I told him quite a long, long time ago there would be two of us at the Mercy Seat. I would have to live the life he had made me to live. It was really a matter between me and God. Even when I began to realize things about myself, began to suspect who I was and what I was likely to become, it was still very personal, absolutely personal. The only one I had was homosexual and that didn’t quite cover whatever it was I was beginning to feel. You never thought of yourself as being gay? I didn’t understand the necessity of all the role playing. Even in my early years in the Village, what I saw of that world absolutely frightened me, bewildered me. I simply feel it’s a world that has little to do with me, with where I did my growing up.
I don’t want to sound distant or patronizing because I don’t really feel that. I never understood exactly what is meant by it. The word gay has always rubbed me the wrong way.
Goldstein: Do you feel like a stranger in gay America?īaldwin: Well, first of all I feel like a stranger in America from almost every conceivable angle except, oddly enough, as a black person. Titled “Go the Way Your Blood Beats,” the entire interview, from the June 26, 1984, issue, is below. The alternative was worse.… If I hadn’t written that book I would probably have had to stop writing altogether.”
At one point Goldstein notes that writing openly about homosexuality in the 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room was “enormously risky,” to which the novelist, playwright, and social commentator replied, “Yeah. The Voice commemorated the fifteenth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising with a special section exploring “The Future of Gay Life.” For the lead feature, senior editor Richard Goldstein interviewed James Baldwin about his experiences as a gay, black writer in America.
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