James Baldwin 1924-1987

(Born James Arthur Baldwin) American essayist, playwright, nonfiction and short story writer, poet, scriptwriter, and author of children's books.

For additional information on Baldwin's career, see BLC, Ed. 1.

INTRODUCTION

One of the most notable American writers of the twentieth century, Baldwin explores in many of his writings the intersections between racism and homophobia. While Baldwin was a high profile figure in the civil rights movement, his ability to effect positive changes in American society was often undercut by the prevailing attitudes toward homosexuality within American culture in general and within the African American community in particular. Through his fiction, essays, plays, and other writings, Baldwin consistently explored and developed his ideas about race relations, homosexuality, and religion. Throughout his career he continued to highlight the African American struggle for equality.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Baldwin was born in Harlem in New York City in 1924, the illegitimate son of Emma Berdis Jones. In 1927 Jones married David Baldwin, who later adopted James. The couple had eight children together, and Baldwin often helped his mother care for his younger siblings. His stepfather was strict and religious, and Baldwin's relationship with him influenced his later writings. At the age of fourteen, Baldwin became a Pentecostal youth preacher. Attending Frederick Douglass Junior High School, Baldwin met the famous Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, who encouraged Baldwin to apply to the prestigious DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. Baldwin did so and was accepted; there he began writing short stories, plays, and poetry. He graduated in 1942. The following year, Baldwin's stint as a youth preacher ended and he moved to New York's Greenwich Village after the death of his stepfather. There he worked odd jobs and began writing a novel. At this time he also met the author Richard Wright, who helped Baldwin obtain a fellowship that enabled him to focus on his writing. In 1948 he used the funds from a fellowship to pay for his move to Paris, France. Here, he finished his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). In Paris he found greater acceptance of his race and his homosexuality than he had in America. Continuing to write fiction and essays, Baldwin settled in St. Paul de Vence, a small town in the French countryside, where he lived the rest of his life. He died from cancer in 1987.

MAJOR WORKS

Sexual and racial issues permeate Baldwin's writings, and he treats them in terms of his personal experience as well as within a larger social context. Baldwin's first novel, the semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain, explores the religious conversion of a thirteen-year-old boy whose stepfather is a preacher. In Giovanni's Room (1956), Baldwin treats the topic of homosexuality with some candor. The novel is set in Paris and concerns the romance between a white American student and an Italian bartender. Another Country (1962) recounts the relationships of the black jazz musician Rufus Scott with his best friend and his white lover; additional subplots follow the sexual relationships of other homosexual and heterosexual characters. Issues of personal and cultural identity, which had appeared briefly in Baldwin's works thus far, are examined directly in Baldwin's novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968). In this book, a prominent black artist becomes the victim of his own public persona and experiences a loss of identity and personal convictions. In If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), Baldwin uses another artist protagonist to portray an environment hostile to blacks and in Just above My Head (1979), Baldwin turns again to sexuality and religion as he tells the story of a homosexual gospel singer.

Like his bold, varied, and complex treatment of race relations in his fiction, Baldwin discussed the issue extensively in his essays. In the essay collection The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin maintains that the current and future lives of whites and African Americans are connected, and he urges the races to reconcile. The conciliatory tone of Baldwin's essays changes with the escalation of racial tensions during the mid-1960s. In No Name in the Street (1972), he insists upon the independence of African Americans and suggests that violence against whites might be the only means to this end. Baldwin was working on a play and a biography of Marin Luther King, Jr., when he died.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Often criticized more for his politics than for his abilities as a writer, Baldwin was regarded during the early 1960s as an influential spokesman for African American rights. Baldwin asserted, however, that he was not the mouthpiece for any particular message, but rather an artist and an intellectual who explored various ideas in complex ways. When readers and reviewers perceived that Baldwin was not the advocate for African American liberation they thought him to be, his literary efforts were sometimes dismissed. With the publication of Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin was praised as a major novelist for his cathartic, semi-autobiographical work. When Giovanni's Room, with its frank discussion of homosexuality was published, the controversial nature of Baldwin's work became the topic of critical reviews. While he was often attacked for his views or for the fact that they seemed to change substantially, his examinations of race relations and sexuality in his fiction and nonfiction began to be viewed in the late twentieth century as significant explorations of American social issues. Recent criticism on Baldwin's writings continues in the same vein. William J. Spurlin assesses Baldwin's treatment of race relations and homosexuality in Go Tell It on the Mountain. He demonstrates that the tropes Baldwin uses in the novel to discuss homosexuality created anxiety in 1950s Cold War America in the same way that they inspired tension in the racially charged atmosphere of the 1960s. The way in which Baldwin treats homosexuality in Go Tell It on the Mountain is also examined by Angelo R. Robinson, who discusses the novel as Baldwin's critique of black Pentecostal positions on sexuality. While Baldwin portrays the conflict between sexuality and salvation, Robinson explains, the novel is at heart a message of Christian love and hope that rejects restrictive notions of the requirements for salvation. Focusing on Baldwin's nonfiction writings, Frank Louis Rusciano examines Baldwin's views on the relationship between American identity and black identity. Rusciano suggests that Baldwin's personal spiritual journey toward an understanding of his identity is revealed in his essays and that the experiences of blacks and non-blacks are, according to Baldwin, inextricably tied to notions of American identity.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Go Tell It on the Mountain (novel) 1953

Notes of a Native Son (nonfiction) 1955

Giovanni's Room (novel) 1956

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (nonfiction) 1961

Another Country (novel) 1962

The Fire Next Time (nonfiction) 1963

Blues for Mister Charlie: A Play (drama) 1964

Nothing Personal (nonfiction) 1964

Going to Meet the Man (novel) 1965

The Amen Corner: A Play (drama) 1968

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (novel) 1968

A Rap on Race (nonfiction) 1971

No Name in the Street (nonfiction) 1972

One Day When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley's "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" (screenplay) 1972

César: Compressions, l'homme et la machine [with Françoise Giroud, translated into French by Yvonne Roux] (nonfiction) 1973

If Beale Street Could Talk (novel) 1974

The Devil Finds Work: An Essay (nonfiction) 1976

Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (novel) 1976

Just above My Head (novel) 1979

Jimmy's Blues: Selected Poems (poetry) 1983

The Evidence of Things Not Seen (nonfiction) 1985

The Price of the Ticket (nonfiction) 1985

Gypsy & Other Poems (poetry) 1989

Sonny's Blues and Other Stories (short stories) 1995

James Baldwin: Collected Essays (nonfiction) 1998

James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories (novels and short stories) 1998

CRITICISM

Frank Louis Rusciano (essay date winter 2003)

SOURCE: Rusciano, Frank Louis. "James Baldwin: America's Native Son." Academic Exchange Quarterly 7, no. 4 (winter 2003): 311-15.

[In the following essay, Rusciano assesses Baldwin's treatment in his non-fiction writings of the relationship between American identity and African American iden-tity, stressing that in these works Baldwin reveals not only the connections between national and racial identity but the process through which the author searched for his own personal identity.]

It is common to imagine that a man's life can be mapped by the intersection of facts from his personal history. So we learn from James Baldwin's biography that he was born in Harlem in 1924, was awarded numerous prizes to pursue his writing, and eventually settled as an expatriate in Paris where he died in 1987. Beyond his official biography one finds from those who knew him that he was gay (or perhaps bisexual), often fell victim to bouts of depression, and drank and smoked too much to the detriment of his health. But what is surprising about even the most intimate reminiscences of his friends is how little they add to our knowledge of the man beyond his writings; even the best biographies of Baldwin ultimately end up in a discussion of his work. This is not because he lived his life away from the public eye, but rather because his writings bear such honest witness to his experiences. However, his writing is not interesting solely as the basis for a psychological portrait, or because of his dexterity with language. Instead, his spiritual journey reveals a search for personal identity which he relates to the "American problem" of identity in general and race in particular.

Using the accounts of a "witness" to history is a critical pedagogical tool that has been employed to good use in several venues, for instance, in Holocaust studies. But this essay would like to suggest a specific use stemming from Baldwin's approach to this role. Since high school and college students wrestle with essential issues of identity, Baldwin's non-fiction prose may be studied as a journey of self-examination in three ways. For African-American youth, it illustrates how their identities are incomprehensible apart from the American identity in general. For non-black students, it teaches how their American identity, conversely, is incomprehensible without the presence and acknowledgement of African-Americans. Finally, it shows all students that identity need not be defined by separating oneself from some "Other", but by understanding how breaching that barrier may lead to a deeper self-understanding. Elaborating Baldwin's accounts of the inextricable relationship between American identity and black identity becomes an exercise in changing students' consciousness—not just with regard to race, but also in relation to other barriers and identity issues. Baldwin's insights persuade because they can still render even the most contemporary racial and identity concerns comprehensible.

One of Baldwin's constant themes was that the search for identity is a distinctly American problem, one that distinguishes us from a European past that many claim, incorrectly, as our sole heritage. In his essay "Stranger in Paris," Baldwin notes how the French, unlike the Americans, know who they are—ethnically, historically, and as a people. Americans, by contrast, struggle to identify and understand themselves. We recognize each other, "know one when we see one," but we cannot name what we share in common as Americans.

