Homosexuality In Giovanni's Room By James Baldwin

The novel Giovanni’s Room, written by James Baldwin in 1956, is a compelling novel about the life of a young American man named David, who often has a hard time accepting himself has homosexual. He does everything in his power to try to prove to the world that he is a straight American man. Despite how David used to deny that he was homosexual, at the end of the novel he comes to terms with his homosexuality and accepts it a fact. David’s denial of his homosexuality is first seen when he was a teenager. For example, after he had his first sexual encounter with a boy named Joey, he felt ashamed, confused and guilty. For example, he admits, “I was afraid. I could have cried, cried for shame and terror, cried for not understanding how this

He describes his guilt when he admits, “But, above all, I was suddenly afraid. It was borne on me: But Joey is a boy” (9). This realization in David, made everything he just did with Joey become real. He felt an immediate guilt for having slept with a boy, he then went into denial and pretended like nothing ever happened between him and Joey. For instance, David describes how he never went to see Joey anymore and when he finally ran into him at the end of the summer, he says, “I made up a long and totally untrue story about a girl I was going with and when school began I picked up with rougher, older crowd and was very nasty to Joey” (10). In this regard, David couldn’t even face Joey because of how ashamed he was. He projects his anger about himself on Joey to make him feel better about himself. By telling Joey that he had been seeing a girl, it makes him seem like a straight man and he asserts that Joey was never anything to him, especially by the way he acts towards him. Later in the novel in regards to the decision he made after being in Joeys bed, he reveals, “I

The reasoning why he denies his sexuality to his father is because David feels that him being gay would be an enormous burden to his father. This could be because at a young age, David’s mother passed away and David’s father was left to raise David on his own and he does not want his dad to put the blame on himself if it were to be revealed that David was gay. For example, after his encounter with Joey, David says, “Then I thought of my father, who had no one in the world but me…”(9). David did not want to disappoint his father whatsoever because he was only person he had. David later explains his relationship with his father when