In J. Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place, the author argues that the requirements of bourgeois, heterosexual society create experiences of time for its adherents that they refer to as reproductive time (the time in which couples can reproduce), family time (the daily structure of time considered normal and respectable for child-rearing), and time of inheritance, which Halberstam describes as “generational time within which values, wealth, gods, and morals are passed through family ties from one generation to the next.” They add, “It also connects the family to the historical past of the nation, and glances ahead to connect the family to the future of both familial and national stability” (Halberstam 5). Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin is a tragedy about the U.S. expatriate David’s failure to find love. I use J. Halberstam’s writing on queer temporality to understand the chasm between David and Giovanni; the two have a passionate relationship but cannot find lasting love because they are separated by time. Within David, there is a hidden space, a bottomless cavern of death, queer desire and alternative possibility which could transport him to Giovanni’s realm. It is not until he is forced to stop planning for a heterosexual future that bourgeois time loosens its grip on David. The entire novel is told in the somber, expanded present of grief, when David is trapped in a prison-like space “between this night and this morning on the guillotine” (Baldwin 5). I use Halberstam’s work on queer temporality to imagine four spaces in the novel and their respective “times”- the cavern (David’s interior burial ground for shame and desire), the Room (where he lives with Giovanni), the American Dream (a potential future with his fiancée, the proverbial “white picket fence”), and the Prison (the space where the state sends those who upset the timeline of inheritance and its logics).

David grows up indoctrinated with the logics of bourgeois time in a wealthy family, with a forgotten mother and a misogynistic father who represses all desire which does not include alcohol and an investment in his own masculinity. This effect is not total, and within David, there is a creeping space which exists as a repository for the shameful emotions which David cannot fold into the future he and his father plan for him. The first time that David experiences this other world is when he sleeps with a boy, his friend Joey. When they touch unmediated by the scripts of homosocial camaraderie, David feels that he is aware, in a jarring new experience, of the smell of someone else, the sensory pleasures inherent to the body when it is no longer held at bay. He notes the possibility of an infinite present time within himself and feels that “a lifetime would not be long enough” to sleep with Joey (Baldwin 8). This joy and possibility quickly turn to fear and shame because of the associations David already holds about desire. Desire, particularly queer desire, swims for David in the same murky waters of death and madness. Where he previously looked upon Joey with love and lust, he now regards him as dangerous, “the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood” (9). When David recalibrates to heterosexual temporality, he buries his lover deep within the cavern, below a layer of shame.

The existence of the cavern threatens David’s manhood. He fears that relationships with men will strip him of his masculinity, draw him into the cavern where feminine monsters lie. The first monster we are introduced to is his mother. The cavern is the only space where David allows himself to grapple with his mother’s death, where he is forced to reckon with her body. In a nightmare, he is swallowed into her rotting embrace, where her body “opened, as I clawed and cried, into a breach so enormous as to swallow me alive” (11). He learns to regard this desire and fear with shame, and keeps the nightmare hidden. The only other time he speaks of his mother directly is when he is stuck between consciousness and unconsciousness after a car crash, when he calls out to her. In this liminal space between realities, he loses his fear and screams for her embrace. Other feminine figures haunt him; queer spaces terrify David, where he encounters feminine men, not-quite-men, drag queens, and other gender-variant people who appear to him as apparitions, paranormal patrons of the cavern come to haunt him. At the bar he finds himself in close proximity with them, but distances himself from their reality by describing them as “grotesque” and un-human (27). One of these figures approaches him as an overly-lustful zombie. He recounts seeing this person with disdain, and constructs an unflattering portrait, “It carried a glass, it walked on its toes, the flat hips moved with a dead, horrifying lasciviousness” (39). Her/His/Their expression is dreadful to David because they inhabit exactly what he represses in himself. To render his fellow queer patrons legible in a reality where he retains a bourgeois future, he needs to regard them as dangerous paranormal interlopers in his realm.

While the cavern exists for David as a nightmare, it is nonetheless very real. Joey lives there, along with his mother, “at the bottom of [David’s] mind, as still and awful as a decomposing corpse” (16). In this cavern lies his sexuality, his awareness of death, his desire for validation. It is also the place where he keeps loved one’s close but out of sight- his mother, Joey, and, to the best of his ability, Giovanni.

