When his fiancée returns, David abandons Giovanni, even as he knows he wants to be with a man. Later, David heads to Paris with his fiancée, and, while she is away, he meets a number of queer men-most notably the eponymous Giovanni, who he decides to room with and who he seems to fall for Giovanni certainly falls for him.

I thought I saw my future in that cavern.” A cavern,” he continued, “ opened in my mind, black, full of rumor, suggestion, of half-heard, half-forgotten, half-understood stories, full of dirty words. Joey’s “body,” David muses, “suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured until madness came, in which I would lose my manhood. He then shifts into a subterranean metaphor he will return to often throughout the book. Joey is a boy, he thinks with epiphanic horror the morning after while his partner for the night is still asleep. It is a beautiful “miracle” of a moment.īut the bird is also “doomed,” because, as David quickly realizes, he is as attracted to Joey’s body as he is terrified of its maleness.

The comparison is remarkable his moments of intimacy with Joey are at once new and old, new in that he is a virgin to this kind of experience, and old because he has been feeling a quiet thrumming of desire all day with Joey, even if he didn’t fully understand the words of that soft electric language inside him. “It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find,” he reflects. When he makes awkward conversation about still being up because a bedbug bit him, David and Joey move closer and closer together, until they are cuddling and kissing. how fond of Joey.” Tired, they decide to spend the night in Joey’s apartment, but Joey finds himself too entranced by his friend’s form in the shadowy room to sleep. He has spent a day with his friend Joey in Brooklyn, astonished at “how good I felt. Early in Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin’s seminal novelistic exploration of queerness, the narrator, David, remembers the first time he held another man’s body close to his own.

James baldwin and giovanni