A QUEER IMAGINING

BY THE TIME JAMES BALDWIN WAS 16, he was already creating the world in which he wanted to live, one where the words others used to describe him—Black, gay, poor—had little impact.

“All of the American categories of male and female, straight or not, Black or white, were shattered…very early in my life,” he wrote in the 1985 article “Here Be Dragons or Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood.” “Not without anguish, certainly; but once you have discerned the meaning of a label, it may seem to define you for others, but it does not have the power to define you to yourself.”

This world—which the late writer-activist called “the new Jerusalem”—was a place where people like him had nothing to prove, one where a person’s identities were not thought