And also of its arbitrariness, since as rebuttal to any claim that shame might be some natural accoutrement of queerness – the belief that lies at the heart of David’s malaise – the novel offers the fact of Giovanni, who seems immune to shame, or at least to the shame that plagues David. But that’s not stating it strongly enough: the whole novel is a kind of anatomy of shame, of its roots and the myths that perpetuate it, of the damage it can do. Shame is one of the central subjects of Giovanni’s Room, published in 1956 and recounting a tormented love affair in Paris between the American narrator, David, and Giovanni, an Italian bartender. The whole novel is a kind of anatomy of shame, of its roots and the myths that perpetuate it, of the damage it can do It didn’t matter that that dignity was so often the dignity of tragedy it was still a kind of antidote to shame. It’s hard to overstate what those books meant, growing up in the American south, or the solace I took from them and from their vision of queer life as possessed of a measure of human dignity.
I chose books almost at random, based on their titles, I guess, or their covers, a method that led me to Edmund White, Yukio Mishima, Jeanette Winterson, Baldwin.
As a student in Kentucky’s public schools, which means I wasn’t getting much of a literary education, I didn’t have any idea what names to look for. I have mixed feelings about lesbian and gay sections in bookstores now, but it was a wonderful resource for the pre-internet kid I was.
This store had a section dedicated to lesbian and gay literature, tucked away in a back corner, and each time I went I would spend a few sweaty minutes there before I snatched a title and carried it to another part of the store to sit and read. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and there was a wonderful independent bookstore in town, a place called Hawley-Cooke, where, since I was a bookish kid, I spent pretty much every Friday night.
I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I first discovered Giovanni’s Room, but I was quite young, maybe 14 or 15.
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