The first time that David and Giovanni meet, they tease one another about national belonging and their experiences with time. David sees Paris (and Europe, generally) as not of this (his) time; by David’s estimation, Paris is ancient, and New York is modern. Giovanni protests that (white) Americans did not leave Europe so long ago, to which David asserts that the weight of their respective histories is what has made them different. “Things have happened to us there which have never happened here. Surely you can understand that this would make us a different people,” Baldwin writes through David (33). From the outset, a crisis of American masculinity sits between the men, one that is marked by repression and need for domination (over femininity, over desire, over death itself). Giovanni feels that American time is not serious, that it moves like “a triumphant parade,” looking always to a celebratory future rather than sitting with pain (34). David reveals through this conversation that he is trapped in a different time of inheritance than Giovanni; David’s sexuality implicates the future of his hypothetical family, and of the wealthy social strata of his nation.

Giovanni is trapped in a different timeline from David, one marked by the death of his old life and his status as a foreigner without money. He works at night, which Baldwin writes through David’s eyes as being heavy with death; at night, for example, “the river was swollen and yellow”; the river, perhaps, is simply unclean, or in a similar process of decomposition as his mother’s corpse (45). The first space in Giovanni’s realm that we are introduced to is the bar with other lower-class patrons. This bar may constitute an alternative “queer space” as Halberstam imagines in their work. Here, Giovanni feels free enough from scrutiny that he can throw his arm around David, and the people in this space move in a way which feels alien and theatrical to the American.

While Giovanni cannot exist as an actor in bourgeois time, he is nonetheless impacted by its adherents. Halberstam pulls from Cathy Cohen’s The Boundaries of Blackness to note that in bourgeois time, some bodies are considered expendable (Halberstam 3). Giovanni ultimately is expendable to the state because he is gay, because he is poor, because he is not French. This impacts the places and times that Giovanni can live; if death or imprisonment wait for him in the light, so he must live in the shadows. Giovanni is aware of the danger he faces outside of his room, as evidenced by his reaction whenever someone passes by the obscured windows, when he “would stiffen like a hunting dog and remain perfectly silent until whatever seemed to threaten our safety had moved away” (Baldwin 86). While Giovanni fears the danger outside of the room, David fears the danger within.

Giovanni’s room appears to David in a world of its own. It sits outside of the bustle of Paris at the end of a dark corridor, with painted windows facing a courtyard. It is small, cluttered, and to David a “regurgitated” physical manifestation of Giovanni’s life and grief (87). David describes the space of the room as “occurring beneath the sea”, the same quiet, dark place where his mother lies, the same sea which separates the U.S. from Europe (75). The room is both outside of space and time; the first night David stays with Giovanni he says, “the sun filtered through the room so faintly that I was worried about the time” (86). At first he experiences the alternative temporality of the room with “joy” and “amazement”, but later sees this alternative as a trap. The illuminating light at the center of this room is not a beacon towards love but“yellow… a diseased and undefinable sex” in the center of the ceiling (88). Even Giovanni’s body distorts for David in the context of the room, as “… the wide and beautiful brow began to suggest the skull beneath” (75). The room, hidden from the French people and the state, rejects the hypothetical futurity that David has built his life around, and appears to him as a reminder of death. It begins to change David’s conception of space in present, future, and even encroaching on the past. “It became,” David says, “every room I had ever been in” (85).

For David, The Room offers precarity, while a home with Hella offers stability, longevity, and a direct line to his rightful role as a patriarch. David’s crisis in masculinity holds him teetering between two worlds: one in which he can love Giovanni and one in which he cannot love at all. Manhood exists for David as a border of its own, one that he is cautious to lower to find love. When David and his (sometimes) friend Jacques first see Giovanni, David is reticent to approach him. Jacques uses humor to encourage David to embrace vulnerability while critiquing his shame, saying to his young friend, “I was not suggesting that you jeopardize… your immaculate manhood which is your pride and joy” (30). David’s crisis in masculinity also leads him to use women as tools; he sleeps with Sue who regards herself as “built like a brick stone wall” and uses Hella to hide within the imagined safety of the walls of the American home (96). David’s “manhood”, a self-identity marked by emotional and physical distance from himself and others, is a pillar David balances on to keep from the cavern below.

David’s manhood only exists as an imagined roadmap, a predestined role in a grander timeline of inheritance. David’s father, who he is estranged from emotionally, pressures him to come home and to bring with him any woman. Without a home and a woman in the states, David’s father accuses him of letting “the world pass [him] by” and uses his family money as an incentive for David’s return (91). He assures David that when he is ready to begin “real” life, on the timeline of reproductive responsibility, he will help the new hypothetical family financially. Later, when David leaves Giovanni, he describes him to Hella as a “kid” and says that for Giovanni and those like him, there is no possibility to build a future (134).

