Writers Were Meant to Be Seen
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JAMES BALDWIN was one of the first Black Americans to write honestly about being gay, producing eloquent and passionate essays on both racism and homosexuality. His novel Giovanni’s Room, which came out in 1956, dared to broach the latter topic and was shocking for its time. Baldwin’s novels are psychologically penetrating, exploring (among other things) the hypocrisy of a society that likes to think of itself as the land of the free, the land of opportunity where everyone is equal and has the same chance of success, but this is a delusion that ignores America’s pervasive racism and fascism.

            James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance celebrates the 100th anniversary of the writer’s birth in 1924. The exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington is a small but radical combination of faces and events that focus on Baldwin’s Civil Rights activities during the 1960s along with the activists he knew and shared his politics with, including Martin Luther King, Jr., gay activist Bayard Rustin, playwright Lorraine Hansberry (who was largely closeted), singer Nina Simone, poet Langston Hughes, and many others.

Cassandra Langer, a freelance writer based in New York City, is the author of Romaine Brooks: A Life (Univ. of Wisconsin Press).