For Baldwin, what we cannot name is race. Our struggle has its roots in the American denial of the role of race—particularly the African race—in the creation of American identity. The African's loss of history due to slavery represented both a tragedy and a challenge. The tragedy was that black people lost a sense of who they were before they came to this continent. The challenge was that this loss made them among the first real Americans, forced to define themselves in terms of the terrible conditions of their lives in a new land. Hence, black history in America becomes key to understanding American history; the American identity is forged, in large part, from the struggles of this people to create a new identity in the absence of their familiar surroundings, customs, and social networks. The denial of the black person's presence through slavery, forced segregation, second-class citizenship, and the silence of the history books has thereby prevented all Americans from knowing themselves. The American tragedy lies in our inability to define our own identity.

Baldwin knew even in the 1950s that what many individuals so affectionately refer to as "the Canon" in Western philosophy and literature cannot tell Americans who they are. If it could, we would be Europeans; but the twin encounters of white Americans with an alien land and with the African race in close contact do not allow for such naivete. Because all of us, as Americans are "Strangers in the Village", to use the title of one of Baldwin's most famous essays, we all must establish a new identity in close quarters with others occupied with the same task. These others include African Americans whose engagement in this task is even more urgent; having been robbed of their African heritage, they had to become Americans if they were to be anything at all. American history so often becomes a struggle, then, between black people who must forge an identity as Americans, and whites who wish, in a futile way, to forge an American identity as white as that of their European forebears. In Baldwin's own words:

Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be.

          (Baldwin, 1985a, p. 89)

But one may ask why all of this matters in the long run. After all, if the winners write history, should we really be surprised that we form our myths about history in a way that supports the dominant class—myths that therefore exclude African Americans? Baldwin tells why this issue matters out of the agony of his own experience. To deny who or what one is does violence to the self, and this violence escalates, the greater the denial becomes. As a homosexual living in a homophobic world, Baldwin was all too familiar with this personal violence. His loneliness bordering upon despair led him to attempt suicide at least twice. If we refuse to understand ourselves as we really are, we must become ever more violent to protect ourselves from a reality we cannot accept. Eventually, we destroy ourselves with self-loathing; in Baldwin's words: "Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law" (Baldwin, 1985b, p. 145).

The violence of white Americans towards blacks, from the symbolic emasculation of movies that contained black characters to the physical emasculation of blacks by lynch mobs and terrorism, creates an atmosphere, a tendency towards violence which ultimately swallows white Americans. It affects us all because violence is a cycle that turns back upon itself; it is a continually self-renewing strategy. As Baldwin notes "all ideas are dangerous—dangerous because ideas can only lead to actions and where the action leads no man can say" (Baldwin, 1985a, p. 87). But it affects Americans even more deeply, by injuring our souls, oftentimes beyond repair: "confronted with the, impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of being free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses" (ibid.). At times, of course, these excesses were so absurd as to be almost comic. In our movies, which mirror our beliefs so well, scenes with black actors or actresses were regularly trimmed from films shown in the South. If blacks did appear in movies, their stories became unrecognizable to anyone with a passing acquaintance with African-American life in this country. Baldwin describes how this revisionism leads to distortions of black life in such bad films as The Defiant Ones and Lady Sings the Blues (Baldwin, 1985c, pp. 557-637). On a more positive note, the problem of identity also inspires the best of our literature and arts. It is no coincidence that the greatest American novel describes a spiritual journey on the Mississippi River, in which a white boy must wrestle with his conscience about the meaning of his relationship with an escaped slave.

Yet, the importance of knowing the role of black Americans in the forging of American identity goes beyond sharpening our aesthetic understanding. For from this knowledge we can make comprehensible the chaos of our common history. Baldwin's pursuit of this theme gives his work a timeless quality, as many of our most nettlesome issues become understandable when viewed through the lens of our common struggle for identity.

To take but a few examples, consider first the common observation that other groups, notably the Irish, Italians, and Jews encountered prejudice in America, but were able to work their way up in the society. What, then, it is asked, is the problem with black Americans that they have been unable to do so? Baldwin uses this question as an example of a dangerous naivete; he turns the issue on its head, making the question an indictment of American values, rather than an indictment of African-Americans. After all, blacks have been in America for nearly four hundred years, and still find themselves in a disadvantaged position in the society. The fact that the Irish, Italians, and Jews could, and did, move upward, and still maintain significant vestiges of their ethnic identity and pride, meant that they did so by ascribing to a system of beliefs which defined "American" by excluding blacks. Except in a few (often sad) circumstances, blacks were denied entry into the society unless they refuted their own race. One need only observe the tragic lives of young African-American males who are often accused by their peers of "trying to be white" when they attempt to excel in school. They are, in fact, trying to be American and partake of that dream in a society that still cannot fully integrate their race into the American identity. The rise of other immigrant groups is thereby evidence of an American idea flexible enough to absorb white immigrants of different languages and cultures, but too inflexible to absorb blacks.

Of course, one may reject this explanation. One may argue instead that our society is open and always new, and that all people have a chance to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps." But Baldwin exacts a terrible cost for this belief, by making Americans follow this argument to its logical conclusion. If all other things are truly equal, and blacks are still in a disadvantaged position in the society, there must be some reason—congenital or genetic—which keeps African-Americans as a group in their inferior position. Put another way, if the fault is not within our belief systems, which have for so long excluded African-Americans, then the fault must lie with blacks themselves as a race. We begin by proclaiming our minds and our society open, as the last great hope for the world, and we end by embracing the most heinous ideas, ideas responsible for several holocausts in this century alone.

Baldwin acknowledged that to change commonly held ideas is difficult, since even the most incorrect or useless ones die-hard. He would not be surprised by Herrnstein and Murray's attempt to relegate blacks to the nether regions on a "bell curve" of intellectual achievement, by means of dubious statistics and ethnic categories (Herrnstein and Murray, 1996). Neither would he be surprised by Bloom's assertion that a reverence for the European canon will rectify the "closing of the American mind" (Bloom, 1987). Baldwin would argue that the American mind has certainly been closed, not due to ignorance of this canon, but due to the canon's irrelevance to the problem of American identity. He would note that these authors' ideas still have an audience because we dare not speak of the role of blacks in creating a distinctive American identity. It has been easier to write African-Americans out of American history discounting their intelligence or their contribution, than to see our history as it really is. But while the death of false ideas is painful, it is also inevitable; in Baldwin's words:

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too … It is only to be borne in on us—faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will—that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.

          (Baldwin, 1985a, p. 89)

Finally, the conflict over identity explains for Baldwin another of our contemporary problems—the tragic animosity between African-Americans and Jews. The suffering of the Jewish people, while horrible by any standards, was not part of the American history in which Jews were invited to participate. As such, black Americans (including Baldwin) too often viewed Jewish accounts of their suffering as an indictment of the black people, as evidence that a people may suffer and still reach the Promised Land. This attitude angered blacks who felt that part of the promise of this land that welcomed the Jewish people was that it also excluded blacks. Baldwin understood the sources of black anti-Semitism (and flirted dangerously with these feelings himself). Yet, he joined other black activists in openly condemning the anti-Semitism of black newspapers in the late 1960s. Here, Baldwin's sociological vision conflicts with his moral vision. He knew that in yielding to anti-Semitic attitudes, African-Americans lost the moral high ground—and for practical (if no other) purposes, that loss left blacks in a vulnerable position. After all, the moral high ground is the main recourse black Americans have in pressing their demands upon the society; it may not be their only strategy, but without it they have little left. Baldwin always cautioned, then, against allowing circumstances to become justifications: "The betrayal of belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were so there would be no moral standards in the world at all" (ibid., p. 87). Or, in a fuller statement of Baldwin's beliefs:

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas that seemed in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are; in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this does not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one's own life, accept those injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it had now been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.

          (Baldwin, 1985, p. 145)

Baldwin the observer clashes in this way with Baldwin the visionary. This is the curse of all witnesses, to struggle between the need to describe honestly what is without abandoning the fight for what might (or must) be.

In the final analysis, there are those who would retreat into psychoanalysis to dismiss Baldwin's concerns about American identity. His obsession with the blending of black and white voices in American history, they argue, is merely a projection of his confusion about the blending of male and female voices in his own sexuality. But Baldwin's sexuality did not diminish his vision; it enhanced and focused it, especially in his final years. Being suspended between the male and female genders allowed him to see the artificiality of such boundaries in all aspects of identity. Near the end of his life, his new comfort with his gender identity seemed to portend a coming to terms with the creation of American identity out of different races. Most of us, faced with personal conflicts, work to resolve them on an individual level, as personal problems. A precious few, like Baldwin, promote this conflict between the self and the society's values into a broader insight into the human condition, an examination of all forms of identity that opens a door to everyone's psyche. In this manner, too, Baldwin lived the life of the witness for all of us.

