Reading Left 2

By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and hunger. I write to record what other erase when I speak.
(Anzaldua 169)


There was Joyce and then Nicole and then others. My life couldn't be protected for very long. Friends never seem to let me be protected from anything. Everyone always wants to come out to me, and so there it is, for me to deal with, and how I feel and how the Church feels. The Church has already told me what is right and what is wrong. All of the Christendom that I grew up with told me. The Bible says so, we've been told. I know right from wrong. If my mind knows then why doesn't my heart care? When Nicole and Jennifer are in a fight, why do I want the fight to resolve? Why do I think what they have is wholesome? Why do I want them to have a happy ending. I need to know there is another way. I don't want it for myself, but I want to know that it exists, that it is valid, that the walls that were set around us are put up by men and not by God. The world I was brought up in was full of a goodness tinged with bigotry. Good girls like good boys. But the world I live in is becoming one where good girls like good girls and I like being left alone and seeing my friends happy. I read a book, to read if there is another world, a truer one, a place with more options.

He looked at me with his mouth open and his dark eyes very big... I laughed and grabbed his head... But this time when I touched him something happened in him, and in me which made this touch different form any touch either of us had ever known... Joey raised his head, and we kissed.
(Baldwin, 14)


To be straight and especially religious and straight, to read Giovanni's Room is to leave behind one sort of innocence and enter another. The moment I consent to read past chapter one, without reservations, without headshakes, without drawing a line between myself and the sexuality of the character is the moment I at least in part consent to be gay for the duration of the book, to hear a voice not heard before. Here I am in the course of two days, reading the most passionate love story I've ever read.
And then, in the end, Giovanni is dead. Giovanni is Baldwin's first overtly gay character but not the last. Whatever innovation the Black and bisexual Baldwin might have flouted, the one he never flouts is that having engaged in the heady world of homosexuality, someone must pay, someone must die. There must be a tragedy.
I look in on the window of the party.
Jennifer and Nicole are still fighting.
I need another way.

Why do I need another way, Dean?
Until you are free, I am not free. Don't you see that?