Giovanni's Room

Giovanni’s Room was written in 1956 and owning the Dell Paperback 1964 edition provides a looking glass not only into the world as it once was for gay men but also what it meant to be an adolescent, necessarily closeted, homosexual. Fortunately it was a moving story written by a gifted and sensitive man.

James Baldwin wrote the story but did not speak literally to the black experience, but rather he spoke of a young white expatriate struggling with his sexuality. David, the narrator finds himself in Paris of the 1950s. It is a France, a Europe struggling with the new postwar American arrogance. It is, as always, a love/hate relationship. It is reciprocal.

David comes from McCarthy’s United States of Xenophobia, but boiling right underneath it is James Dean sensual, rebellious America on the verge of bursting forth with the Rock’n’Roll Era. An America it might be said on the verge of dealing openly with its sensual dark side.

David already traumatized by a teenage experience which started out beautifully enough that ended with both externalized and internalized homophobia meets Giovanni, a bartender.

Giovanni, if you will, is the Negro of the piece. He is a Southern Italian already an object of derision in France and Europe. In Giovanni David confronts himself and Giovanni already dealing with his own history, finds himself a part of David’s personal nightmare. Hence the reciprocal love/hate: America/Europe, Wasp/Mediterranean, Black/White and Gay/Straight.

Baldwin’s novel is laced with speeches and scenes that describe the anxiety of the time but point to the joy and beauty that can be. It is an engagingly beautiful and melancholy story.

Giovanni is eventually sent to the guillotine. Yes, France in the 60s, had capital punishment but ti wasn't ostensibly for his sexuality but an accusation of murder. Much is made throughout the novel, especially in Giovanni’s speeches about privacy and respecting what people do between each other. It is David’s reflection that is read as the time approaches.

David’s older friend Jacques was the man who introduced the two. His advice to David is the most telling and puts it all in perspective:

‘I don’t understand him,’ I said at last. ‘I don’t know what his friendship means; I don’t know what he means by friendship.’

Jacques laughed. ‘You don’t know what he means by friendship but you have the feeling it may not be safe. You are afraid it may change you. What kind of friendship have you had?’

I said nothing.

‘Or for that matter,’ he continued, ‘what kind of love affairs?’

I was silent for so long that he teased me, saying, ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’

And I grinned feeling chilled.

‘Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at best, can it last? Since you are both men and have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, helas! In the dark. And if you think of them as dirty , then they will be dirty – they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, and you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better – forever – if you will not be ashamed, if you only not play it safe.’ He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. ‘You play it safe long enough,’ he said, in a different tone, ‘and you will end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever – like me.’ And he finished his cognac …


Now that much is being made about Brokeback Mountain, one can only wonder what happened to Merchant Ivory’s project for Giovanni’s Room, a worthy subject for filming. James Baldwin was a consummate painter of humanity. The experience painted in David’s world was almost a half century ago. It resonates today.