Born On This Day- August 2nd... James Baldwin

"Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, & this was an immutable law."

The very first "gay" book I ever read was James Baldwin's GIOVANNI'S ROOM (1956) & at 15 years old, & the tragic story did not lift my spirits. I was reading everything I could that dealt with homosexuality or by a homosexual, & the message I was getting was not positive. I had already decided at 15, that my life was not going to be tragic because I was gay. Still, I found the novel to be erotic & well written. I continued to follow James Baldwin's life & work through his exile in Europe, reading his novels, poems & essays. When he returned to the USA & was active in the civil rights movements of the 1960s & 1970s, I still admired his work & had my eyes opened by his words.

Born in 1924, he had a life of extreme hardship, growing up illegitimate & very poor in Harlem, Having his work rejected by publishers (black & Homo!), & harassed by the FBI (he had a 1750 page file on his activities). After the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 & drawbacks in civil-rights movement, Baldwin started bitterly to acknowledge that violence may be the only route to racial justice. Some optimism about peaceful progress would later return, but in the early 1970s he also suffered from writer's block. Baldwin: "Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent, which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it."

In 1983 Baldwin became a professor in the African-American Studies department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He spent his last years in St. Paul de Vence on the Riviera, France, where he died of stomach cancer on November 30, 1987.

James Campbell said in the NY Times Book Review: "All the aspects of Baldwin’s character are exposed … He was magnetic, compulsively sociable, elaborately extrovert, darkly introverted, depressive, magnificently generous, self-absorbed, self-dramatizing, funny, furious, bubbling with good intentions, seldom hesitating over a breach of promise – capable of exhibiting all these traits between lunch & dinner, & between dinner & the last whisky at 4 am."