The witness reminds us that personal history and American history blend in a manner that neither diminishes nor demeans either. If this were not case, individuals would mean nothing, and personal efforts would be for naught. Just as Baldwin's personal life challenged those who wished to stereotype him, so too did his work challenge those who would read American history as white or black. As a witness, Baldwin finally found peace by disturbing ours. By renouncing violence against himself late in his life, he challenged Americans to do the same—to renounce the violence necessary to preserve a myth. That myth was, of course, that American history was white history, and could only be sustained by violence against African-Americans that made them invisible in the society. Ultimately, Baldwin saw through his own spiritual journey that the fratricide of white versus black Americans ends in a form of suicide. In avoiding each other, often in violent ways, whites and blacks destroy by their own hands any hope of self-knowledge—and what is death, after all, if not the final loss of one's own identity?

It is best to give Baldwin the final word. In the concluding paragraph of one of his last essays, Baldwin acknowledges that his search for gender identity and American identity are linked. It may cause us discomfort, but that does not make his words any less true:

we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

          (Baldwin, 1985d, p. 690)

Whenever high school or college students write, they are on some level writing about themselves. Directing their assignments to Baldwin's insight above can prove how being "helplessly" a part of each other in the classroom and the society can be a liberating experience in "knowing thyself."

References

Baldwin, James. (1985a). "Stranger in the Village." In The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-fiction, 1948-1985. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.

Baldwin, James. (1985b). "Notes of a Native Son." In The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-fiction, 1948-1985. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985

Baldwin, James. (1985c). "The Devil Finds Work." In The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-fiction, 1948-1985. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.

Baldwin, James. (1985d). "Here there be Dragons." In The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-fiction, 1948-1985. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.

Bloom, Allan. (1987). The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Herrnstein, Richard J. and Murray, Charles. (1996). The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Angelo R. Robinson (essay date March 2005)

SOURCE: Robinson, Angelo R. "The Other Proclamation in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain." CLA Journal 48, no. 3 (March 2005): 336-51.

[In the following essay, Robinson analyzes Baldwin's commentary in the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain on the conflict between personal sexuality and the Pentecostal notion of salvation.]

Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was too late.

          —James Baldwin

What is it too late for John, the young protagonist in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, to do? And what is it about his fourteenth birthday that made him realize that it was too late? Why on that day did John realize that it was too late for him to be "just like his father," a preacher? While these questions are more than enough to ponder, John poses yet another question later on this eventful day. In a highly emotional state with tears flowing from his eyes and with his fists clenched, John implores, "What shall I do? What shall I do?" (31). What is it that John should do? What is troubling John? His waking thoughts provide a clue to answering these questions:

He had sinned. In spite of the saints, his mother and his father, the warnings he had heard from his earliest beginnings, he had sinned with his hands a sin that was hard to forgive. In the school lavatory, alone, thinking of the boys, older, bigger, braver, who made bets with each other as to whose urine could arch higher, he had watched in himself a transformation of which he would never dare speak.

          (19)

Several things stand out in John's revealing thoughts. First, we are informed of John's bodily desire. This is a desire characterized by masturbation prompted by lustful thoughts of males. It is here that the reader is informed of John's homosexual desire. More significantly, it is here that we find the first indication of what is bothering him. Indeed, John's struggles with his homosexuality provide the window through which to understand the complexity of his struggles with his spirituality, and hence for understanding why it was too late. This essay will attempt to get to the heart of John's condition by examining the impact of his homoerotic desires upon his need for salvation. In so doing, I will show how James Baldwin critiqued prevailing notions of black Pentecostalism through John's agony over his sexuality and his conversion. Moreover, this reading will make clear how Baldwin uses the struggle with homosexuality to confront the conflict between spirituality and sexuality.¹

In many ways the questions asked concerning John are interrelated: one must address all of them in order to get a complete answer regarding John's state of being. I begin with the question stemming from the epigraph, What is it too late for John to do? In the epigraph, we are informed of an expectation for John to be a preacher. We also see that this expectation is placed on him with- out his active acceptance but rather his passive consent for a time until his fourteenth birthday. Then we are told that it was too late. With this ending, a sense of doom resonates, signaling entrapment. This leads to two more questions: Is it too late for John to be a preacher? Or is it too late for John to escape being a preacher? These are also the questions at hand for John as the subject of his conversion bears heavily on him. The intensity of the weight of these questions is shown in his desperate and self-proposed question, "What shall I do? What shall I do?" The dilemma that John is faced with here is urgent and inescapable, a "now or never" situation. His emotional state on this day is no accident but is the reaction of a frightened and tormented teenager who believes that his very life and free will are at stake as a result of the pressure to convert, be saved, and follow in his father's footsteps as a preacher.

To understand the profound angst of John's dilemma, it is necessary to first examine what it means for John to be converted and saved as a Pentecostal in the novel. To do so specifically requires following a set of dictates instituted by the Pentecostal faith that include living "holy" and "separate from the world." In order to live holy, Pentecostals distance themselves from those in the world and strive to live as saints on earth. The mandate of holiness is to resist conforming to the sinful ways of the world and is based on Biblical scripture: "But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation; / Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy" (Holy Bible, 1 Pet. 1.15-16). In the novel we see that John has been raised to believe that his church, Temple of the Fire Baptized, "was the holiest and the best" (12).

In terms of living separately, the Pentecostals in the novel believe that social isolation is the cornerstone of their Christian existence and regard themselves as saints who must adhere to this characteristically Pentecostal vow of separation. Indeed, Baldwin's portrayal is faithful to the actual black Pentecostal experience. Jerome de Romanet concurs that separation is in fact "the specifics of black Protestantism" (11). Similarly, in Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture (1996), Cheryl Sanders concurs that separation from the worldly is the essence of the black Pentecostal movement. She writes, "The saints reject the world on the basis of Biblically derived ascetic commitments, that is, the mandate of holiness" (ix). Sanders further describes this aspect of separation for black Pentecostals as "the social dimension of exile" (ix). In the novel, we see this view expressed by Roy, John's older brother, when he complains to Elizabeth, their mother, about the inhibiting and obstructive terms of "social exile" enforced by their father, Gabriel. He laments,

We don't know how lucky we is to have a father what don't want you to go to movies, and don't want you to play in the streets, and don't want you to have no friends, and he don't want this and he don't want that, and he don't want you to do nothing. We so lucky to have a father who just wants us to go to church and read the Bible and beller like a fool in front of the altar and stay home all nice and quiet, like a little mouse. Boy, we sure is lucky, all right. Don't know what I done to be so lucky.

          (24)

Roy loathes the confinement of his father's dictates that stifle his very nature as a teenager. He wants the freedom to do as others without the constraint of living in the "narrow way" prescribed by Pentecostal beliefs. Though perhaps not as passionately, John also longs for this freedom that he sees extended to others outside of their faith. His thoughts on this fourteenth birthday confirm his feelings as he hears a group of boys outdoors: "And he wanted to be one of them, playing in the streets unfrightened, moving with such grace and power, but he knew this could not be" (30).

However, what Roy and, to a much lesser extent, John fail to realize is that Elizabeth is not just concerned with their religious salvation. She believes that by encouraging them to embrace Christianity according to the doctrine of their faith, she is not only helping to save their souls but she is also assisting in saving their actual lives by keeping them off the streets of Harlem and away from danger. This thinking is also reflected in Baldwin's assessment of the importance of the black church during his adolescence. In "Down at the Cross," he credits the church with saving his and other teenagers' lives:

What I saw around me that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen; nothing had changed. But now, without any warning, the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace. It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances. Many of my comrades were clearly headed for the Avenue, and my father said that I was headed that way, too…. Some went on wine or whiskey or the needle, and are still on it. And others, like me, fled into the church.

          (337, 339)

It is in this vein that Elizabeth agrees with the confines of their faith as enforced by Gabriel because she believes that a fate outside of the church will result in Roy and John's earthly and eternal death. Reprimanding Roy for his outburst and disparaging remarks about his father, she warns him that his rebellion will lead to imprisonment. In reply, he charges his mother with narrowmindedness in thinking that the world only consists of churches and jails. Her warning is indicative of the Pentecostal belief in a bipolar world of good versus evil, saintly versus worldly. Elizabeth believes that in order for her son to "live holy," he must separate him- self from the worldly completely. Arthur Paris affirms this view in Black Pentecostalism, stating that Pentecostal theology "requires behaving differently from worldly people" (121). Paris relates that the overall goal of the church is to "emphasize the life of Holiness, the evangelization of sinners, and the rejection of the world and its wiles—in short, an attempt to convert men to both the world view of the church and its social practice" (147). As such, for Pentecostals, anything not scriptural is to be viewed as worldly and therefore evil. The saying "holiness or hell" is often cited in the black Pentecostal church as the only two options for living (Tinney 49).

Baldwin, however, believed that this doctrine was too limiting and did not help people deal with the reality of everyday life, as fraught with danger as that life may have been. As Sanders reports and other scholars have noted, Baldwin saw black religious culture as "restrictive, constraining, and confining" (106).² In James Baldwin and the Christian Tradition, Jerome E. Thornton attests to the strictness of Pentecostal doctrine as critiqued by Baldwin in the novel. In setting these restrictions on his children, Gabriel confirms the oppressive nature of their religion. Thornton points this out, stating,

Gabriel cannot offer a theology that frees one from the frustration of walking in the narrow path of Christianity, causing one to fear every step; he can only offer a theology which makes one fear one's existence, if one does not comply with the suffocating rules of Christianity. Gabriel's faith preaches a creed in which one should not believe in one's emotions, but rather he teaches a faith that one should fear what could happen if one chooses to yield to one's natural instincts.

