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#giovannis room
soracities · 6 months
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Then, for the first time in my life, I was really aware of another person’s body, of another person’s smell. We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find.
James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
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victorianlonging · 6 months
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If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.
Giovanni’s Room
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rorygilmoreh4ter · 3 months
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specific things in literature things i think about often pt 1/?
-basil’s love for dorian
-david and giovanni
-francis abernathy
-juliet capulet and her sense of agency
-laertes’s and ophelia’s relationship
-clive durham dooming the narrative for himself
-neil perry playing puck
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tulip-jojo · 2 months
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12th of february,
I love this book so much 😩
ig: tulipp.reads
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dysphoresque · 6 days
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“You mean I have a home to go to, as long as I don't go there?”
— James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
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n-jostcn · 6 months
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red, white & royal blue — casey mcquiston
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giovanni's room — james baldwin
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blue lily, lily blue — maggie stiefvater
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outstanding-quotes · 25 days
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Now that he was trying to find something out from me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me.
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
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sellouttoyourself · 1 year
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There’s this part in Giovanni’s Room where David describes trans women/crossdressers he sees at a gay bar as “grotesque” and compares his disgust towards them to the disgust of watching a monkey eat it’s own feces because, as he puts it, the grossest part of the latter is seeing something human (like you) behave in a disgusting manner. I’m trying to get better at reparative readings and set aside paranoid readings, so let’s unpack this for a second. David is the epitome of a self-hating gay man, and the novel itself is plainly about how society teaches gay people to hate themselves. So what he finds so grotesque about trans people isn’t trans people in an of themselves but what they remind David about himself. Trans people are this funhouse mirror to David, a warped reflection of what he’s terrified he actually is. He sees trans people as visible mockery of his own failure to perform the masculinity demanded by his overbearing father and society at large, that if he’s in this club with people like *that* it must mean he is *of* them and similarly absurd in their aesthetic.  David takes the disgust and rage he feels about himself and his own sexuality and enacts it against these trans women as emblems of everything he despises about himself. Which is strange, because so many DL men do that to the gay men and trans women in their lives. Trans women are most likely to be killed by a domestic partner--someone they had a pre-existing relationship with. I’ve read enough testimonies from men put on trial for murders of trans women to know they usually took out their fear on these women. Not the fear of “gay panic” upon learning the woman they suspected was cis was actually trans; more often than not they knew their victim was trans and likely sought them out as a romantic partner or sex worker because of it. What often precedes the murder is a fear of *other people* learning their partner was trans or they were partners with a trans person. Their violence is an embodiment of their own shame for wanting what society tells them they should never want, and the trans woman herself becomes a threat to their masculinity even when desired for their femininity. Violence, as gendered violence so often does, then becomes the means of recapturing the masculinity they feel is at risk.  When I first read David’s derisive description of these trans people, my instict was to shelve the book and decry Baldwin as yet another great author who gave into their worst impulses and failed to learn their own lessons when it came to trans people. But the more I thought about it. the more I saw the value in these expressions of David’s insecurity.  This vision of transphobia--visceral disgust at the appearance of a trans person--is harder to come by than it must have been in 1954, but it remains the atomic unit of transphobia. The impulse to erase us from public life is based in this gut-level rejection that David puts forward, one which rejects not transness per se but what transness reveals about the observer.  For most, what we reveal is a sense of instability to a world they thought they knew. Gender is baked into the rules so many build their lives around. The cringey couple throwing a gender reveal party isn’t doing so because they hate trans people; they’re doing it because they’re excited about this little life they’re bringing into the world and are eager to “learn” more about them and what to expect. Whether the cake contains pink or blue batter reveals, to their eye, a lot about who their child will and can be. That’s no small matter! Trans people, by virtue of our very existence, destabilize the certainty that surrounds that joy. Truly, we destabilize the certainty that surrounds a lot of misery as well--misogyny, gender roles gendered violence, and much more. But people, generally speaking, abhor freedom, most of all that freedom that leads to uncertainty in an area where they could previously sleep soundly. The impulse to deride us is learned, surely, but not simply by poor representation of trans people as people. It is learned by making people dependent on the gender binary--a constructed, fragile mess to which people are nonetheless loyal as hell. I knew this. What I’d considered less often was how frequently trans people represent for cis people their own failures to live up to the gendered expectations they navigate. David has a deep-seated fear of being feminized, of losing his own masculinity to the love he feels for other men. Instead of seeing the potential in trans lives to separate masculinity from sexuality, he sees us as sad reminders of how he fails the former because of how the latter manifests for himself.  I don’t think this kind of fear is limited, however, to closet cases like David. I think lots and lots of cis, straight people reject trans people because of how we amplify their own failures to perform their gender identity “correctly” and the absurd, even grotesque, steps they take to avoid that failure. A few weeks ago some cis female writer went on Tucker Carlson and mocked Dylan Mulvaney, calling her performance of femininity a kind of minstrelsy--”womanface” as akin to blackface. This was odd to me, since she was literally on cable news while saying this, so was almost certainly plastered in a full face of makeup. She was donning more artifice than Dylan was, most likely, but shaming Dylan for how hers was made more apparent when contrasted with her assigned male gender. The disgust she was voicing is not terribly different from the disgust David expresses in Giovanni’s Room, one of anger at what Dylan reveals about herself as a woman--the effort and performance and costume and habits. Consciously or no, she sees herself in Dylan--even if it’s a kind of joyful embrace of femininity she killed long ago or to which she feels entitled by virtue of her biology and gender assignment. 
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mothmans-beloved · 4 months
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i am feeling so normal about giovanni's room by james baldwin rn. i am not frothing at the mouth eating barbed wire. why wont you believe me
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wolives-town · 1 year
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‘a burning hill’ by mitski // giovanni’s room by james baldwin
this book destroyed me made me wanna eat concrete
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soracities · 6 months
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I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst.
James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
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Thinking about this and…yeah
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin // Black Sails (TV)
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rorygilmoreh4ter · 29 days
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i adore classic gays i am always thinking about my fav classic gays
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anansislibrary · 29 days
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youtube
This video essay discusses the work of James Baldwin and the film moonlight, analyzing both in relation to each other and revealing themes of queer love, liberation and compulsory heterosexuality.
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dysphoresque · 6 days
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