Influential LGBT+ People From History: James Baldwin
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Regarded as one of the greatest 20th Century writers, James Baldwin explored topics of race, social issues, and being black and gay in America. His first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1953 was a loosely autobiographical story based on his own father and religious identity. "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else. I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal, above all, with my father," he later said.
His next novel, Giovanni’s Room, depicted the-then taboo subject of homosexuality with a deft complexity. He did this as well in his 1978 novel Just Above My Head.
Baldwin was open about his relationships with both men and women, believing sexuality was fluid and rigid sexual categories were limiting. When asked in a 1969 interview if being gay was an aberration he shrugged it off: "If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy.”
It was his essays, however, that established Baldwin has one of the prominent writers of his time. His works Notes of a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name explored the black experience in America and became bestsellers. Nobody Knows My Name sold over a million copies.
His next collection of essays The Fire Next Time offered a brutal depiction of race meant to educate white Americans. While frank and unflinching, he also remained optimistic: "If we...do not falter in our duty now, we may be able...to end the racial nightmare.”
The Fire Next Time also sold more than a million copies.
"There is not another writer—white or black—who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South," Time magazine wrote about Baldwin in 1963.
Baldwin claimed he never wanted to be a spokesperson or a leader, instead, he viewed himself as “bearing witness to the truth”. A goal he accomplished with his lasting and iconic literary legacy.
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