          (90)

It is this fear and conflict over his natural instincts and desires that leave John helplessly unprepared to deal with the reality of his sexuality, particularly as it is homosexual desire. This desire is introduced and developed with the homoerotic attraction of John for Elisha. The attraction is typical of any adolescent romance with the exception that it is a same-sex infatuation. His attraction to Elisha is hinted at from their first encounter at church, where Elisha is John's Sunday school teacher. The narrator relates that John is "distracted by his new teacher, Elisha" (13) and unable to concentrate on the lesson. When Elisha, noticing that John's mind is far from the Sunday school lesson, questions him about the lesson, John is interrupted in the midst of his daydream; he is both "ashamed and confused" and "the palms of his hands become wet and his heart pound[s] like a hammer" (13). John's moist hands and pulsating heart signal that sexual arousal is a manifestation of his daydream. An analysis of the way he looks at Elisha supports this explication of the daydream: "John stared at Elisha all during the lesson, admiring the timbre of Elisha's voice, much deeper and manlier than his own, admiring the leanness, and grace, and strength, and darkness of Elisha in his Sunday suit" (13). This is no ordinary looking, but a sexualized looking, an erotic gaze, associated with the phallus and distinguishable from a look associated with the eye.³ John's admiration of Elisha's physicality as shared by the narrator is evidence of this thinking. His attention to the details of Elisha's voice, body, and appearance causes him to fantasize about Elisha. John's concentration on Elisha's physique is most telling of his fascination with him, and the objectification is characteristic of the gay male gaze.⁴

In a later scene when John and Elisha wrestle, John's sensual fascination with Elisha's body is exhibited as he revels in the smell, sight, and touch of Elisha:

And so they turned, battling in the narrow room, and the odor of Elisha's sweat was heavy in John's nostrils. He saw the veins rise on Elisha's forehead and in his neck; his breath became jagged and harsh, and the grimace on his face became cruel; and John, watching these manifestations of his power, was filled with a wild delight.

          (53)

After wrestling, John is left titillated and "trembling" as if in ecstasy from the excitement that the romp with Elisha has produced.⁵

John's attraction to and objectification of Elisha's body is not the only means by which we see the reality of his homosexual desire. His desire for the male body is shown in other ways as a longing for "maleness" is at the center of his desire. Elements of what Laura Mulvey terms fetishistic scopophilia also come into play when one examines John's sexual attraction for males. This happens when the object of one's desire is built up, "transforming it into something satisfying in itself" (Mulvey 21). A manifestation of this phenomenon occurs when John masturbates while recalling the images of other males to give him sexual arousal, stimulation, and gratification.

It is here that we find the troubled John on the morning of his fourteenth birthday, awakened to the reality of his bodily desires like never before, recalling the image of masturbatory bliss. This image troubles him much, not only because it is sexual—that is bad enough—but worse yet, it is homosexual. He fully realizes that his sexual desires are far from acceptable to his Pentecostal faith. This dilemma is poignantly brought home on his fourteenth birthday when we see him tormented and terrorized over his bodily desires on that morning: "Suddenly, sitting at the window, and with a violence unprecedented, there arose in John a flood of fury and tears, and he bowed his head, fists clenched against the windowpane, crying, with teeth on edge: "What shall I do? What shall I do?" He is in much pain and conflict over his spirituality and sexuality as he is being urged by family and friends to submit to God and embrace a conversion that does not allow for these desires. His response to his mother's plea says it all. When she implores him to embrace God according to their faith, he candidly replies, "Yes Mama. I'm going to try to love the Lord" (32).

To gain an understanding of John's plight regarding bodily desire and his salvation, it is necessary to first examine the guidelines of his Pentecostal faith on sexuality in general. In the same way that black Pentecostalism calls for a separation of the earthly saints from the worldly, a separation of the spiritual from the physical is also advocated. In terms of sexuality, it is believed that a "saved" life calls for the erasure of a sexual identity in that sexuality is equated with the sin of lust. This view is expressed and strived for, though never attained, throughout the novel. Gabriel, John's stepfather, tries to live up to this ideal after his own conversion. He attempts to ignore the reality of his sexuality by abstaining from sex. However his physical needs prevail and are manifested in a dream in which several women implore and attempt to entice him to join them in bed. Starved for the sexual release that his body needs, he finds relief in a wet dream: "His loins were covered with his own white seed" (111). Startled by the realization that he is still a sexual being with desire, as evinced by his wet dream, Gabriel obeys St. Paul's mandate to marry when abstinence is not possible: "But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn" (Holy Bible, 1 Cor. 7.9). As such, he immediately decides to marry a woman who he believes will not compromise his converted lifestyle. He proposes to the older and devout Deborah. Thornton expounds on Gabriel's reasoning for proposing marriage to Deborah: "Because Christianity makes one deny spontaneous physical communion, Gabriel proposes to Deborah simply to fortify himself against his craving flesh. He needs all the help he can get to stay in the narrow way" (Thornton 88).

However, this strategy fails to help Gabriel retreat from the specifics of his sexual appetite. He soon tires of his safe choice and has an extramarital affair with the young, sensual Esther. He fails to escape his desires by choosing a wife with whom he is spiritually but not sexually compatible. After ending the affair, Gabriel attempts to remain faithful to his wife but soon resents her: "He struggled to wear out his visions in the marriage bed, he struggled to awaken Deborah, for whom daily his hatred grew" (128). When Gabriel ends the affair, Esther warns him that he will never be satisfied with his wife after the passion they have shared (131). Years after the affair, Deborah confesses that she prayed to be the kind of woman that Gabriel wanted but was unable to be because of the psychological scars resulting from being raped by white men during her adolescence. She states, "I been praying all these years that the Lord would touch my body, and make me like them women, all them women, you used to go with all the time" (149). Indeed, Gabriel's life could have been much happier and less complicated if he had tried to satisfy his spiritual and physical needs rather than fleeing his sexuality in an effort to satisfy his spirituality. He is of the belief that the two are polar opposites. When Deborah questions why he rejected Esther and abandoned Royal, their son, he relates that he could not marry a woman like Esther, calling her a "harlot." He states, "Esther's mind weren't on the Lord—she'd of dragged me right on down to Hell with her" (148). Gabriel rejects Esther and women like her as potential spouses because they are not ashamed of their sexuality and refused to deny it. Gabriel, on the other hand, believes that he has to deny his physical needs for the good of his spirituality according to his Pentecostal beliefs.

Espousing the same belief as Gabriel about the separation of the spiritual from the physical after conversion, Elisha tells John that once John has converted, he will no longer have sexual desire. He proclaims, "But when the Lord saves you He burns out all that old Adam, He gives you a new mind and a new heart, and then you don't find no pleasure in the world, you get all your joy in walking and talking with Jesus every day" (54). Realizing that John is not persuaded and sensing his reluctance to embrace this kind of transformation, Elisha emphasizes that his conversion has given him the ability to resist all fleshly temptations. He exclaims, "Ain't no woman, no, nor no man neither going to make me change my mind" (55).⁶

It is here that Baldwin not only critiques the black Pentecostal faith but also challenges orthodox evangelical theology that requires a conversion that "turns away from" the flesh and physical desire. Baldwin rejects theology that requires a transformation that excludes sexuality. He knows that man was created in God's image and part of that image includes having a sex drive. Baldwin does not believe that sexuality and spirituality need to be at odds. He views sexuality as a blessing from God. Kelly Brown Douglas affirms Baldwin's view in Sexuality and the Black Church; she writes,

Human sexuality must be viewed as a gift from God. It is not, as spiritualistic dualism suggests, a human flaw. Rather, it is significant to the human capacity to show forth the image of God. Sexuality allows human beings to be in loving relationships that are inevitably life-affirming and life-producing.

          (121)

Subscribing to this understanding of sexuality, Baldwin seeks to harmonize the relationship between the body and the spirit. In doing so, he confronts his readers with the reality of sexual desire and the need for spiritual reconciliation supported by a theology that is relevant to the human condition that created it. Moreover, he advocates a conversion that is realistic and inclusive of the physical and spiritual.

He does this in the portrayal of John's conversion in Part III of the novel, entitled "The Threshing-Floor." After his conversion, John, like Gabriel, realizes that his conversion has not eradicated the sexual desire that comes to the fore for John in his attraction to Elisha. The trembling that signified his attraction to Elisha previously in the wrestling scene before his conversion persists. The promise that conversion will rid one of sexual desire sought by Gabriel and expressed by Elisha has indeed failed John. This reality is distressing for John and leads him to believe that his conversion and salvation are in danger. In the immediate aftermath of his conversion, John is worried that his transformation is threatened and temporary. Feeling this way, he implores Elisha to pray for him and urges him to remember that if it was only for that night, he was saved. He stresses this point to Elisha, stating, "No matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says, you remember—please remember—I was saved. I was there" (220). At this time, John believes that his salvation is doomed and that he is a failure.

