Musings: A Non-Monogamous Reading of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

I.

James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room is, for many readers, one of the most masterful pieces of literature ever written. On this occasion, and there are but few, I am among the many.

Baldwin tells the story of David, a white American living in South France who forges a relationship with Giovanni — a handsome young bartender from Italy. There is a tendency when folks think about Giovanni’s Room, to think that the book is about homosexuality. Avid fans of Baldwin smugly point to the fact that Baldwin himself was a gay man — citing his love relationship with Lucien Happersberger. But on Baldwin’s own view, which we get from an interview with Baldwin in the 80s, Giovanni’s Room “was not so much about homosexuality, it is what happens if you are so afraid that you finally cannot love anybody.”

On another hand, a lot of fuss has been made about Baldwin’s choice to center white characters; a departure from literary choices he made in his first novel Go Tell It On the Mountain published in 1953 which was set in Harlem and centralized Black experience. But on the decision to make David and Giovanni white men, Baldwin acknowledges the burden that themes of sexuality already introduce for his second novel when he says, “I certainly could not possibly have — not at that point in my life — handled the other great weight, the ‘Negro problem.’ The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book. There was no room for it,”. We are reminded, of course, that at the time Baldwin wrote and published Giovanni’s Room, much about sex and its motives were clandestine.

II.

In the novel, Baldwin both masterfully creates and describes a world of intimacies — intimacies that were perhaps being presented to his readers for the first time.

Sure, there are overtones in the novel that spotlight David’s “struggles” with his own sexuality; For example, as David reflects on his life and experiences, we see him trying to make sense of his sexual encounters with and attraction to men. On the other side of that, however, is the reckoning with what his relationship with Giovanni means for his relationship with Hella. In the first pages of the novel David recalls, “But it was too late by that time. I was already with Giovanni. I had asked her to marry me before she went away to Spain; and she laughed but that, somehow, all the same, made it more serious for me, and I persisted;”

I have little interest in whether David’s story is one of gay, bisexual, or otherwise queer love as one New York Times writer suggests. What I’d like to suggest here instead is that, whatever degree Giovanni’s Room is about David’s sexuality, it concerns to the same degree matters of monogamy and non-monogamy; it positions us to explore the ways that normative structures around the idea of “romance” or “romantic relationships” supervene on and constrain sexual exploration and what I call “sexual righteousness.” We see David struggling as much around his sexual desires as he does his ongoing relationship with Hella.

III.

A question is crucial: what is the relationship between one’s relational orientation and one’s sexual orientation? Generally, we might think that sexual orientation determines romantic orientation. But hesitation is appropriate here. Folks across the asexuality or ACE spectrum have prompted us to question whether there is an essential link between sex and romance at all. For example, ACEs have introduced ways of thinking of sex and romance on different planes. It is common among ACEs for someone to be, say asexual and heteroromantic — the idea that while one does not experience sexual attraction toward anyone, yet is romantically attracted to people of the opposite sex.

Similarly, one might be aromantic and bisexual — that is, they do not judge romantic relationships to be a central or important part of a well lived life, and they also experience sexual attraction for people of both sexes.

Finally, someone might be biromantic and bisexual. In this case, we would expect that they not only find themselves sexually attracted to members of both sexes but also romantically attracted to them as well. In societies where monogamy rules the day and plural or polyamorous relationships are frowned upon, the outward expression of bisexual biromantic relationality (to give only one example) is suppressed, repressed and made invisible.

In the past two decades, discourse has risen out of the consideration of ways that non-monogamists (such as polyamorists) face social exclusion and marginalization. Within this context, folks writing on non-monogamy have talked at length about mononormativity — or, the dominant discourse of monogamy which is reproduced in everyday conversation and saturates mainstream media depictions of romantic love relationships. They have also talked about amatonormativity — or, the assumption that a central, monogamous, romantic (and usually heterosexual) relationship that leads to marriage is the ideal form of romantic relationship and is a goal that everyone has.

With David in Giovanni’s Room, we are positioned to think about them both. At several points throughout the novel, David experiences shame and guilt not only by his erotic desire for the same sex, but also around feeling as if his relationship with Giovanni marks a betrayal of his relationship to Hella. To be sure, instability factors in to the book prominently throughout. Yet and still, there are points in the novel where David is certain of nothing more than his desire for Giovanni. We are left to wonder whether, if not for his relationship with Hella, David’s sexuality is something that he is in fact unsure of. Which factors in this guilt and shame more prominently —the failure of heteronormative ideals of masculinity or a conservative relationship politics that both valorize and moralize monogamy?

At some points in the novel, David pines after other young men and seemingly feels as passionately on fire for them as he does for Giovanni. In these moments, desire gets messily entangled with non-monogamy, moving his understanding of his love for Giovanni further away from the love we call true.

Monogamy is not the only concern, however, as David’s relationship to Hella is on the verge of marriage — they were engaged to marry. In societies where the institution of marriage is fashioned after patriarchy and the masculine, bread-winning, mature and responsible male figurehead, marriage functions to fortify one’s standing as a property owner and thereby a “man”. Thus, questioning David’s failure of heteronormative ideals simply because of his erotic desire for the same sex is incomplete. His relationship with Giovanni, insofar as it can be construed as one writer puts it as a “faithlessness”, it threatens heteronormativity in another way because it simultaneously threatens marriage.

How would present understandings of intimate relationships in Giovanni’s Room be complicated by readings that foreground the presence of non-monogamous dynamics in the novel? How might our understanding of not only sexual identity, but also romantic relational identity enhance our understandings of ourselves and the world in which we live?

In societies where the institution of marriage is fashioned after patriarchy and the masculine, bread-winning, mature and responsible male figurehead, marriage functions to fortify one’s standing as a property owner and thereby a “man”.

One writer remarks that “despite its tragic ending, Giovanni’s Room is a curiously hopeful book; like many morality tales, the story is meant to be instructive; the author wants you to love, but he doesn’t necessarily want the love he describes in his story to happen to you. And if it has happened to you, how to undo it?”

If this take has truth to it then non-monogamous readers are left to wonder about whether the love that Baldwin doesn't want you to have is a non-monogamous one? Is the source of David’s tumult non-monogamy? Is this what must be undone?

This message is reified in the present status of marriage throughout the Americas. The message that non-monogamies are something to be avoided still rings loudly and clearly. In 2015, when same sex marriages were legalized, non-monogamous members of the LGBTQIA+ community were excluded despite Barak Obama’s proclamation that “Love Wins”. If the message non-monogamous folks were supposed to take from the Obergefell v. Hodges decision was that love won, it is clear that love still hates us.

*Special Thanks: I would like to extend a special thank you to the students in my Spring ’22 Love, Sex, and Race course whose thoughts ideas ultimately motivated this concentration. You all were a special group and have much to be proud of.