James Baldwin & Lucien Happersberger
Most of Baldwin's work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century in the United States. His novels are notable for the personal way in which they explore questions of identity as well as the way in which they mine complex social and psychological pressures related to being black and homosexual well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups was improved.
When Baldwin was an infant, his mother, Emma Berdis Joynes, moved to Harlem, New York, where she married a preacher, David Baldwin, who adopted James. The family was poor, and James and his adoptive father had a tumultuous relationship. James Baldwin attended the prestigious DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he worked on the school magazine together with Richard Avedon. At the age of 14, he joined the Pentecostal Church and became a Pentecostal preacher.
When he was 17 years old, Baldwin turned away from his religion and moved to Greenwich Village, a New York City neighborhood, famous for its artists and writers. Here, he studied at The New School, finding an intellectual community within the university. Supporting himself with odd jobs, he began to write short stories, essays, and book reviews, many of which were later collected in the volume Notes of a Native Son (1955).
James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist and civil rights activist. In 1949, Baldwin fell in love with Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger, age 17, eight years younger than Baldwin. The two became very close, until Happersberger's marriage three years later, an event that left Baldwin devastated, but they remained close friend until 1987, the year Baldwin died. The wife was Afro-American Diana Sands. They divorced and Happersberger died in 2010.
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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin
A journalist once remarked to James Baldwin, "When you were starting out as a writer you were black, impoverished, homosexual. You must have said to yourself, "Gee, how disadvantaged can I get?"
"No", the novelist replied. "I felt I'd hit the jackpot".
(...)
James Baldwin described his own homosexuality with frankness and ambivalence in Giovanni's Room, the novel he published in 1956. The book came out of "something which tormented and frightened me: the question of my own sexuality", Baldwin explained many years later. One reason he wrote it was to eliminate the nagging problem that other closeted writers faced in the fifties. Baldwin said the book "simplified" his life because it "meant that I had no secrets. You couldn' blackmail me. You didn't tell me, I told you".
Coming out of the closet gave Baldwin the freedom the thousands of his contemporaries would not experience until they emulated him two, three, or four decades later. Of course, thousands of others would never emulate him at all. "It's only the twentieth century which is obsessed with the details of somebody's sex life", Baldwin said on another occasion. "I don't think the details make any difference. Love comes in very strange packages. I love a few men and I love a few women. I suppose it's saved my life".
Alfred A. Knopf had published Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, in 1953. A semiautobiographical account of a poor boy growing up in Harlem during the 1930s, the book was a critical success. "I'd been a boy preacher for three years", said Baldwin. "That is what turned me into a writer really... My father frightened me so badly I had to fight him so hard, nobody has ever frightened me since".
But when he submitted Giovanni's Room a couple of years after his first big success, Knopf rejected it. "I guess they were scared", said William Cole, who was Knopf's publicity director - and the first person to bring Baldwin to the publisher's attention. "Homosexuality wasn't on the books in those days and they turned it down", Cole recalled. When he learned the young author's second novel had been rejected, Cole was "horrified". --The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America by Charles Kaiser
James Baldwin's 1955 Giovanni's Room and 1962 Another Country dealt with the complicated intersections of sexuality and race through homosexual characters. As early as 1949, in his essay "The Preservation of Innocence", Baldwin directly connected heterosexual hostility toward homosexuals to white hostility toward African Americans. He saw both as a failure of the imagination to connect fully with one's own humanity. He explores this idea in his 1963 The Fire Next Time: "White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be towmorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed". Historian John Howard charts how interracial homosexual relationships, sometimes less obvious than heterosexual ones, were often the way that white men became involved in the civil rights movement. --A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski
Paperback: 760 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 1 edition (July 1, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1500563323
ISBN-13: 978-1500563325
CreateSpace Store: https://www.createspace.com/4910282
Amazon (Paperback): http://www.amazon.com/dp/1500563323/?tag=e
Amazon (Kindle): http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MZG0VHY/?tag=e
Days of Love chronicles more than 700 LGBT couples throughout history, spanning 2000 years from Alexander the Great to the most recent winner of a Lambda Literary Award. Many of the contemporary couples share their stories on how they met and fell in love, as well as photos from when they married or of their families. Included are professional portraits by Robert Giard and Stathis Orphanos, paintings by John Singer Sargent and Giovanni Boldini, and photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnson, Arnold Genthe, and Carl Van Vechten among others. “It's wonderful. Laying it out chronologically is inspired, offering a solid GLBT history. I kept learning things. I love the decision to include couples broken by death. It makes clear how important love is, as well as showing what people have been through. The layout and photos look terrific.” Christopher Bram “I couldn’t resist clicking through every page. I never realized the scope of the book would cover centuries! I know that it will be hugely validating to young, newly-emerging LGBT kids and be reassured that they really can have a secure, respected place in the world as their futures unfold.” Howard Cruse “This international history-and-photo book, featuring 100s of detailed bios of some of the most forward-moving gay persons in history, is sure to be one of those bestsellers that gay folk will enjoy for years to come as reference and research that is filled with facts and fun.” Jack Fritscher
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