However, in Baldwin's mind, John is not a failure for precisely the same reason that John thinks he is. The fact that John still has sexual desires after a night on the threshing floor is a symbol of hope. It signals that conversion does not have to mean erasure of a full life. Understood this way, John's conversion is a success. It is a conversion that takes the reality of being human seriously. Unlike Elisha and Gabriel, he does not have to flee or deny his sexual identity in order to claim his salvation. In effect, John's conversion is an authentic transformation. Ironically, while John worried about his conversion, he perhaps has more of a chance of maintaining his salvation than Gabriel or even Elisha. For again, John has not unrealistically denied himself. In A Fire in the Bones, Albert Raboteau concurs that John has attained the true sense of conversion in that he is enabled to face reality with "a power of spirit and of truth" (160). For John this is critically important because he has questioned all along how one becomes saved without losing oneself, especially when those around him seem to have done just that.

John, however, seems to have been saved in such a way as to embrace the truth of his sexuality. He soon realizes the fullness of his transformation and is fortified by it. His declaration to Gabriel—"I'm saved … and I know I'm saved…. My witness is in Heaven and my record is on high"—proclaims this understanding (207). John has moved beyond the "do's and don'ts" of black Pentecostalism to claim his salvation after conversion. He has overcome the rigidity and dogmatic nature of this Pentecostal faith tradition. His night on the threshing floor has freed him from Gabriel's faith with its severe sexual ethic. By refusing to surrender his sexuality because he knows that it is part of who he is as a human being, John is able to experience the full measure of his spirituality. This view of sexuality is also expressed by James Nelson in Embodiment: An Approach to Sexuality and Christian Theology. He writes, "Sexuality is who we are as body-selves who experience the emotional, cognitive, physical, and spiritual need for intimate communion—humane and divine" (17-18). Indeed, sexuality is part of what makes us human beings, and to deny this is not only unrealistic but also unChristian. Nelson agrees further, stating, "Sexuality … is intrinsic to our relationship with God" (18). Knowing that humans were made in the image of God, this acceptance of sexuality in relation to God is understandable. Douglas concurs, stating, "The consequence of a devalued sexuality is an estranged relationship with God" (124). This estrangement is what John is trying to avoid by holding on to his sexual identity in his new relationship with God. In terms of African Americans, Douglas takes her argument one step further in her advocacy of sexuality for Christians. She explains, "To corrupt, misconstrue, deny, or simply ignore black sexuality is a betrayal of Christianity in general and Black Faith in particular, especially since these stances portend a distorted understanding of and diminished relationship with God" (112). In this light, John not only frees himself from a diminished relationship with God but also allows Baldwin the opportunity to advocate a full relationship with God that includes all components of one's humanity: body, soul, and mind. He presents John as freeing himself from the doom of sexuality and as being triumphant in doing so.

By the end of the novel, a feeling of love and hope resonates as John's joy is no longer restrained by Pentecostal doctrine that excludes him from religious salvation; rather, he embraces his deliverance. At least for the moment, he is free of anxiety about his sexuality. His resolution is secured by a holy kiss from his spiritual brother Elisha, who in Christ-like fashion guided him through his conversion. The sacred kiss signifies John's ethereal blessing as light emanates from Elisha in the dawn of that Sunday morning. As Elisha bids John farewell, we see the promise of salvation extended to John:

Then he turned away, down the long avenue, home. John stood still, watching him walk away. The sun had come full awake. It was waking the streets, and the houses, and crying at the windows. It fell over Elisha like a golden robe, and struck John's forehead, where Elisha had kissed him, like a seal ineffaceable forever.

          (221)

In the final sentences of the novel, we see a confident and mature John accepting God's grace as he proclaims, "I'm ready … I'm coming. I'm on my way" (221). He is well on his way to transforming the Pentecostal view of conversion. John is not following in Gabriel's footsteps but charting his own course as he begins to walk in his salvation.

Through John's spiritual, mystic rebirth, Baldwin is creating an ideal leader: a Black Messiah who will instruct black men and women to consign to oblivion the idea of loosing [sic] themselves in the damnation of white theology; theology which denies people their instinctive nature to respond to life, and dissolves the attitudes which are central to a bearable everyday existence.

          (91)

Indeed, Baldwin's "novel" conversion alters the traditional Pentecostal conversion experience in that John is not "cured," "healed," or "delivered" from his sexual desire during his rebirth; he is rather "restored" to confront the reality of his sexual desires while at the same time claiming the promise of salvation in that reality, thus affirming the proclamation of the Negro spiritual "Go Tell It on the Mountain." In this sense, the reality of a sexual personhood, even after religious conversion, is the other proclamation in Go Tell It on the Mountain. That Baldwin makes his case for the affirmation of human sexuality through the window of homosexuality is also telling. For in doing so, John's dilemma cannot be resolved through marriage; thus, one is left to confront and overcome the divide between spirituality and sexuality in general.

When Baldwin left the church at age eighteen to "continue his ministry" as a preacher without a church, he continued to declare a message of love for the body and the soul. His ultimate wish for mankind is a testament to this belief as he continued to advocate for a society filled with Christian love:

It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being … must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving.

          ("Down" 352)

In his first novel, we see this message of love and hope as he proclaims the good news of Christ to all mankind, calling for a reformation of Pentecostal theology that would deny salvation based on a restricted view of conversion.

Fifty years later, Baldwin's proclamation still needs to be heard. John's struggle on the threshing floor is still with us. This struggle is currently being played out in the religious community as individuals and the church at large continue to struggle with the reality of human sexuality and its relationship to religion and spirituality. Perhaps, like John, we will find the courage to face these challenges.

Notes

1. Existing scholarship mostly comments on the homoeroticism of the wrestling match between John and Elisha. See Giles and E. Nelson. Even recent scholarship on Baldwin, like collections edited by McBride (1999) and Miller (2000) do not take up this subject.

2. West classifies Baldwin as a "marginalist" who sees black religious culture as inhibiting.

3. This explication of looking is formulated in Laura Mulvey's seminal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." She asserts that looking can involve sexual objectification and fetishization. In terms of objectification, Mulvey defines scopophilia as "pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight" (18).

4. In terms of same-sex male desire, Steven Drukman's "The Gay Gaze or Why I Want My MTV" extends Mulvey's theorizing on the formation of the heterosexual and male gaze to include a gay male gaze. Drukman's gaze theory creates "a new position of interpretation, desire, meaning and subjectivity" for examining same-sex male desire (82). The scopophilia that Mulvey speaks of is modified to theorize on homoerotic desire. As Drukman states, scopophilic pleasure for the male homosexual is derived from viewing the male body as object (84).

5. Emmanuel S. Nelson, one of the few scholars to comment on the homoerotic element in Go Tell It on the Mountain, notes that "John and Elisha's playful wrestling on the church floor has obvious sexual overtones" (12). The portrayal of wrestling has often been used to express desire, especially in regard to same-sex attraction. In "Religious Alienation and ‘Homosexual Consciousness’ in City of Night and Go Tell It on the Mountain," James R. Giles reports that "The wrestling match has long been a significant device for underscoring covert homosexual attraction (e.g., [D. H.] Lawrence's Women in Love)" (379).

6. This in fact is not the case as Elisha falls short of this ideal when he and Ella Mae are brought before the congregation and rebuked by Father James for "walking disorderly," accused of gravitating toward a sexual expression of their relationship (17).

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. "Down at the Cross." The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985. New York: St. Martin's, 1985. 337-79.

———. Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Dell, 1953.

Burston, Paul, and Colin Richardson. A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995.

de Romanet, Jerome. "Revisiting Madeleine and ‘The Outing’: James Baldwin's Revision of Gide's Sexual Politics." MELUS 22.1(1997): 3-14.

Douglas, Kelly Brown. Sexuality and the Black Church. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1999.

Drukman, Steven. "Why I Want My MTV." In Burston and Colin. 81-95.

Giles, James R. "Religious Alienation and ‘Homosexual Consciousness’ in City of Night and Go Tell It on the Mountain." College English 36.3 (1974): 369-80.

Holy Bible. Gordonsville: Dugan, 1988.

Lawrence, D. H. Women in Love. 1920. New York: Penguin, 1995.

McBride, Dwight A., ed. James Baldwin Now. New York: New York UP, 1999.

Miller, Quentin D., ed. Re-viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2000.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 14-26.

Nelson, Emmanuel S. "The Novels of James Baldwin: Struggle of Self-Acceptance." Journal of American Culture 8.4 (1985): 11-16.

Nelson, James B. Embodiment: An Approach to Sexuality and Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Augsburg P, 1978.

Paris, Arthur E. Black Pentecostalism. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1982.

Raboteau, Albert. A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African American Religious Thought. Boston: Beacon, 1995.

Sanders, Cheryl J. Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture. New York: Oxford, 1996.

Thornton, Jerome E. James Baldwin and the Christian Tradition. Diss. State U of New York at Buffalo, 1976. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1983. 77-3590.

