"Not the Usual Pattern": James Baldwin, Homosexuality, and the DSM

From its first entrance into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1952 to its eventual removal in 1973, "homosexuality" spent over twenty years classified by the American Psychiatric Association as a psychological disorder. Psychiatric models of homosexuality contrasted with previous discourses of sexual inversion in significant ways, with medical professionals generally believing inversion to be a property of the physical body. The mental disorder of "homosexuality," by contrast, was understood as a psychological illness stemming from early childhood trauma.¹ Many literary and cultural representations from the period—from mainstream cinema to the lesbian pulp novels of Ann Bannon—reinforced this portrait of homosexuality as the expression of psychological maladjustment.² Fed up with two decades of psychiatric medicalization, gay activists launched a series of protests in 1970 and 1971 that targeted both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association. Using guerilla performance and other confrontational tactics, these activists called attention to the value judgments and biases that underpinned the organizations' supposedly "objective" criteria for diagnosing mental illness. Representing a brief coalition between gay liberationists and anti-psychiatry activists, this wave of protests cast a shadow on the "objectivity" of medicine, which was now, as Ronald Bayer puts it, "haunted by the specter of a politicized psychiatry that would be defenseless against an endless wave of protests."³

This essay argues that James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room—published four years after homosexuality's first inclusion in the DSM but predating the APA and AMA protests by over a decade—is crucially engaged with this queer moment in the history of medicine. However, Baldwin's approach differs significantly from the activist interventions described above, with the novel remaining relatively unconcerned with the shaming effects of the DSM's diagnostic labeling of homosexuality-as-disorder. Framed through psychoanalysis as the outcome of bourgeois family drama gone awry, the diagnosis of "homosexuality" was, after all, applied primarily to white, middle-class subjects who were assumed to possess a more complex psychological interiority than non-white and working-class counterparts. In what follows, I read Giovanni's Room as an exploration of how these diagnostic criteria might function, for some gay subjects, as a counterintuitive site of racial and class privilege—one which cleansed same-sex desire of many of its previous associations with effeminacy, poverty, interracial intimacy, and prostitution. Though it is common in scholarship on Giovanni's Room to understand Baldwin's protagonist David as a self-hating homosexual or, even further, to understand Baldwin himself as ambivalently reinforcing psychiatric models of same-sex, I argue that Giovanni's Room is in fact sharply critical of the way its narrator, David, clings to psychiatric understandings of his queer desires. If David continually fashions himself as the model homosexual patient to be diagnosed by the reader, then Baldwin reveals that it is much more than the shame (or its failure to be converted into "pride") that is at stake in David's continual rehearsal of his psychosexual back story. Rather, David's acts of self-psychoanalysis are presented as a strategy through which he fortifies or "immunizes" his middle-class masculinity against an important set of cross-racial, cross-class, and cross-gendered queer histories.

Indeed, Baldwin's canonization within an LGBT literary tradition has often served as a way of muting the pointed racial critiques that his novels offer, with gay and lesbian readers either tokenizing Baldwin (his racial difference simply illustrating the "diversity" of the gay and lesbian canon) or ignoring the way that his status as a black man had, in various ways, complicated his sense of identification with the gay community.⁴ At the same time, Baldwin's queerness, along with his openness to interracial intimacies, brought him under attack by black militants like Eldridge Cleaver, who saw Baldwin's homosexuality as evidence of a "racial death wish."⁵ These conflicts and intersections have played an enormous role in shaping Baldwin's reception in both literary and political circles. His status as a black man writing in a white gay canon, a gay man writing in...