🏳️‍🌈🏺 Baldwin (Harlem Legacy)

🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

“I lay and held him, all night long, his body hard against mine, and I knew that this was all I wanted.” — Giovanni’s Room

James Baldwin was a brilliant queer Black writer, activist, and public intellectual whose work bridged the artistic legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights era. Growing up in Harlem just after the Renaissance’s peak, Baldwin absorbed its queer-affirming undercurrent—mentored by painter Beauford Delaney, whose openness about his sexuality and art deeply shaped Baldwin’s vision of liberation for both Black and queer people.

In 1956, Baldwin published his second novel, the explicitly queer Giovanni’s Room. His first, Go Tell It on the Mountain, had drawn heavily on his abusive upbringing in a Black church. Giovanni’s Room was inspired in part by Baldwin’s relationship with his Swiss lover Lucien Happersberger, whom he met when he expatriated to Paris in his 20s to escape the insidious racism he feared would harden him. Baldwin subverted early expectations that he would write only “race novels,” insisting instead on centering his queer experience by making all the characters white.

Baldwin’s life was, in fact, a balancing act between his queerness, his Blackness, and his activism. While he often critiqued the church as destructive to queer people, he often used its rhetoric. He debated Robert F. Kennedy, worked alongside MLK. and Malcolm X, and confrontedAmerica’s failings in interviews and essays like The Fire Next Time. He befriended queer contemporaries Lorraine Hansberry and Bayard Rustin, who—like Baldwin himself—were often sidelined within the Civil Rights movement for challenging its narrow, religiously moral presentation.

Although many of Baldwin’s novels explore queer desire—Another Country and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone being standouts—it is in Just Above My Head that Baldwin openly wrestles with the tension between Black queer identity and the church’s condemnation.

From Harlem to Paris, to Selma, Baldwin’s life was a testament to the intersections of identity—and to the revolutionary bravery it takes to stand proud and speak truth in a racist and homophobic world.