Tinney, James S. "Homosexuality as a Pentecostal Phenomenon." Spirit 1.2 (1977): 45-59.

West, Cornel. Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity. Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1982.

William J. Spurlin (essay date 2006)

SOURCE: Spurlin, William J. "Go Tell It on the Mountain and Cold War Tropes of National Belonging: Homoerotic Desire and the Redeployment of Betrayal under Black Nationalism." In James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain: Historical and Critical Essays, edited by Carol E. Henderson, pp. 29-39. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.

[In the following essay, Spurlin explores Baldwin's treatment of race relations and homosexuality in Go Tell It on the Mountain and assesses the ways in which, through his novel, Baldwin rejected such mandates of the Black Arts movement as the association of power with phallic masculinity.]

In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick reminds us in our analyses of sexual identity not to overlook "how a variety of forms of oppression intertwine systemically with each other; and especially how the person who is disabled through one set of oppressions may by the same positioning be enabled through others" (32). While quoting this groundbreaking text in queer studies fifteen years following its publication might seem a bit dated, queer studies, especially relatively new work on queer diaspora and queer globalization, has begun to interrogate more seriously how some of our understandings of sexual identity are still grounded in essentialism to the extent that race, class, gender, national affiliation, and other ways in which sexuality is socially and publicly mediated are disavowed if gay or lesbian identity is read as a singular site of oppression.¹ Later in the 1990s, and furthering Sedgwick's claim, Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman spoke of the relative weakness with which economic, racial, ethnic, and non-American cultures have been enfolded into queer counterpublicity (215), and Phillip Brian Harper has argued that such work can only be "queer" if it takes into account these constellation of factors "in addition to and in their imbrication with sexual object-choice as it interrogates the function of subjective identification in the socially constitutive activity of public exchange" (25). Yet, in spite of these claims, the study of sexual difference still remains very much ensconced in Foucaudian paradigms of history and culture rooted in (post-)Enlightenment thinking in the West, and we need to ask the extent to which such assumptions remain adequate for the study of sexuality and race as well as for the study of indigenous sexualities marked by a history (and the ongoing effects) of colonialism.

In (re-)reading James Baldwin, and especially through teaching his novels in "another country," the queer edge in his writing and his resistance to all normative ideolo- gies, especially heteronormativity, racism, and other Cold War technologies of violence, become even more apparent, nearly hyperbolic in their significance, given the narrow configurations of race, gender, and sexuality in American cultural and institutional discourses in the 1950s and 1960s. My earlier work on Baldwin focused on situating his early reception within rhetorical practices that extended and manipulated the social and political structures and the material circumstances in which they were embedded at particular historical moments in an effort to examine critically the nexus of cultural lenses that served to interpret black queer identity in the context of the American Cold War political imaginary. In this essay, I shall explore further, with specific reference to Baldwin's first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), how he wrote passionately of racial relations, showing how the white/black opposition only has meaning within a context of racial domination and power, thereby calling uncompromising attention to the gap between American democratic ideals and actual political practices. At the same time, I shall call attention to how the novel is marked by the anxiety and threat of homosexuality under tropes of waywardness, gender dysfunction, and national betrayal in American Cold War discourses of the 1950s, and how these same tropes are redeployed in a new key in the novel's subsequent reception in the Black Power and Black Arts movement in the 1960s, along with Giovanni's Room and Another Country where the treatment of same-sex desire is more overt.

Though Baldwin was committed to the project of constructing alternative and oppositional modes of signification and in restoring racial integrity to the captured African, which would align him somewhat closely with the projects of Addison Gayle, Amiri Baraka, and other New Black Aesthetic critics, Baldwin also struggled in his work to develop an authorial identity that would allow him to speak as a black man without forfeiting his authority on other aspects of lived experience. As Marlon Ross notes, Baldwin attempted "to expand the repertoire of characteristics identified with blackness, not by questioning the integrity of black culture … but by questioning the uniformity of black identity …" (29). Rejecting Black art mandates for work by African-American writers that focused solely on racial struggle and black victimization, quite unlike some strands of identity politics in the US, Baldwin did not see race, sexuality, gender, or other axes of social positioning in parallel relation to one another. Rather, he questioned seriously models of political solidarity and resistance based on one's membership in a particular social group, and was interested in looking at the ways in which a variety of oppressions might intersect and converge within the social field. Baldwin's critique of dichotomous gender roles and heteronormativity, according to Robert Corber, is not only a political resistance to gender oppression and homophobia, but stages the construction of subjectivity along intersecting and mutually inflecting axes of difference in order to critique the patterning of identity by kinship relations along a single axis which often prevented people of color, women, lesbians, gay men, and other disenfranchised groups from overcoming the racist, sexist, and homophobic structures of postwar American society (178). This is also similar to Mae Henderson's critique of the notion of the black tradition; she has argued that the reduction of multiplicity to undifferentiated sameness "has empowered white feminists to speak for all women, black men to speak for all blacks, and white males to speak for everyone" (162).

The cult of phallic masculinity associated with the protest novel (embodied in Wright's Native Son) and praised as exemplary of black literature by Black cultural nationalists, and later by the New Black Aesthetic critics, was rejected by Baldwin as early as 1948 where he criticized Wright for reducing literature to a weapon to fight racism. This rejection of black art mandates is particularly evident in Baldwin's representation of black women as sources of strength and resistance, exemplified, perhaps by Florence and Elizabeth in Go Tell It on the Mountain, with whom the young protagonist, John Grimes, most strongly identifies. While many critics have seen this novel as semi-autobiographical, and even though Baldwin himself has acknowledged that writing the novel was an attempt to deal with his own step-father, a focus on Gabriel's proximity to Baldwin's own step-father has taken attention away from the representation of strong black women in the novel and overrides a potential queer space in Baldwin's early work that disrupts normative gender roles. In fact, it is Florence who wields real power in the novel, indeed the key to the novel's resolution on one level, through the letter she holds from Deborah exposing Gabriel's adultery:

"You done made enough folks pay for sin, it's time you started paying."

"What you think," he [Gabriel] asked, "you going to be able to do—against me?"

"Maybe," she said, "I ain't long for this world, but I got this letter, and I'm sure going to give it to Elizabeth before I go, and if she don't want it, I'm going to find some way … to rise up and tell it, tell everybody, about the blood the Lord's anointed is got on his hands."

"I done told you," he said, "that's all done and finished; the Lord done give me a sign to make me know I been forgiven. What good you think it's going to do to start talking about it now?"

"It'll make Elizabeth to know," she said, "that she ain't the only sinner … in your holy house. And little Johnny, there—he'll know he ain't the only bastard."

          (248)

Florence's independence of mind and her refusal to be intimidated by Gabriel, who has abused and manipulated all of the other women who are close to him, rup- tures the gender dichotomies expected of women not only in the Cold War imaginary, in terms of a deferential role to men, but also in the various black communities in which she is positioned, including her biological family, her earlier marriage, and the black church. She especially exposes the fallacy of conflating truth and goodness with organized religion and, similar to Baldwin himself, the hypocrisy of the black church in justifying and perpetuating phallic masculinity and heteronormative social relations. Speaking of Gabriel and his use of his position as a deacon in the church to justify his authority as a father and husband in the nuclear family, as well as to justify his abuse of other women, including Deborah and Esther, Florence quips: "Being a preacher ain't never stopped a nigger from doing his dirt" (101).

At the same time, Florence seems outside of, or perhaps on the boundaries of, heteronormativity, and quite possibly "queer," given her acknowledgement and critique of heterosexuality as an oppressive regime for women. Advising Elizabeth on the role of black women, Florence comments: "The menfolk, they die, and its over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us" (211). More important, however, Florence's resistance to heteronormativity is evident in her ambivalent desire for her late husband, Frank, which we learn about retrospectively in "Florence's Prayer" in Part Two of the novel, and in her refusal to submit to the gender regimes that privilege phallic masculinity and the subordination of black female desire to the needs of black men, and, by extension, to the collective struggles of blacks in resisting racism.² Complaining of Frank's lack of self-confidence and self-esteem, Florence rebukes him by saying:

"I thought I married a man with some get up and go to him, who didn't just want to stay on the bottom all his life!"

"And what you want me to do, Florence? You want me to turn white?"

This question always filled her with an ecstasy of hatred. She turned and faced him, and, forgetting that there was someone sitting in the parlour shouted:

"You ain't got to be white to have some self-respect!"

          (98; emphasis added)

Yet later that evening, after they have quarreled and Frank returns home drunk, Frank tries to reach out emotionally to Florence, exposing her ambivalence to him and her intense struggle between desire for intimacy on the one hand, and independence of mind and spirit, on the other, the latter of which would be sacrificed if she were to capitulate to his advances:

And, while he spoke, his hand was on her breast, and his moving lips brushed her neck. And this caused such a war in her as could scarcely be endured. She felt that everything in existence between them was part of a mighty plan for her humiliation. She did not want his touch, and yet she did: she burned with longing and froze with rage. And she felt that he knew this and inwardly smiled to see how easily, on this part of the battlefield, his victory could be assured. But at the same time she felt that his tenderness, his passion, and his love were real.

