Giovanni's Room - Books That Made Me

So You Doin the Bendin?

Tags: Black Author, Queer, Classics, Age Read: 23  

A Brief Intro

I’ve been in a local queer book club for around a year now and I thought it was about time I covered a book from one of our meetings. A month or two ago we read Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin’s novel about a Bisexual American Expat’s tumultuous life in Paris. While I respect James Baldwin for what he represents to me as a writer, a queer person, and Black American I don’t often read his work because of how emotionally draining it is. But when Giovanni’s Room was selected I realized I’d only read Baldwin’s essays and thought it was only right that I gave his fiction a chance. 

Spoiler alert: It was still heavy but the mess was entertaining

Story Break Down

“So You Doin the Bendin?”

Set in Paris in the 1950s Giovanni’s Room follows a few months in the life of David, a closeted bisexual American Expat, as he enters into and leaves an affair with a handsome Italian named Giovanni. Now with a description like this you’d think we’d be signed up for the romcom of a lifetime. However financial strife and murder coupled with rampant internalized homophobia and the pull to follow traditional morality, made this one of the toughest narratives I’ve read in a while. 

The story opens with David packing up his apartment in France to return to America on the day that Giovanni is scheduled to be executed. As he packs we go back in time to just a few weeks prior, with David semi freshly in France, waiting for his girlfriend Hella to write back to him from Spain with an answer to his proposal. While he’s waiting for Hella, David runs with with Jacques, an older gay man who David begrudgingly hangs out with for money. Though David finds Jacques abhorrent and never sleeps with him, he feeds into Jacques’ fantasy just enough for the older man to help him. 

During one of their outings together Jaques takes David to Guillaume’s Gay bar where they meet Giovanni, the handsome bartender who, despite his internal battle, David can’t help but be attracted to. Giovanni’s relationship with Guillaume is similar to David’s relationship with Jacques, where in exchange for not (yet) sexual contact Giovanni is given a job. 

At the end of the night the two younger men go back to Giovanni’s room, where they begin an affair that lasts until Hella comes back and Giovanni commits a crime that lands him the death sentence. 

“Internalized Homophobia and the Struggle for Intimacy”

What stuck out to me most about Giovanni’s Room was the characters and the common forces that motivated them. Intimacy-Desire and Money are the biggest motivators for  the characters in Giovanni’s Room and also orchestrate the power dynamics between each character. Amongst the four men, David and Giovanni possess desirability while Guillaume and Jacques possess money. Everyone wants what the other person has, and whoever’s the most desperate is the loser.

However, because they had each other and just enough to survive, for most of the novel David and Giovanni are on top and belittle their older more effeminate counterparts. Yet the power dynamic within David and Giovanni’s relationship ebbs and flows frequently. There are times when one is more enamored by the other or more financially stable and vice versa.  But near the end of the novel when Giovanni is stripped of both his job and David’s attention upon Hella’s return, it is he who is at a loss. 

Though David is the main character of this novel I found him deeply unlikeable and irritating.  We spend a lot of time in David’s head and though it is understandable how being a queer man in the 50s can make one tense, the careless way he treated both his male and female partners was inexcusable. David’s internalized homophobia leaves him emotionally unavailable, selfish, and a perpetual “victim”. 

While Giovanni often voices his feelings for David, David can never bring himself to affirm Giovanni back despite it being clear that he feels more passionately for Giovanni than he does for Hella. 

David often complains that he doesn’t want to play the part of Giovanni’s “housewife”. But it seems that he qualifies any action that’s remotely caring (like helping to clean their room, giving Giovanni money, or even telling Giovanni how he feels) as feminizing. David’s intense craving for intimacy and simultaneous inability to give intimacy sets him up to fail.

Final Thoughts

As a child I kind of assumed that Queer spaces were automatically safe spaces even during time periods where being gay was largely unaccepted. Though emotionally challenging (in a good way) reading Giovanni’s Room illuminated the ways internalized homophobia and misogyny color Queer communities and the interesting ways we might interact with each other because of these embedded belief systems. It’s definitely something that I’ll think about as I work to add to the pantheon of Queer narratives and further build community.