zenosanalytic reblogged
zenosanalytic reblogged
Richard Goldstein & James Baldwin | The Last Interview
lol i litereally stopped reading right before one of his most important quotes. including it with a lot of added context because i always see that quote on its own without the rest of the conversation which is really fascinating.
zenosanalytic reblogged
Joan Baez and James Baldwin Attend Selma to Montgomery civil rights march, 1965. Credit: Steve Schapiro
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"The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light."
James Baldwin.
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“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”
— James Baldwin, from “They Can’t Turn Back”
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untitled by james baldwin, who was born 100 years ago today. happy birthday <3
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Today, August 2 2024, would have been James Baldwin's 100th birthday.
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James baldwin’s the artists struggle for identity. Btw.
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[“If we want to know why many queer people prefer their own company to the company of straights, certainly one answer to this question is about protection and mutual care—we hold each other up in a world that pushes us down. But there is also another, far less discussed facet to this story about queer people keeping their distance from straight people—an element that has less to do with queer vulnerability or oppression in the face of straight privilege and more to do with queer power, freedom, abundance or relief in the face of heterosexual misery and myopia. It is a story about queer people sometimes finding straight culture and relationships too sad or enraging to witness, too boring or traumatic to endure. It is about queers often wishing to look away from the train wreck, by which I mean the seemingly inextricable place of sexual coercion and gender injustice within straight culture, or what the feminist writer JoAnn Wypijewski described in 2013—as she reflected on the ubiquity of sexual assault among teenagers—as heterosexuality’s relentlessly “primitive” attachment to lies, manipulation, and violence as the formative route to sex. It is about queer recoil, or something like the nausea that the French scholar Paul Preciado has felt in response to both the aesthetics and the misery (the miserable aesthetics?) of heterosexuality, described in an essay titled “Letter from a Transman to the Old Sexual Regime”: “I am as far removed from your aesthetics of heterosexuality as a Buddhist monk levitating in Lhassa is from a Carrefour supermarket. . . . It doesn’t excite me to ‘harass’ anyone. It doesn’t interest me to get out of my sexual misery by touching a woman’s ass on public transport. . . . The grotesque and murderous aesthetics of necro-political heterosexuality turns my stomach.” Sometimes straight culture is quite literally repulsive; we feel it in the gut.
We have insufficient language to describe queer people’s experience of finding straight culture repellent and pitiable, given that heterosexuality has been presented to us as love’s gold standard. But even without a suitable name for this contradiction—the fact that the world’s most glorified relationship is often a miserable one—many queers have still spoken this truth. In 1984, a few years before his death, James Baldwin explained to an interviewer from the Village Voice that queers could see the precarity of heterosexuality, even as straights kept it hidden from themselves: “The so-called straight person is no safer than I am really. . . . The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if society itself did not go through so many terrors it doesn’t want to admit.” As Baldwin saw it, it is not simply that straight people are suffering and in denial about it but that heterosexual misery expresses itself through the projection of terror onto the homosexual.”]
Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
“I am as far removed from your aesthetics of heterosexuality as a Buddhist monk levitating in Lhassa is from a Carrefour supermarket. . . . It doesn’t excite me to ‘harass’ anyone. It doesn’t interest me to get out of my sexual misery by touching a woman’s ass on public transport. . . . The grotesque and murderous aesthetics of necro-political heterosexuality turns my stomach.” Sometimes straight culture is quite literally repulsive; we feel it in the gut.
This This This This This. ^^^^^^ This Right Fucking Here ^^^^^^ is why I avoid mainstream dating; so many straight people treat manipulation, deception, violation, abuse, intimidation and objectifying possessiveness in pursuit of sex as either a matter-of-course or (despicably!) LAUDABLE, and it has forever repulsed me to my core. I recoil from it. Why would anyone want this; why would anyone want to be a part of this?!? Nothing can justify treating people this way.
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James Baldwin: “After all, you’re accusing a captive population who has been robbed of everything of looting. I think it’s obscene.”
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"You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less."
- James Baldwin, The Artist's Struggle for Integrity
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James Baldwin, from Giovanni’s Room
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James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
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MAN: The first time I had the opportunity of reading your book, "Another Country," I believe—and this was quite some time ago. But that was the first book I ever read from cover to cover. And I haven't read another since. And—really!—and I still remember the characters and everything, and this really did a lot for me, you know? JAMES BALDWIN: I know that from my own point of view, it was—it was, in a sense, all for you. Do you know? I know that I love you, but you haven't necessarily got to know that. And I suppose I never thought that I would live to hear you say that you love me. That sounds very corny, but—[laughter]—but you know what I mean.