          (99; emphasis added)

But a resistance to phallic masculinity and to heteronormativity not only operates on the axis of gender, but on the axis of sexuality as well, though this is more subtly suggested in the novel beginning with John's refusal to identify with his father and through his close attachment to his mother and to his Aunt Florence. While the cult of phallic masculinity, embodied in John's stepfather Gabriel, nearly destroys his half-brother Roy, and does in fact destroy Royal, it is Florence and Elizabeth who parent and nurture John, even as the trajectory of his desires is directed toward Elisha in the final scene on the church floor. After his "transformation" in the church at the end of the novel, as John feels a wall come down between him and his father, Florence takes John in her arms and says, "You fight the good fight, you hear? Don't you get weary, and don't you get scared. Because I know the Lord's done laid His hands on you" (240). Speaking of his mother earlier in the novel, after she has given him some money for his birthday, John reflects on the ambivalence he feels towards his mother's love for him, "his heart swollen with love for her and with an anguish, not yet his own, that he did not understand and that frightened him" (36). This is later confirmed by Baldwin the narrator, how Elizabeth's "avowal of her love for him lent to John's bewilderment a reality that terrified and a dignity that consoled him" (37). But as this has occurred on John's fourteenth birthday, usually a marker for the beginning of male puberty, and since John has already commented on his "sin" "with his hands … thinking of the boys … a transformation of which he would never dare to speak" (20), he is struggling with the conflict to love his mother, who loves him unconditionally, yet adhere to patriarchal imperatives that demand that he separate from her, while simultaneously struggling with his desires for other boys. Within black phallic masculinity, represented by the protest novel and by the character Gabriel in Go Tell It on the Mountain, and to a greater extent by black cultural nationalism, black women tended to be portrayed, as Joyce Hope Scott observes, either with ambivalence or within a Euroamerican, male dominated framework where they are subordinated to men or repudiated as the "terrible mother" who "emasculates and tyrannizes the black male, depriving him of his opportunity to flourish and grow into a healthy American man" (303-304).

The trope of the terrible, seductive, emasculating black mother does make rhetorical use of clinical work on psychoanalytic understandings of the etiology of homosexuality, which, as I have argued elsewhere, played an influential role on the cultural management of gay identity in the postwar period following the publication of the Kinsey Report in 1948 (Spurlin, "Culture, Rhetoric, and Queer Identity" 107-108). While Cold War discourses in the 1950s conflated homosexuality with communism, positioning it as a threat to national security and on the constitutive "outside" of national belonging, psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourses extended this violently exclusionary gesture, reaching their most homophobic height during this period. This is inscripted socially through the listing of homosexuality in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I; published in 1952 by the American Psychiatric Association) as a sociopathic personality disturbance.³ The APA's position was further buttressed by the publication of a ten-year study by Dr. Irving Bieber on male homosexuality (1952-62),⁴ which presented clinical "evidence" of homosexuality as indicative of sociopathic disturbance and helped further fuel American anxieties about a range of social issues, including not only those pertaining to sexuality, but to race, gender, the family, and national security.

Bieber and his colleagues studied the family constellations of 106 gay male patients as reported in therapy in an effort to shift psychoanalytic attention to early childhood experiences and the child's pre-Oedipal family relations, rather than studying constitutional factors in the development of homosexuality which Freud clearly indicated were important to consider as well (Freud 6-7, 11-12n). It was Bieber's study that promulgated the view that a high proportion of gay men had "close-binding mothers" who demasculinized their sons and thwarted the development of their heterosexual drives and had cold, detached, or hostile fathers (79-80; 310).⁵ Psychoanalysis, especially in the context of the Bieber study, far from being a separate clinical domain, is deeply imbricated with political and social beliefs and practices and became part of the larger social apparatus of detection and surveillance of gay people, in addition to providing the discursive strategies to expose them, within the American postwar political imaginary. Yet, in considering Scott's comment cited earlier, it is evident that the trope of the close-binding mother as a possible source of homosexuality did find itself re-worked into the management of black women a decade later as the Black Power movement gained momentum. Supporting a position of homosexuality as "un-African" and showing complicity with psychoanalytic work predisposed to pathology in its studies of the etiology of homosexuality, Molefi Kete Asante, writes as late as 1980 that "homosexuality is a deviation from Afrocentric thought because it makes the person evaluate his own physical needs above the teachings of national consciousness" (64), and argues that raising children Afrocentrically will give them "healthy self concepts" and teach the male child "that his manhood is attached to a mind working on important questions" (65). Not only is there a normativization of race, gender, and sexuality at work here, and a privileging of masculinity and hint of betrayal implied for those who do not conform to these normativities, there is similarly a normativization of the family and child-rearing practices as a means of serving broader political or national interests, in addition to an overall strategy of exclusion toward those marked as different which relegates them to the constitutive outside of these various modes of social affiliation.

With the redeployment of the rigid gender and sexual norms of the Cold War into Black cultural nationalism a decade later, Go Tell It on the Mountain would form part of a critical corpus of work by Baldwin that contributed to his failure to achieve the same stature of other black leaders (such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and others), even after the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963, one of the most provocative treatises on American racial relations at the time that put Baldwin on the lecture circuit and on the cover of Time on May 17, 1963. Homosexuality would once again be read through the trope of national betrayal because Baldwin and his work did not fit the image of (straight) black male virility many in the Black Power movement wished to see projected as mode of resistance to racism. Eldridge Cleaver, in spite of his embrace of the politics of black struggle, makes rhetorical use of Cold War tropes of betrayal and psychoanalytic tropes of gender abjection to read homosexuality. In his (in)famous essay "Notes on a Native Son," Cleaver saw Baldwin's homosexuality and the representation of same-sex desire in his work as an attack on a "natural" black masculinity, a rejection of Africa, and an assertion of gay superiority (109-110). His feminization of Baldwin reaches its most outrageous climax when he declares that in their sickness, gay black men are in the position of "bending over and touching their toes for the white man," a sickness which he says causes them to uncontrollably "redouble their efforts and intake of the white man's sperm" (102). Not only does Cleaver blatantly ignore the wide range of possible roles gay women and men may play sexually (all of which are obviously not reducible to the "bottom" role and may vary between and within specific erotic acts), he continues to speak of Baldwin's character Rufus Scott in Another Country as "a pathetic wretch … who let a white bisexual homosexual fuck him in his ass" (107). Yet regardless of the race of the penetrator in gay male sexual relations (and Cleaver's ignorance of the finer points of gay male sex!), the point is that Cleaver and others in the US Black Power movement in the 1960s saw homosexuality among blacks as a form of ideological penetration by whites, that is, as introduced into black culture and inherently foreign to it. In reproduc- ing psychoanalytic constructions of homosexuality, and its master tropes of gender dysfunction and gender dysphoria as the cause and the marker for homosexuality prior to the APA's historic 1973 decision to delete homosexuality as a diagnostic category from the DSM, Cleaver's feminization of Baldwin and his "attribution of a damaged, failed, or otherwise abject gender" (Butler 238) to gay black men raises for speculation whether it was he or Baldwin who was more eager for the "fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love [and acceptance] of the whites" (Cleaver 99; brackets mine).

Henry Louis Gates has similarly remarked that black national identity became sexualized in the 1960s in such a way as to engender a curious relation between homophobia and black nationalism (234), and this did have an effect, I believe, on Baldwin's subsequent literary reputation as a black writer and as a potential black leader. Baldwin's cultural resistance (and therefore a site of potential power given the attention he received as a writer at the time and the rising momentum of the civil rights movement) was regarded, in the context of the early sixties and the rhetorical strategies used to represent him as homosexual, as an assault on dominant cultural practices, on his African heritage, and as way of "exhibiting himself" for profit and prestige in the white world at the expense of racial struggle and responsible social action. Yet Baldwin's first novel is a defiantly queer act of resistance to homophobic Cold War constructions of the terrifying:

In the narrow way, the way of the cross, there awaited him only humiliation forever; there awaited him, one day, a house like his father's house, and a church like his father's, and a job like his father's, where he would grow old and black with hunger and toil…. [B]ut here, where the buildings contested God's power and where the men and women did not fear God, here he might eat and drink to his heart's content and clothe his body with wondrous fabrics, rich to the eye and pleasing to the touch…. [He] then began to run down the hill, feeling himself fly as the descent became more rapid, and thinking: "I can climb back up. If it's wrong, I can always climb back up."

          (39)

John's refusal to separate from strong women such as Elizabeth and his Aunt Florence, his rejection of Gabriel (and phallic masculinity), and his acknowledgment of his desire for other boys defy Cold War psychoanalytic tropes of heterosexuality as the apex of psychological health and would also defy the later reinscription of those same politically defiant, but transformative as well. His identification with Elisha, a different kind of identification with masculinity and the male body, occurs in the church, in the place of bodily prohibitions; in fact, one could easily argue that the church eroticizes desire, so that John's "conversion" at the end of the novel is both spiritual and (homo)erotic insofar as his desire refuses to be domesticated or tamed or "cured": "In his heart there was a sudden yearning tenderness for holy Elisha; desire, sharp and awful as a reflecting knife, to usurp the body of Elisha, and lie where Elisha lay; to speak in tongues, as Elisha spoke, and, with that authority, to confound his father" (225). Here, the psychoanalytic trope of castration seems reversed through a splitting, that is, through an act of homosexual agency marked by a refusal to separate from the mother and female caretakers, a cutting away from the father, and a simultaneous (re-) visionary move toward another grid of masculine identification and system of meaning-wherein homoerotic desire operates as a site of personal and social transformation in a world ravaged by Cold War anxiety, racism, gender oppression, and homophobia.

