Put this in your pipe and smoke it, cancel culture!
I remember that the bar, that night, was more than ordinarily crowded and noisy. All of the habitués were there and many strangers, some looking, some just staring. There were three or four very chic Parisian ladies sitting at a table with their gigolos or their lovers or perhaps simply their country cousins, God knows; the ladies seemed extremely animated, their males seemed rather stiff; the ladies seemed to be doing most of the drinking. There were the usual paunchy, bespectacled gentlemen with avid, sometimes despairing eyes, the usual knife-blade lean, tight-trousered boys. One could never be sure, as concerns these latter, whether they were after money or blood or love. They moved about the bar incessantly, cadging cigarettes and drinks, with something behind their eyes at once terribly vulnerable and terribly hard. There were, of course, les folles, always dressed in the most improbable combinations, screaming like parrots the details of their latest love affairs--their love affairs always seemed to be hilarious. Occasionally one would swoop in, quite late in the evening, to convey the news that he--but they always called each other 'she'--had just spent time with a celebrated movie star, or boxer. Then all of the others closed in on the newcomer and they looked like a peacock garden and sounded like a barnyard. I always found it difficult to believe that they ever went to bed with anybody, for a man who wanted a woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man would certainly not want one of them. Perhaps, indeed, that was why they screamed so loud. There was the boy who worked all day, it was said, in the post office, who came out at night wearing makeup and earrings and with his heavy blond hair piled high. Sometimes he actually wore a skirt and high heels. He usually stood alone unless Guillaume walked over to tease him. People said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people's stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did no--so grotesquely--resemble human beings.
David, James Baldwin's white, sexually conflicted protagonist, acidly captures the atmosphere of a Fifties gay bar where self-loathing flowed more freely than alcohol, and one that lingered well into my generation. Sure the plot is a more than a little overwrought for modern readers--death by guillotine, for example!--but Baldwin understands well how life in the closet led to melodrama. Although Gore Vidal, the first American novelist to write explicitly about homosexuality in the City and the Pillar (1948) romanticized the forbidden love between two men nearly a decade earlier, Baldwin considers its collateral damage, too.
"Well," said Hella [who has just confirmed that David, her fiancé, is gay] "I'm going home. I wish I'd never left it.
"If I stay here much longer," she said, later that morning, as she packed her bag, "I'll forget what it's like to be a woman."
She was extremely cold, she was very bitterly handsome.
"I'm not sure any woman can forget that," I said.
"There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet," she added, "in spite of you. I'm not going to forget it. I'm getting out of this house, away from you, just as fast as taxis, trains and boats will carry me."
If ever a novel was custom made for a book club discussion, this is it!
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