David imagines the French heterosexual family as not so different from what he desires, as safe from the night and from poverty. Before he leaves Giovanni, he begins to feel a more pronounced loss of control, a heterosexual future slipping away from him. He walks along the river and considers taking his own life, while ruminating on the French family home – “Those walls, those shuttered windows held them in and protected them against the darkness and the long moan of this long night. Ten years hence, Jean Pierre or Marie might find themselves out here beside the river and wonder, like me, how they had fallen out of the web of safety” (104). Contemplating suicide, comparing the potential of a dangerous life with Giovanni to a safe, loveless one with Hella, he craves the celebration and parade of American bourgeois time where there is no death, no pain, no passion but an infinite future. He craves warmth from the night, a family to carry on his lifeblood and a woman to support him as “a steady ground, like the earth itself, where [he] could always be renewed” (104).

When Hella returns, David (initially) feels safe again, with redemption on the horizon. When he embraces her his arms felt like a “home”, and when they sleep together it is not the result of bodily desire (he would rather lay silently) but a theater of homecoming, as David recalls, “… I felt her moving, rushing to open the gates of her strong, walled city and let the king of glory come in” (123). The act is not passionate for David, but it is celebratory, and reasserts his manhood and future as a patriarch. Hella’s capacity to reproduce also invokes the future of nation, where David is king and Hella his fortressed city, safe from any lust and other queer monstrosities beyond her borders. Both Hella and David are aware of their need for one another to affirm their respective gender identities and to keep them cloaked from the cold of the “Old World.” As bourgeois Americans, they turn to the future, and fear both past and present.

When David reveals to Giovanni that he wants to leave him, they fight. Giovanni argues that “home” is only an idea in David’s mind, a bourgeois fantasy. David misunderstands Giovanni’s reality, asking why he has “buried” himself in this room; meanwhile, Giovanni tries to explain that The Room is all that he could find, and suitable enough for his needs. When David returns to the room after reuniting with Hella, he and Giovanni fight again. Finally, David is truthful. While Giovanni tries to show David his devotion through domestic support (“All day… I worked, to make this room for you”), David fears for his economic stability and masculinity, refusing to meet his relationship with Giovanni on its own terms and in its own time (137). He says to Giovanni that they cannot have a (future) life together, accusing him of wanting David to be his “little girl” who takes care of the home. This fight shows the extent to which reproductive time and its sociosexual scripts obscures love for David behind the male/female division of labor. He is unable to face the present reality of his relationship to Giovanni, asking him, “What do you think can happen between us?” Giovanni responds slowly, “You know very well what can happen between us. It is for that reason that you are leaving me” (142). David and Giovanni may exist on the same plane materially, but the meaning that they imbue into the space of The Room and their perception of futurity separates them. David’s experience of reality is shaped by a hypothetical heterosexual family which prevents him from seeing Giovanni, and the two finally admit to the space between them.

By the end of the novel, David must confront a new space which emphasizes neither the future nor present: the prison. Giovanni draws David closer into this space when he is fired from Guillaume’s bar and secures him there when he finally murders Guillaume. David learns first that Giovanni lost his job after he decides to rejoin straight society. Guillaume fires Giovanni for not sleeping with him, and in the diminishing space between his and Giovanni’s bodies David feels the room’s walls “closing in” on him (105). Sharing in Giovanni’s pain, he forgets his early preoccupation with the family home. He stands near the precipice of the cavern with Giovanni and the veil of straight temporality lifts momentarily, as Giovanni recalls, “… neither my father nor Hella was real at that moment… nothing would ever be real for me again- unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality” (111). In queer space with Giovanni, the borders of David’s body blurs. With Hella, this may have been possible early in their relationship while they were able to have passion (in Halberstam’s understanding of bourgeois time, an “unruly adolescence” before marriage is allowed, temporarily), but the pressures and constraints of reproductive time (and the binary division of gendered labor) drive them apart.

