FINAl

Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin, is a vivid account of an "All-American" boy named David, and his confused sexuality enticed by desire and need which are unreconciled by his extreme homophobia and his fear of becoming like the two older "ugly fairies" whom he associates with. This book serves the purpose of describing the life of a fictitious character that may very well have lived during the time period of this book's publication. This character, David, leaves his country in flight to 'find' himself, while at the same time he is running away from his disconnected father.

In this saga of turbulent sexual confusion amid irresponsibility and insecurity lies a man in a foreign country to flee the internal self that he willingly discovered one summer night with his friend 'Joey'. This discovered self was a product of lust and homosexual desire that David knew he had, only he could not make himself believe it was so.

That summer night when David and Joey gave each other pleasure, David has many things going through his head: He was, "suddenly afraid" and he became ashamed of what he was doing in the same bed-- with "a boy".Joey's body was something that he wanted to explore, yet he knew that this body would cause him to lose his manhood. "The very bed, in its sweet disorder, testified to this vileness". He then thinks of his father and what Joey's mother will say when she sees the sheets; "I could have cried, cried for shame and terror, cried for not understanding how this could have happened to me, and how this could have happened in me". While this incident is taking effect, David does not know how to react because he had never made love to a boy and this relationship would alter his self-conception of masculinity to a much lower degree of manhood than he live with.

David is caught between his radical homosexual desire and the conventional American upbringing illustrated by his father's only wish for David to, "grow up to be a man". By this, David felt compelled to fulfill this wish because ideally, he wanted to have his "manhood unquestioned, by having a woman and watching her put his children to bed". David wanted a wife so that she could be his "steady ground, like the earth itself", but his lust for men, Giovanni in particular, obstructed this exemplar heterosexual lifestyle. While in Paris, David becomes accustomed to a nonchalant lifestyle (which Paris is associated with). Because of his carefree character, David finds himself with no job and no place to go. First of all, he had no money and was evicted out of his hotel room. Although his father has money, he does not send any because he wants his son to come back home and 'settle down'. In order to get his father to send him cash over the "deep and wide Atlantic Ocean", he writes to his father that he, "won't keep secrets anymore", and that he, "found a girl that he wanted to marry" . By deception, David hoped that this act would appear as if he were following his father's wish and therefore, this step of getting married might ease his father's worry of David not becoming a 'man'.

Due to his circumstances, David was forced to associate with an older crowd of gay men, whose company he did not enjoy. These two individuals, Guillame and Jacques, are a good reason why David refuses to accept his homosexual desires because they are ugly, disgusting, and alone. He figures that leading a homosexual life in Paris would amount to the life of one of them, and this was something that David did not want. He tolerated them mainly because he lived off their hospitality, their friendship, and their money. The friendship that they provided was abused to the greatest extremity by the needy, parasitic David. Jacques would supply food and shelter, and whenever convinced he would lend money to David knowing that he would never pay it back. David's ultimate challenge is deciding whether he will conform to society and his father or to lead a life of loneliness as a homosexual. He has to weigh the pleasures with the losses on one hand while considering his desires in light of the conventional moral rules which his father expects him to follow. Throughout the novel, David's insecurity and irresponsibility are the driving force that influences him to act the way he does with his lover Giovanni and his fiancee`Hella. The outcome is unfavorable for David because he loses both his wife-to-be and his soul mate, Giovanni, to his insecurity and confusion about his sexuality. He starts out alone in the beginning of the novel and ends up the same way at the end. His homosexuality, no matter how hard he tries to escape it, is confined in him and harnessed by his lack of accepting it. He is a homosexual by nature, but a repressed heterosexual by choice.