- Victoria A. Brownworth
Black History Month: James Baldwin
February 16, 2022 Philadelphia Gay News

Illustration by Ash Cheshire
James Baldwin, one of the most famous gay writers in America, said “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
Quotes from Baldwin are endemic — particularly now as liberal white America struggles to wake up yet again to Black oppression and systemic racism. But for many, Baldwin’s explosive language about racism and his unflinching discourse on the politics of race are as unsettling in 2022 as they were in the 1950s and 1960s, when Baldwin’s writing was first published for a wide audience in the U.S. Reading and reciting Baldwin’s quotes is less harsh than reading his excoriating essays on why he had to flee the U.S. for Paris and an expatriate life at the age of 24 in 1948.
Born to a young single mother in Harlem, New York, Baldwin never knew who his birth father was. When Baldwin was a toddler, his mother, Emma, married a much older man, David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher who raised James as his own. Emma had eight children with David.
James Baldwin’s early life was defined in part by opposition to his stepfather, who hated white people and hated James’s intellectuality as well as James’s white friends. Biographers of
Baldwin state that the relationship was fraught and that it came close to physical violence. And while James referenced David as “father” in his writing, there was no fealty in that relationship. James would find that later in relationships with his early male mentors, including Black painter Beauford Delaney and author Richard Wright, to whom he was compared by critics.
Baldwin’s early years were filled with poverty, discrimination and conflict. As the oldest child he left school early to help support the family, but it was grueling labor and no job lasted very long. He experienced racism at every level of his life and credits a white teacher and mentor, Bill Miller, as the reason he “never really managed to hate white people.”
It was while still a student that Baldwin would begin to thrive as a writer, first under Miller’s tutelage and later under that of Bill Porter, a Black teacher at Harlem’s Frederick Douglass Junior High School. At that school, Baldwin was first published in the newspaper. At the prestigious DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, Baldwin became immersed in the school’s magazine, The Magpie, on which he worked with fellow student, Richard Avedon.
Baldwin wrote constantly after that, and it was his driving ambition to be a writer, finally finding the connections he needed to do so in Greenwich Village. There he socialized with the white literati at left-leaning publications like The Nation and Partisan Review, and it was then that Baldwin began to be published regularly. In his essay, “The Preservation of Innocence,” Baldwin deconstructs violence against homosexuals in American society as an element of American society’s failure to mature on issues of sexuality and masculinity — what he termed “the protracted adolescence of America as a society.”
From his earliest junior high years, Baldwin was having relationships with other males, and in his twenties he had a succession of brief liaisons and a longer relationship with Eugene Worth. He had also had strong attractions to some men with whom he became friends, not lovers, like Marlon Brando. But it wasn’t until he moved to Paris and met Lucien Happersberger, a young painter with whom he fell deeply, and biographers say, obsessively, in love, that Baldwin was fully and comfortably out as a gay man. Happersberger was 17, Baldwin 25. The relationship lasted three years until Happersberger married, and it took some years for Baldwin to rekindle the friendship.
Baldwin wrote provocatively about men in his essays and novels and is widely credited with bringing a strong neo-realism to the depiction of gay and bisexual men in his fiction. But critics of his work at the time were uncomfortable with homosexuality, and that criticism devalues the relationships between and among the men in Baldwin’s novels, most notably “Go Tell It On the Mountain” (1953), “Giovanni’s Room” (1956), “Another Country” (1962), and “Just Above My Head” (1979). As Baldwin wrote: “Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” And even more provocatively, as a man whose great loves were white men, “Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.”
