Homosexuality wasn’t a comprehensible concept to me as a kid. My culture laughingly mocked the LGBTQ+ community and the religion I was born into might stone them to death (if caught). As a kid, I saw them all as transgenders and laughed along with other boys. Even a shred of femininity would warrant seemingly harmless jokes and pranks that now seem to me way too cruel. To the targeted person(s). To humanity. Manhood was something you guard with your life. You can't cry. You can't seem down. Can't express your feelings. These are unmanly. Aren’t you a man? Suck it up.

As an adult, I haven’t been very faithful to that upbringing of mine. No, actually I went 180 degrees on it. I fervently support the LGBTQ+ community and their right to love and choose partners. But supporting someone's cause and feeling for it are two very different concepts. As a heterosexual male, I cannot always grasp the feeling of love among the same sexes. I know it's there. Again, knowing isn't everything.

But I've found that passion, that sense of yearning and regret and joy and sorrow in Giovanni's Room—a classic novel written by James Baldwin in the ‘50s. It's about an American bisexual man and his struggle to find his sexual identity when he was roaming in France. France then had a more welcoming society that didn't actively try to be vindictive.

A good joke turns into a dull mockery of it in the wrong hands—or mouth in this case. Stories become elegant and meaningful once told in a beautiful way. I've often found that the story itself doesn't make much a dent to sway myself in its favor. I got pursued more often by the author's personality manifested through the text and how they treat their characters and scenes, interwoven within the story.

The protagonist of this book found out his conflicting sexuality at an early age. Shocked at his budding lust for another boy got him thoroughly perplexed and resulted in complete denial.

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”

Even though he had a troubled childhood, his "normality" wasn't challenged a long time, until he met Giovanni, a pretty Italian young man in a gay bar of Paris many years later.

David is living in Paris. His girlfriend, Hella, will return from Spain soon. He proposed to her and she wanted some time alone to find 'herself' before she answers.
Meeting Giovanni alters the events drastically. It opens the door David had shut so many years ago. His fascination with Giovanni, falling in love with him and being unsure whether it is infatuation or love and the ever-growing tension anent his girlfriend’s return make the plot of the story.

James Baldwin explores the corners of sexual orientation and the frustration and its impact on the psychology in Giovanni’s room. The novel is written from a first-person perspective. We see the story through David’s eyes. We are submerged in his stream of consciousness. His regret, his true feelings are bared open. I’ve taken an interest to this character. He’s a blond, young man who sees others in a cynical light. David describes one of his friends as -

“Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.”

When this book was written, most of the world’s cultures weren’t really embracing LGBTQ+ theme with open arms. I can only imagine how important it was for someone in the same shoes as David.

Loved reading Giovanni’s Room. It made me realize once again, I don’t have to be able to relate to the subject as long as it is written well. I also realized I only need my humanity to feel a man’s feelings for another—not as a hetero-male but as a human being.

Let me finish with a quote I absolutely loved.

“It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”

Thanks for stopping by. :)