A Gen Z Reviews the Classics: Why 'Giovanni's Room' is the book to read this Pride Month

James Baldwin reached Paris in November 1948 with about $40 in his pocket and the reasonable conviction that America would kill him if he stayed. He had watched what his country did to Black men, and he knew what it thought of men who loved other men, and exile seemed preferable to the alternative he described plainly as madness, violence, or suicide.

He was a short, dark, pop-eyed, gay, and a Black man in a century that had opinions about all of these things. He had grown up being told he was ugly by a stepfather who seemed to mean it as a theological verdict as much as an aesthetic one, and he remained convinced of his outer grotesqueness until late in his life. Paris did not solve what he had carried across the Atlantic. "In America, the colour of my skin had stood between myself and me," he wrote. "That barrier was down — it turned out that the question of who I am was not solved because I had removed myself from the social forces that menaced me."

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Baldwin wrote Giovanni's Room in Paris in the early 1950s and dedicated it to Lucien Happersberger, a Swiss man he had fallen in love with. His publisher at Knopf called the manuscript repugnant and rejected it. An editor told him to burn it or risk destroying his career. After a friend called it “a book in drag”, Baldwin found another publisher, and the book came out in 1956. His sentences are now visible in decorative fonts over photographs of Parisian skylines.

159 pages of beautiful dread

I went in knowing two things: that it was a tragic love story between two men, and that Giovanni gets hanged. I called a friend about forty pages in, not to discuss it, just to say I was miserable. He laughed, but was sceptical about the entire literary community adoring Baldwin, and my disliking him.

I hoped, for the entirety of its 159 pages, that I was wrong about the hanging. (I was not.) The sentences are delicious, pulling you forward even when the story makes you want to put it away. Its descriptions of love and sex are suffocating and beautiful in almost the same breath.

David, the narrator — an American in Paris, blond, vaguely handsome in a way he describes as generic — is difficult to like from the first pages because he is a coward, and cowardice is hard to respect even when you understand it.

The whole novel is essentially a confession, a moment of introspection (some might argue that it has come a bit late), told in retrospect on the night before his former lover is executed by guillotine.

Giovanni's room is hardly an aesthetic place. It is a maid’s room, service quarters, with peeling wallpapers and rotten potatoes. The space the world has allotted to their love is marginal and hidden, and yet it is the only place in the novel where David is free, where he can love Giovanni without performance or disguise. The moment that door opens onto the street, the relationship begins its long collapse.

Of all the queer literature I have read (and I have read Maurice, which I loved) Giovanni's Room is the only one that refused me every comfort I didn't realise I had been expecting. Forster loved his characters. The shows our generation grew up with, Will & Grace, Sex Education, needed their queer characters to be loveable, or at least redeemable. Baldwin doesn't make David loveable. But he shows you exactly why David is the way he is — the self-hatred, the running away from himself, and no matter how much we understand him, it only makes things worse.

Television taught us too

Growing up watching queer characters on screen means growing up with a narrow and recurring cast of types. The “gay best friend” has been a fixture since at least 1997, when Rupert Everett played George in My Best Friend's Wedding — charming, brokenhearted, present solely to rescue Julia Roberts, with no desire and no story of his own.

On Will & Grace, American television got its first gay leads, then immediately divided them into the one who passes and the one who performs, both primarily existing to be good friends to the straight women around them. A peer-reviewed study of the show found it equated gayness with a lack of masculinity and infantilised its most interesting characters.

Glee's Kurt Hummel, in his early seasons, was defined almost entirely by his markers, the makeup, the fashion and Lady Gaga. He didn’t really get much of an inner world.

Eric Effiong in Sex Education is a different proposition. He is flamboyant, warm, and frequently the funniest person in any scene, but the show is not satisfied with that. He cheats on Adam. He emotionally betrays Rahim. He is a devoted friend and also, at times, a selfish one. His queerness is not the ceiling of his characterisation, and that matters more than it sounds, because for every Eric there are a dozen characters whose sexuality functions as ornamental — present as a signal, stripped of the friction that would make it real.

Heartstopper is not a bad show, but its Nick and Charlie exist in what one critic called "a glossy, fairy-lighted, skipping, giggling little one-note cocoon," and a 2025 peer-reviewed study found that its homonormative presentation of queer teens who are "cute, sweet and likeable" simultaneously reassures more conservative viewers that nothing fundamental is being disturbed. The queer edge is decorative.

Giovanni's Room was called repugnant by its first publisher. Heartstopper scored 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Witnesses to the collapse

Baldwin's characters resist every category that television has trained us to reach for. Jacques, the older gay man moving through the novel's edges, is not the camp confidant dispensing wisdom before disappearing. He is a man corroded by longing, and he knows exactly what is at stake: "Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, hélas! in the dark."

Guillaume, the bar owner, is a man with institutional power and no capacity for love, and after David abandons Giovanni, it is Guillaume's world that swallows him — sex work, dependency, and finally a murder charge when Guillaume turns up dead. The press buries Guillaume's history of exploitation and criminalises Giovanni's desperation instead.

David, meanwhile, proposes to his fiancée Hella not out of love but because freedom had become unbearable, and he needed something to be moored to. He uses her body to try to erase Giovanni from his memory during sex, and she stops mid-act to ask if she has been away too long, and he lets her believe that she has. When Giovanni is condemned, David slips out and spends three days drunk and sleeping with a sailor. Hella finds him. Her final words before leaving for America: "If I stay here much longer, I'll forget what it's like to be a woman."

The men in this novel do not think highly of women, and I don't think I was reading it wrong. It is part of what Baldwin is documenting about what internalised shame does to the people unfortunate enough to be standing nearby.

The sentences are so beautiful. Baldwin managed to write something with so little mercy, so wonderfully elegantly. I resented it, and will recommend the book to everyone that I know.

I finished the book and called my friend back. The one I'd rung to complain to, forty pages in. I told him I'd been wrong to grumble and that Baldwin wasn't remotely interested in making anyone feel seen in a way that soothes. He was documenting what shame does to everyone in its radius, and he wanted it to feel like rot.