Hello, and welcome to Queer's Fiction, where we talk about queer historical media. I'm Jason.

I'm Alice. And today we're talking about the 1956 novel by James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room.

Before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge the Wawandari-Wai-Wong people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional owners of the land on which we record this podcast, and pay respects to their elders past and present.

We recognize them as the custodians of an oral history tradition far older than this podcast.

We also have some content warnings before we get started.

There will be some discussion of

misogyny and domestic abuse, alcoholism, homophobia and transphobia, death and execution,

and self-harm and suicide. There are also uses of homophobic slurs, in quotes.

It's a pretty heavy episode. Yeah, it's a pretty heavy book. Yeah. This is not one of the

fun, lighthearted ones,

sorry, team. If you would like more lighthearted content on this podcast, this was in fact

a Patreon episode where our patrons got to vote and sign up to our Patreon if you would like

different choices. I'll also just note that we're obviously a person down on what we usually have. Unfortunately,

Eli is ill and we didn't have time to get Irene to read a book with no day's notice.

He doesn't have COVID. He doesn't have COVID, fortunately. So before we get into the novel itself,

I want to talk briefly about James Baldwin first. I want to leave open the possibility of doing a full episode on him down the line, but

obviously some context is important for discussing his works.

Yeah, and I like three facts about James Baldwin, so this might drastically change how

I understand Jim is written.

This will be interesting.

So Baldwin was born in 1924 in New York.

He never knew his biological father and had a strained relationship with his intensely

...