Notes

This essay was originally a paper given at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association in 2002 in a session sponsored by the Division on Black American Literature and Culture entitled "James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and the Cultural Politics of the Cold War." I am grateful to the session organizer, Mae Henderson, for inviting me to be part of that panel and for the opportunity that the discussion allowed for me to revise many of the ideas in the present essay. I am also grateful to Carol E. Henderson for the privilege of participating in this special commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Baldwin's Go Tell It On the Mountain and for her insightful comments and suggestions for this essay.

1. I am referring here to a critical distinction between "gay and lesbian" and "queer." I use the term "queer" to denote an oppositional praxis which operates against normalizing ideologies in general (such as those pertaining to race, gender, class, nationalism, etc) in addition to those pertaining to sexuality. The use of the term also helps resist, as Phillip Brian Harper notes, the idea of sexual identity "as a primary identificatory principle, uninflected by the pressures of other subjectivizing factors" (26). While "gay and lesbian" can be used interchangeably with "queer," and indeed, often is, the former terms usually refer to the politics of sexual difference alone, that is, as Teresa de Lauretis observes, to same-sex desire as transgressive against a "proper" natural (hetero-)sexuality (iii). In this essay, and in my other work on Baldwin, I argue that Baldwin's textual representations of same-sex desire are far more queer than gay, and certainly supportive of the viability of Sedgwick's claim. For further discussion of this point within the context of an analysis of Baldwin's Another Country, see Spurlin "Culture, Rhetoric, and Queer Identity: James Baldwin and the Identity Politics of Race and Sexuality," especially pages 110-111.

2. Concerning Florence's refusal to submit to phallic masculinity, which is, in part, a (queer) resistance to heteronormativity as well, it is also important to note that quite possibly this resistance is connected to the way in which she was raised by her mother who privileged her brother Gabriel simply because he was male. In "Florence's Prayer," which is written from the viewpoint of Florence, Baldwin writes: "Gabriel was the apple of his mother's eye. If he had never been born, Florence might have looked forward to a day when she would be released from her unrewarding round of labour, when she might think of her own future and go out to make it. With the birth of Gabriel, which occurred when she was five, her future was swallowed up. There was only one future in that house, and it was Gabriel's—to which, since Gabriel was a man-child, all else must be sacrificed" (Go Tell It On the Mountain 81-82).

3. There were subsequent revisions to the APA's position on homosexuality following that in the first edition. The DSM-II (1968) still considered homosexuality to be indicative of psychopathology, but removed it from the category of sociopathic disturbance, listing it instead under "sexual deviations" alongside fetishism, pedophilia, transvestism, exhibitionism, etc. In 1973, the APA voted to remove homosexuality as a diagnostic category from the DSM; the DSM-III (1980) retained "ego-dystonic homosexuality" which was reserved for individuals who were distressed by homosexual arousal and desired to acquire or increase heterosexual arousal. The revised edition of the DSM-III, or DSM-III-R (1987), deleted ego-dystonic homosexuality as well. The current edition, DSM-IV (1994), also contains no entry for homosexuality; yet what is often overlooked is the insertion of a new diagnostic category in the DSM-III in 1980 "Gender Identity Disorder in Childhood," or GIDC, which often is used to diagnose and "treat" gender-atypical children, especially boys, to prevent gay outcome. This entire history of the APA's position on homosexuality is indicative of how clinical evidence is always already socially and culturally mediated. For further discussion, as well as for clinical sources related to the historically variant psychiatric views on homosexuality through the different editions of the DSM, and for clinical sources on GIDC, see my essay "Sissies and Sisters."

4. The 1962 study, Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals, now out of print, was republished in its entirety in 1988 (only with a new Foreword added) under a revised title Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study by the same team of co-authors who were also the original researchers in the 1962 study. All references in my text are to the 1988 edition of the 1962 study.

5. It is interesting to note that Bieber's views on homosexuality as indicative of psychopathology were also promulgated in the popular media in the early 1960s. For example, in a special issue of Life magazine in 1964, entitled "Homosexuality in America," Bieber is cited as a medical expert on homosexuality, saying that the use of the word "gay" by homosexuals "is only a flippant and rather pathetic attempt to cover up deep and chronic feelings of pathological depression" (Havemann78).

Works Cited

Asante, Molefi Kete. Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change. Buffalo: Amulefi. 1980.

Baldwin, James. Another Country. New York: Vintage, 1962.

———. The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage, 1963.

———. Giovanni's Room. New York: Dell Publishing, 1956.

———. Go Tell It On the Mountain. 1953. London: Penguin, 1954.

Berlant, Lauren and Elizabeth Freeman. "Queer Nationality." Warner 193-229.

Bieber, Irving, et al. Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1988. Rpt. from Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals. New York: Basic Books, 1962.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge, 1993.

Cleaver, Eldridge. "Notes on a Native Son." Soul on Ice. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. 97-111.

Corber, Robert J. Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

De Lauretis, Teresa. "Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities." differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3.2 (1991): iii-xviii.

Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1962.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "The Black Man's Burden." Warner 230-238.

Harper, Phillip Brian. "Gay Male Identities, Personal Privacy, and Relations of Public Exchange: Notes on Directions for Queer Critique." Social Text 15.3-4 (1997): 5-29.

Havemann, Ernest. "Why?: Scientists Search for the Answers to a Touchy and Puzzling Question." Special feature "Homosexuality in America." Life. June 26, 1964. 76-80.

Henderson, Mae G. Response to "There Is No More Beautiful Way: Theory and the Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing" by Houston A. Baker, Jr. Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s. Eds. Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Patricia Redmond. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989. 155-163.

McBride, Dwight A., ed. James Baldwin Now. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Ross, Marlon B. "White Fantasies of Desire: Baldwin and the Racial Identities of Sexuality." McBride 13-55.

Scott, Joyce Hope. "From Foreground to Margin: Female Configurations and Masculine Self-Representation in Black Nationalist Fiction." Nationalisms and Sexualities. Eds. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger. New York: Routledge, 1992. 296-312.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Spurlin, William J. "Culture, Rhetoric, and Queer Identity: James Baldwin and the Identity Politics of Race and Sexuality." McBride 103-121.

———. "Sissies and Sisters: Gender, Sexuality and the Possibilities of Coalition." Coming Out of Feminism? Eds. Mandy Merck, Naomi Segal, and Elizabeth Wright. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. 74-101.

Warner, Michael, ed. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

FURTHER READING

Feldman, Susan. "Another Look at Another Country." In Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen, pp. 88-104. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

Studies Baldwin's portrayal of love and sexuality in Another Country and argues that the depiction Baldwin offers is an attempt to demonstrate the connection between the repression of homosexual desire and the oppression of African Americans.

Miller, Elise. "The ‘Maw of Western Culture’: James Baldwin and the Anxieties of Influence." African American Review 38, no. 4 (2004): 625-36.

Offers an analysis of Baldwin's autobiographical Notes of a Native Son, focusing in particular on his comments regarding his literary influences.

O'Hara, Daniel T. "Toward Global Democracy: James Baldwin and the Stoic Vision of Amor Fati." Boundary 2, 33, no. 3 (fall 2006): 61-72.

Uses Baldwin's play Blues for Mister Charlie and other works as a means of explaining how Stoicism could be an effective path by which the United States could establish its role in a global democracy.

Additional coverage of Baldwin's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale: African-American Writers, Eds. 1, 2; American Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 2; American Writers Supplement, Vol. 1; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vols. 4, 34; Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography and Resources, Vol. 1; Black Literature Criticism, Ed. 1:1; Black Writers, Ed. 1; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, Vol. 1941-1968; Concise Major 21st-Century Writers, Ed. 1; Contemporary American Dramatists; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 1-4R; Contemporary Authors—Obituary, Vol. 124; Contemporary Authors Bibliographical Series, Vol. 1; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 3, 24; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 13, 15, 17, 42, 50, 67, 90, 127; Contemporary Novelists, Eds. 1, 2, 3, 4; Contemporary Popular Writers; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 2, 7, 33, 249, 278; Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, Ed. 1987; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules, Eds. MST, MULT, NOV, POP; Drama Criticism, Vol. 1; Drama for Students, Vols. 11, 15; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Exploring Short Stories; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 5; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Major 21st-Century Writers (eBook), Ed. 2005; Modern American Literature, Ed. 5; Nonfiction Classics for Students, Vol. 4; Novels for Students, Vol. 4; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 2, 18; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 10, 33; Something about the Author, Vol. 9; Something about the Author—Obituary, Vol. 54; Twayne's United States Authors; and World Literature Criticism, Vol. 1.