis of each other due to their writers' life experience. While the concept of race and economic standing aren't overt topics in this book, Baldwin's perspectives does add an alternative interpretation.

Historic note: James Baldwin's own publisher advised him against writing a gay novel, because he would alienate African American readers, but he believed strongly in both causes as he was both black and gay. Still, he wrote David as a white man, instead of a black man like himself being gay. It's interesting how he was willing to defend the creation of Giovanni's room as an aspect of himself, but could not come out on the page himself to talk about the black and gay experience as one narrative. I wonder if he had a different draft that the world has yet to discover.

My Rating: 4 out 5, it’s a classic for a reason and despite its horrible main character's nature and tragic ending, it deserves to be read. It’s a cautionary tale for all the gay and bi guys in the closet, who compromise their souls too far and deny their true selves to seek social approval.

However, if this were written in 2016, instead of 1956, I'd likely give it 0 star out of 5 for my utter contempt of David's character and what he does throughout the novella to Giovanni, Hella, and even his friends. He's a horrible human being and from a modern perspective, it shame me to think that in context to 1956, he represented possibly the best scenario for a gay man, who wasn't wealthy, living in alienation and random hookup with deep guilt and regret. I know critics have given this book a glowing review and I am recommending it as well, but I honestly hated the main character and I had to fight my own modern disdain for his attitudes with historical context.

This is an example of a book I hate to read, but I knew I had to finish. It's a bitter medicine for the Happily Ever After Gay Romances I prefer.

-------------------

I hope people enjoyed these reviews. I am not a stickler for classic books, new age gay romances, science fiction, fantasy, or even mysteries as a preferred genre, since I enjoy them all, both for reading and writing. I hope you all consider reading and expanding your horizons beyond limited genres and grow your interests.

On a personal level, some people have criticized me that I must be googling all my knowledge, because I can't possibly know so much about the world. I don't know everything in the universe, but I read a ton of books, even romance novels will teach you new things and force you to read reference materials.