'Giovanni's Room'

James Baldwin had the double whammy: Gay and black.

He moved to Paris in 1948 in order to divorce himself from the segregation and racism, especially in the American south. Still, he was primed to further alienate everyone with his blatant homosexuality and the way it envelopes his writing.

Baldwin being black further perplexes the fact that the characters in his second novel, Giovanni's Room, are all white. Although they're extremely gay.

What really must have kicked Baldwin in the nuts is that he was going to alienate all white people because of his race and sexual orientation. He was going to alienate the blacks with his sexual orientation. He was perpetually a man without a home and a man without a people. That had to be frustrating.

This alienation (him from everyone else, going both ways) bleeds through his stories.

However, Baldwin had it right. It's what makes him good. He took relationships -- whether homo- or heterosexual -- and turned them into emotional typhoons destroying everything in their paths. He wasn't in any way bias toward one orientation or another. He knew both could get pretty fucked up because people are pretty fucked up. He also knew that no matter who you like to be with or what color their skin is, these raw emotions are always the same.