James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room" Had An All-White Cast

In Rosalind Rosenberg's otherwise fascinating biography of black writer, lawyer, and women's rights activist Pauli Murray*, Jane Crow (Oxford University Press, 2017), there is one bit of information I disagree with. Ms. Rosenberg describes James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room as "an explicitly bi-sexual, bi-racial novel." The bisexual aspect is correct since David, the novel's protagonist, had a romantic relationship with a female and Giovanni,who was, if I recall correctly, a bartender in Paris. But the book is not biracial because all the characters in it are white, the only such book that Baldwin wrote.

Christopher Bram, in his equally fascinating book, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed  America (Twelve, 2012), writes that "Baldwin had several reasons for writing a novel with all-white characters. He wanted to escape the label of 'Negro novelist,' which was not only artistically limiting, it was commercially restrictive."  "Changing the race," continues Bram, "also enabled Baldwin to put distance between himself and his story: he wasn't writing about his life, he was writing about other lives. It gave his imagination more breathing room. In addition, there must have been bitter pleasure in putting himself inside a privileged white skin."

*Pauli Murray (1910-1985) believed herself to be a man trapped inside a female body, a belief others thought was a sign of some form of mental illness.

"Jane Crow" was the term Murray coined for gender discrimination. She saw it as a partner to "Jim Crow," the label for race discrimination. Black women were the victims of both forms of discrimination.





Note: Once again, Happy New Year, everyone! Let's hope 2018 will be a healthy, happy, productive, and prosperous year for all of us!