It is the prison more than the cavern that finally makes David and Hella strangers to one another, and precludes their home in the American Dream from coming to fruition. After David learns that Giovanni has murdered Guillaume, he first wants to seek refuge within Hella, but finds her far away. “I must have hoped that there would be something Hella could do for me. And this might have been possible if the days had not dragged by, for me, like days in prison” (157). David is stuck between freedom and prison just as Giovanni is stuck between life and death. Hella notices their time growing apart. She wants to begin “reality”, their triumphant, American parade together, and is angered that David is forcing them to “mark time” out in the countryside (161). He is completely lost to her in time and psychic space, as Hella says, “You’ve gone away somewhere and I can’t find you” (161). When she leaves him after catching him with a sailor, she laments the effect of this “Old World” on the American future. “Americans should never come to Europe…” she says, “it means they never can be happy again. What’s the good of an American who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had” (165).

The prison is mental for David, but very materially present for others. David talks about a man he met at Jacques’ house for whom, despite literary achievement, time had changed irrevocably, his mind distorted to meet the prison where he had spent half his life. “Prison was all that was real to him… wherever his eyes focused one saw a wall rise up” (113). The man said prison was worse than death, and David wonders about Giovanni’s future- “I wonder about the size of Giovanni’s cell. I wonder if it is bigger than his room. I know that it is colder.” (113)

The French prison was also very real for Baldwin. Baldwin too experienced time in prison as stagnant, writing of his experience, “Silence is really all I remember of those first three days, silence and the color gray… The days had nothing, obviously, to distinguish them from one another.” (“Equal in Paris” 113). Here, we can make sense of why Baldwin chose to introduce the novel with David, in his internal mental prison, reflecting on colonialism and violence. In Bill V. Mullen’s biography of Baldwin, he writes of his imprisonment, “Baldwin here recognizes the privileged distinction of American nationality in a Western imperial country as a counterpart to colonial abjection. It is 1950, and Algeria and North Africa are under French domination, its own ‘exiles’ second-tier citizens in France as announced by their prominence in Parisian jails” (Mullen 55). The space of the prison was always present as a possibility in the corners of Giovanni’s life, present in the way he made his money, the way he loved, and perhaps in the eyes he hid from behind his painted windows. When Giovanni murders Guillaume, he threatens not only the home of David and Hella, but the French state. Baldwin writes through David’s memory, “Such a scandal always threatens, before its reverberations cease, to rock the very foundations of the state” (149). People stuck outside bourgeois time, like Giovanni, may be expendable but Guillaume is not. The murder is widely threatening because Giovanni, a poor, queer foreigner has killed a wealthy Frenchman, threatening the safety of the French bourgeois home which lives in service to the French nation.

Tracing the contours of queer temporality, Halberstam writes, “Queer time perhaps emerges most spectacularly, at the end of the twentieth century, from within those gay communities whose horizons of possibility have been severely diminished by the AIDS epidemic” (Halberstam 2). They quote the poet Mark Doty, who lost his lover to AIDS, and who writes in his memoir, “All my life I’ve lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes” (2). The space of the novel, a heartbroken recollection of a life and love lost, exists within Giovanni’s diminishing future. Within the first paragraph, the novel is born from David’s drunken and grief-stricken paralysis, where he becomes a figure of another time. “My face is like a face you have seen many times,” he reflects. “My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past” (3). Already, a linear time of progression and capital accumulation is presented through the lens of the novel’s queer temporality as undesirable.

Despite their passion for one another, David and Giovanni meet in the same realm only temporarily, while drunk among other queer patrons in the bar or while hidden in the Room. By the end of the novel, they finally meet in David’s mind. When he learns that Giovanni will be executed, he must finally face himself. He looks in the mirror, reflections of himself falling into the prison-space, facing the guillotine with Giovanni. He stares at his body in the mirror “under a sentence of death”, and recites a line from the bible, “… when I became a man, I put away childish things” (168). David wants to become an American patriarch, to put away childish yearnings on the route towards family, but ultimately he cannot. His grief and acknowledgement of death brings him finally to Giovanni, but on both of their timelines it is too late.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. “Equal in Paris.” James Baldwin: Collected Essays, edited by Toni Morrison, Library of America, 1998, pp. 101-116.

Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room. 1st International Trade ed., New York: Vintage Books, 2013.

Halberstam, J. In a Queer Time and Place. New York: New York University, 2005.

Mullen, Bill V. James Baldwin: Living in Fire. London, Pluto Press, 2019.

About the Author

Mac Godinez is a queer resident of western Massachusetts, originally from Lancaster, PA, and can be reached by email. Mac was a student in Comp Lit 121: International Short Story, taught by Michael Kowalchuk in Fall 2021.