18/ James Baldwin

I just finished reading James Baldwin's Wikipedia entry. Back when I was around 18 and reading his books (Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, The Fire Next Time, Another Country), book jackets revealed as little about authors as they do today, but there was no easy way to learn more. All I remembered about James Baldwin is that he was black and gay. I didn't know his friends called him "Jimmy," and that he had many of them. I didn't know his stepfather was hard on Jimmy, treating him far more harshly than his eight biological children. I didn't know he lived most of his life in France, visited often by those friends. And before I read Giovanni's Room I didn't know how gay men had sex.