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I’m still absolutely flabbergasted that two renown scholars could have a conversation about James Baldwin for over an hour and not bring up his queerness and the role cisheterosexism played in Baldwin’s su*cidal ideations—a link he directly makes in “The Price of the Ticket”.
here is Baldwin (‘85) talking about a Black man he loved who died by su*cide in winter 1946. its easy to disconnect that from Baldwin’s own attempts in the landmark years of ‘55 and ‘69 when you are more interested in making Baldwin appear as a race man and less as a queer man.
it’s even easier to erase the influence of someone like Beauford Delaney, a black gay painter of the Harlem Renaissance, who Baldwin names as explicitly helpful in him not also becoming a “Hudson River corpse”.
James Baldwin is a part of a black QUEER radical tradition.
James Baldwin is a part of a black QUEER radical tradition.
Eddie Glaude and Cornel West aren’t obligated to historicize Baldwin in this way—in fact, I’m not completely sure if they are capable. however, I am curious about what placing Baldwin’s in the Blues, for instance, or alongside Kwame Ture, within MLK’s assassination does.
what’s the price of Baldwin’s cisheterosexual ticket, so to speak? what kind of citational practices must be employed to excise the queerness of Baldwin—a queerness he strained with and against in his literature, I must add—to make him more palatable?
is this even a matter of palatability, in the first instance? or, is the first order concern, in fact, the cisheterosexuality of Eddie Glaude and Cornel West? does thinking Baldwin’s queerness queer them? might the refusal to think Baldwin’s queerness be a refusal of one’s own?
I’m less interested in a line of questioning that implicates West or Glaude as queerphobic; I’m more interested in how their erasure of Baldwin’s queerness extends a cisheterosexist conception of the BRT that is historically untenable. here’s Saidiya Hartman on this conception:
