Month: January 2024

By Edward Bayliss

Our current season has so often been relied upon in cinema to accelerate some kind of dramatic effect. Importantly, winter hosts the world’s favourite event in the Christian calendar. Think of charity, love, and compassion, along with accentuated feelings of security and warmth; that is, if you have God and triple glazed windows. Just as easily, winter can be a hellishly frigid wasteland, and if that’s not bad enough, you might find yourself on a Norwegian glacier with Nazi zombies chasing after you (Dead Snow). There is such a thing as winter without Christmas.  

Nevertheless, winter cinema isn’t always just a godless freeze, nor is it as simple as warm candles casting long shadows across tastefully decorated drawing rooms. Let’s leave this binary to thaw into a messy puddle and look at two films that toy brilliantly with the season of snow.

Director Michael Dougherty wages war with Christmas – the American Christmas – in his 2015 film, Krampus. The slow motion opening credits show a shopping mall opening to hordes of frenzied shoppers, each looking to get their hands on last minute presents for the festive season. Shots of credit cards, cash, plastic, sickly greens, reds, and golds all drip like syrup before the camera. In this ‘monster of melodrama’, fantastically choreographed fights break out between rival shoppers – even the most grotesque scenes can become beautiful if seen in slow motion. As this plays out, we hear the tinny tune of ‘It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas’. It might look like Christmas, but it doesn’t feel like Christmas. 

And this is what Krampus does so well. It treads a careful path between the horrific and the familiar, the fantastical and the realities of family dysfunction. The eponymous character originates from Austro-Bavarian folklore, and punishes badly behaved children, almost like an anti-Santa. He absolutely brings with him a menace that will frighten younger audiences, including my 12 year old self upon first viewing. But on rewatching it now what seems especially unnerving to me is the subcurrent of uneasiness on which the film awkwardly floats. The constant darkness of winter, the disorientating use of animation, and the apparent question of dream and reality at the end of the film all threaten our sense of truth and fiction. Beneath the clotting accessories and circumstance of Christmas which Krampus so knowingly flaunts, there are mounting feelings of disillusionment on the part of the audience. 

Gasper Noé uses winter sparingly in Climax (2018). For the director, the colour of winter is unmistakably white, with its clinical and undistracting exactness. The notion of mise-en-scène is almost entirely buried under a reliably indifferent blanket of snow. It is in these couple of snow scenes that the camera comes back to its sober sided self, and watches overhead as the story’s fallout unfolds. 

Climax is set almost entirely in a remote empty school building in France, 1996. A dance troupe host celebrations as their rehearsals come to a close, though, unbeknownst to them, their sangria is laced with LSD. Noé takes us on a trip quite unlike any other I’ve seen in cinema. It is exhaustingly colourful, even kaleidoscopic, as the camera becomes entranced (the ‘master shot’ in this episode lasts a staggering 42 minutes). Sweaty and claustrophobic, the school rooms and corridors become a labyrinth with dark corners for even darker deeds.

Like a splash of water to the face, we gasp as we escape the school and are met with a bright shock of snow which brings with it a crisp clarity, both in terms of actual visuals and narrative understanding. Noé places a crawling body in frame against the blank canvas snow, presenting an arresting point of comparison between the stuffy slants of light and shadow in the school complex and the ‘freeing’ embrace of the ice cold winter. 

When you picture winter in cinema, you might think of snow blizzards so bad they look like TV static, honey tongued dialogues between repulsive characters, and the same old love stories over and over again. But let’s not meet this season’s cinema with a sigh.  

Here are a few other films that do interesting things with winter:

Fargo (Joel & Ethan Coen)

The Shining (Kubrick)

Snowpiercer (Bong Joon Ho)

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Kaufman)

The Thing (Carpenter)

Cool Runnings (Turteltaub)

Groundhog Day (Ramis)

The Hateful Eight (Tarantino)

By Cosmo Adair

“I am deeply honoured and humbled to receive this prestigious award. Kudos to all my distinguished fellow finalists, you have all provided me with many hours of enjoyable reading over the last year.” James Frey was so thrilled with his prize that you’d imagine it was a Booker, a Nobel, or at least a Costa. But no, he’d just won the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award, awarded to him for an egregious passage in his novel Katerina which reads: “Blinding breathless shaking overwhelming exploding white God I cum inside her my cock throbbing we’re both moaning eyes hearts souls bodies one”: a ridiculously awful sentence, which makes you question not only the limits of stream-of-consciousness narration, but whether anyone should ever be allowed to write about sex again. 

The Bad Sex Award was bestowed annually by the Literary Review until 2020 when they decided that simply “too many bad things” happened that year to justify exposing its readership to more. It was set up by Rhoda Koenig and Auberon Waugh with the intent of ‘[drawing] attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.’ It was, John Maier writes in The Times (“Bonk, bonk! Why it’s time to bring back the Bad Sex Award”), “the one literary prize where you felt the recipient truly deserved to win.” Look at the Roll-Call of its Victors: of the twenty-seven prize winners, only three of them were women. And so, not only did it highlight egregious, unnecessary, or else simply bad writing, but it constitutes a kind of send up of established male authors, letting you see the Narcissists, the Male-Power obsessives, and the Nerds: by that I mean that it gave the impression that most of these writers (including Salman Rushdie, Sebastian Faulks, Tom Wolfe, and John Updike, amongst others) were not only terrible at writing about sex, but that they were terrible at sex. For a few days every year, the public could think to themselves: I might be no Shakespeare, but at least I’m better at Sex. 

Some of the more brilliant entries are: Giles Coren’s Winkler (“… and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands, he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.”); Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am (“He jerked off with the determination of someone within sight of Everest’s summit, having lost all his friends and Sherpas, having run out of supplemental oxygen, but preferring death to failure.”); Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (“I slid down the bed and took his cock in my mouth, shlurping away as if I’d just discovered a particularly juicy pear.”); and John Updike, winner of a Lifetime Achievement Award, in The Widows of Eastwick (“Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room … She laid her head on his pillow and seemed to want to be kissed. Well, why not? It was his jism.”). 

But, as Julian Gough wrote in The Guardian (“I was nominated for the Bad Sex Award. Don’t laugh”), the competition’s light-hearted nature started to disappear with the rise of social media and its mob of illiterati. People who’d never read his nominated book, Connect, trolled him online. He wrote, “It deliberately and successfully encourages the worst, and dumbest, misreading of fiction; the conflation of authors with their characters in order to publicly shame them. This is regressive cyber-Victorianism in progressive drag.” He discusses how the nature and tone of these ridiculed sex scenes can be understood (surprisingly) when placed back into the context of the book. Connect is about socially awkward teenagers and the nominated passage concerns the protagonist’s first sexual experience: “He sucks on the hard nipple. He has never done this before, and yet; no, wait, of course, it’s totally familiar. The first thing he ever did.” That is the only extract of his fiction which most people have read, and it hardly inspires you to read much more of his writing. 

Auberon Waugh’s involvement in creating the Bad Sex Award was surely influenced by what is the most awkward, strained and poorly written passage of his father, Evelyn’s, oeuvre: “It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure.” (Brideshead Revisited) Evelyn Waugh himself, questioned on that passage, would argue that the English Language had developed at a time when sex was not freely discussed, let alone written about. Thus the words and phrases which the Dictionary offers for its description are, invariably, crude, if comic in a schoolboy way, whilst most attempts to write it through metaphor feel like uneasy euphemisms. In this way, bad sex writing breaks the third wall: the reader becomes aware of the inadequacy of language and of the writer themselves to discuss such a natural occurrence. This is why it becomes so easy to conflate the author with the sex scene: because poor writing is often the result of the writer becoming too conflated with the work. Martin Amis was right to say that “Very few writers have got anywhere with sex … My father used to say that you can refer to it but you can’t describe it. It’s inherent in the subject. It’s not that someone’s going to hit upon the right way; it’s that there’s no right way … The novelist, unlike the poet, has to be a universal figure and our sexual urges are deuniversalising. There is a Bad Sex prize but there’s no prize for Good Sex. That is probably significant.”

And so, whilst it’s hilarious to think of willies flying about like loose shower-heads and blowjobs in culinary terms, most sex writing vindicates Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis’ arguments. Most sexual descriptions — be they deliberately comic or highly serious — are funny. Few writers do sex well, since it’s a unique, subjective experience and good writing requires an impersonality that’s hard to achieve when discussing sex. Still, most writers persist: and I respect their noble effort which might, one day, land them unwanted laurels. But, for now, I implore the Editor of the Literary Review to revive the Bad Sex Award, so that whoever writes sex badly does so at their own peril.

by Sophie Holcroft

Talking to Tom O’Sullivan leaves you feeling truly inspired because his passion for music is so infectious. He has been playing the drums for as long as he can remember, performing ‘concerts’ in his living room whilst banging on pots and pans as a two-year-old and getting his first mini toy drum set at just three years old. Renowned for his drumming talent (and eyeliner), he is now at BIMM Brighton where he is moving towards bigger things.

One can only be in awe of Tom’s versatility, and this is reflected in the many bands that he is part of. In January 2023, Tom joined the band Mindframe who tie together elements of Grunge, Math-Rock and Shoegaze, and have performed in Brighton for the last two years, with the occasional show in Bristol and London. Mindframe released their latest single in November which is available on all streaming platforms, and they plan to play across the UK in 2024. Tom also plays in a “Jazz-HipHop-Funk-Prog-Whatever Else six-piece” called Goetia, which was formed out of a jam session in 2022. They are a force to be reckoned with, as after a debut performance at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in Soho, London, Goetia has since signed with Nasty Mode Records and is recording an album in January with legendary producer, Mark Dodson. Tom says, “Going to see Goetia play live is something that everyone should do at least once in their life, the guys in the band are just the most talented musicians.” Tom clearly lives and breathes music, because he spends his spare time playing as many session or dep gigs as he can, with recent artists including Tamara Kramar, LIZMNK, Molly Thorne and many others. For Tom, “there is no better feeling than playing gigs – once you get a taste for it you just can’t stop. When you are performing with your best mates and the audience loves the music you are playing, that’s a special feeling. Performing is one of the only times I feel completely present.”

Tom’s interest and ability to play such a breadth of genres of music means his sound “is a bit messed up really.” His inspirations vary from Rock legends like Dave Grohl through to jazz pioneers like Max Roach and Elvin Jones and Fusion players like Vinnie Colaiuta. His own musical career so far has been a medley too, starting off playing Rock and Pop music before getting into Metal and then studying Jazz and Afro-Cuban drumming for 5 years. Tom says he “really likes having the variety,” from making people mosh with Mindframe on a Saturday and then playing in a jazz show with artist, Sambambo, on a Sunday.

When asked about the music scene in Brighton, Tom lit up, as he feels it really is “second to none, it’s hard to put into words… Whatever kind of music you are into, you can find it – whatever kind of music you make, there is a place for you to perform. Venues like Hope and Ruin and The Prince Albert provide a stage for up-and-coming artists, allowing anyone to get their foot in the door – Green Door being the beating heart of the Brighton music scene.” Unsurprisingly, Tom loves going to as many live music events as possible and supporting grassroots venues. With Brighton being a hub of musical activity, Tom says, “at least two or three grassroots gigs are happening on any given night, all within about a ten minute walk of each other. Including support bands, you can quite easily find yourself accidentally seeing over ten bands a week.” This constant exposure to creativity and innovation inevitably has a ripple effect.

Tom’s goal moving forward is to keep creating music with the incredible musicians that he works with and to play his music to as many people as possible. He feels that “there is nothing better than writing music you really care about with people you love and sharing that with whoever wants to listen.” Without being prompted, Tom spreads love for his art by offering the following advice, “if anyone is, or knows anyone who is thinking about going out and doing music, absolutely go for it! You meet the best people, have the best experiences and make the best memories – it definitely beats a 9-5 desk job.” Do you see what I meant by infectious now?

Go follow Tom on Instagram – @tjsixx and keep your ear to the ground for his next moves. Have a listen to @mindframeuk and @goetiaofficial and if you’re in Brighton, keep an eye out for his gigs!

By Harry Laventure

The Photograph: 695 x 1005mm, 1984. 

More precisely, one month after being battered. The eyes neither project nor accuse, but retain a grandiosity in the look of two distinct acts. White as marble, crimson as blood, her twin axes speak in the binary colour-coding of a pill. Bruises orbit like the curls of withered petals, autumnal, but the vulnerability here is only physical. Sparked coils, almost regal, drape over the shoulders in simple decadence, and frame the punctuation mark of the picture: the rouge glamor of lips in pout, hardened. It is in this defiant diarism that we meet Nan Goldin face to face in her early career, stoic and honest to the beatings she received to conclude the “crav[ing], dependency, the adoration, the satisfaction, the security” of her relationship with an older man. Follow through to 1^st July 2019, and we are electrified by the same spirit as she lies Louvre-side, still as a corpse, below a rippled slab of vermillion accusation: “SHAME ON SACKLER”.

It is in admiration of this vital force that ArtReview have recently awarded Goldin the top spot on their Power 100 list for artists of the highest influence. Such recognition titillates even the casual observer as to the merit upon which it is rewarded, and it is under the admission of such scepticism – I blame the Englishness – that I found myself investigating the life and work of Nan Goldin. What a mockery would come of my brambles. 

On 12^th September 1953, Nancy ‘Nan’ Goldin was born to middle-class Jewish parents in Washinton D.C., before growing up in the deliciously named Swampscott, Massachusetts. Her early years were bedfellows to numerous tensions and tragedies, and by the age of eleven both the claustrophobia of her parents’ expectations and the suicide of her elder sister Barbara had amputated Goldin from any sense of domestic comfort. At the mercy of a carousel of foster homes, she would next find permanence in her enrolment at Satya Community School in Lincoln, aged 16. Perhaps as well timed as it was ostensibly trivial, a Polaroid camera found its way into Goldin’s possession here on the back of a grant. This has since been autobiographically retrojected as the artist’s first finding of her “voice”. 

Within two years, Goldin had “[fallen] in with the drag queens” of downtown Boston. These would become her subjects, her muses, but most importantly her family. Indeed, the raw tenderness of Goldin’s first major publication The Ballad of Sexual Dependency resonates to this day, and gently showcases the intimate haze of neon Lepidoptera that defined the queer scene of the time. The style and content of The Ballad cannot be over pronounced in their influence. Her ‘snapshot’ portraits of friends at their most open capture the universal humanity of that desire for connection, in whatever manifestation of sexuality it is to be realized. In her own words, the direction of The Ballad was “to kind of glorify them” in admiration for those “who can recreate themselves and manifest their fantasies publicly”. 

Perhaps there is no more lucid an expression of this than Trixie on the Cot, New York City, 1979. Between the carelessly sensual debris of magazines, empty bottles, and cans of beer, the eponymous Trixie luxuriates like a psychedelic take on Boucher’s Madame de Pompadour. Draped in an anthology of ivories and rubies, cigarette perched between fingers and lips, she casually cradles her battered high heels. A camera lies to her left, its back ironically turned to the scene, and deaf to the bohemian elegance beyond. Quite a wily if unintentional symbol, one could wager. Further still, the magnetism of Rise and Monty Kissing, New York City, 1980 bottles the salacious lightning that pulsates through Goldin’s early work. The pair are unapologetic, absorbed, and as ignorant of as ignoring the observer in the orbit of their desire. Here, as in so much of The Ballad, Goldin articulates a truth that does not have to be staged for it to be demonstrated. 

The diaristic, deliberately unchoreographed style of these works has contributed to their endurance and continued resonance as much as the content. The hagiographists among us enjoy the idea that Goldin precipitated the social-media-style of photography that is so omnipresent in contemporary content. While I may not share such retrospective elasticity of optimism in the aesthetic components of this argument, what sings to me is the spirit behind her work. The courage to capture so much of one’s life and lives is a factor that has become all too familiar to us. And yet, Goldin’s insistence on elevating it to the boldest walls of galleries (and consequently below the loftiest noses of criticism) was unquestionably radical and revolutionary. 

As such, it was not without consequence. Freely exposing so much of oneself to the caprice of review is a posture for the confident or unwitting. In this period, Goldin has freely admitted to wanting to be a “junkie”, the “slum goddess” of whom bands like The Velvet Underground and Television wrote. The honest portrayal thereof, in all its excess and masochism, has been criticised as glamourising images in the circuit of the “heroin chic” tagline, with grave implications for those under her influence. The tortured artist trope is nearly as old as art itself, and Goldin’s intimate reflections of her own bouts of addiction personify the archetype without the usual protective distance of a name on a novel’s title page or below a painting. Perhaps there is a particularly cruel if tenuous parallel between Dostoevsky writing “The Gambler” to pay off his gambling debts, and the commercial success of Goldin’s “heroin chic” epoch funding her crippling OxyContin habit later in life. 

The nature of the criticism she received becomes more twisted still in its accusations of voyeuristic tendencies. For all the vibrant and animated beauty of her corpus, it is not without darkness. Gotscho kissing Gilles, Paris 1993 captures the ravages of the AIDS crisis in a personal, private setting. The former gently presses his lips onto the forehead of the latter, whose eyes weakly pry themselves open to burrow into the camera lens, and our sympathies behind. It is a brutally uncomfortable image. We cannot help but feel invasive, inappropriately forced into a setting of mourning usually reserved for the related. Questions of being imposters in this arena are natural, and easy to extend to the person behind the camera. The moment certainly raises disconcerting questions about the relationship of subject and object in art more generally. Does the solidification of a few images as representative of a person leave too much space for unfair projection or manipulation? Where is the border between the person behind and in front of the lens, and is it immoral to add such inflection of meaning to a scene that should or could be “objective”?

My apologies for the evasion, but this is neither the right writer nor setting to provide confident answers to these issues and their accompanying fragrances. And yet, perhaps we may poke at cadence with respect to Goldin herself. There is an obvious if implicit resolution in Goldin’s practical responses to such claims. I do wager that she is unquestionably a force for good in her exposure and humanisation of the more taboo queer subjects within her contemporary scene. The sincerity and intimacy of her works in this field are revelatory in their glorification of her family’s then-unorthodox beauty. Moreover, following her own struggles with addiction to OxyContin, Goldin has proclaimed that becoming an activist is “more important to [her] than propelling [her] art career”. Indeed, the “die-in” rallies and personal missions of Goldin’s P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) have found such gravitas as to remove the Sackler name from gallery after gallery, even dissuading the Royal Portrait Gallery from taking a £1.5 million donation from the Purdue Pharma magnates.

With respect to the queries of voyeurism and the recklessness of her biography, I think it of the utmost importance to appreciate just how much of herself is in the work. With the camera as her “voice”, Goldin gives us a flipbook dialogue through which she negotiates her own personality through immense tragedy and hardship. Whilst I do not claim a total absence of artistic direction within her work, we must note our privilege of responding to it rather than participating in it. The characters of her corpus are not topics under examination, they are her “party”, and perhaps the family she deserved. The love affairs had their reverberations in the strands of her social spheres; the deaths and victims were sincere losses to the community that she was a member of. Placement thereof in a private, intimate setting only magnifies the impact on an observer detached from personal connection to it. Perhaps I mean to say that, to me, Goldin is not clipping the wings of butterflies to collect them, so much as she moves to accompany and admire them in flight. 

These remarks are of course my own, and my only desire in writing this is to stimulate your own interpretations of her work. The critics continue to laud: her 2022 biopic All the Beauty and the Bloodshed was peppered with awards and applause, and her placement on ArtReview’s list will only prompt more panegyrics and vitriol. Goldin’s original pledge to her friends was to “reflect to you the beauty that you are ”. In her constellations of ragged decadence, excess, intimacy, sincerity, trauma, and ultimate splendor, we must grant her that.

Brava, Nan Goldin. 

by Vadim Goss

The English Language, in all of its forms, holds a particular place for those who were born outside of its whiteness. It is the language of the oppressor; no amount of lectures on Wordsworthian poetics nor Wildean stylistics can ever erase its association with centuries of colonial enterprise. In the colonial era, the English Language itself became a product, in which its reproduction was enforced upon a population on whom this product would always be semiotic of the language and culture they had lost. It wasn’t enough for this language to be shared with native languages, it had to create total erasure. In other words, there could be no before, only after. Only then would it serve as the signifier to Empire’s and by extension whiteness’s power; only then would it become a product of whiteness itself; and any non-white seeking to attempt the language would only be, could only be, appropriating it—cementing their status as what Edward Said calls “The Other”. So it must have been hard for those same ideologues when an African-American homosexual expatriate living in Paris became the most important prose writer in the English Language since James Joyce. 

James Baldwin was never able to shed the language oppressed onto him. A language that, even by the publishing of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, he had mastered. In their famous debate at the Cambridge Union, William F. Buckley accused Baldwin of adopting a ‘British accent’, in turn suggesting that Baldwin was in effect “acting white” for the white audience. Baldwin, throughout his whole career and indeed his whole life, was faced with an insurmountable situation: for if the English Language is a White Language, then how can a Black man—to which this language has been forcibly imposed upon—preserve his own identity if in the very words he speaks assumes an inexorable reproduction of that whiteness? Moreover, how can he escape being a product of a White system to which he is unwillingly reproducing? 

Ultimately, how could James Baldwin speak in his own words, and not theirs? 

As a Black and Gay man, Baldwin spent all of his career resisting the relegating categorisation a white-heteronormative literary culture sought to reduce him into. Already it had happened with his first novel and his subsequent essay collection Notes of a Native Son. He was known as a “Black writer” producing “Black Literature”. That such a thing would continue to happen was something he acknowledged even before the seminal Giovanni’s Room was published. Hence why he chose not to feature any Black characters in the story: a decision prompted out of protest at the literature culture placing genre onto an identity. Still, upon the release of Giovanni’s Room it fell immediately into the sub-genre of “Gay Literature”. To make my point clearer, “White Literature” is just called “Literature”. 

These false genre handles served a purpose designed to thwart Baldwin. It was a deliberate tactic designed by a literary marketplace that governed itself in line with this normativity; with the explicit purpose of delegitimising his artistic merit by characterising his work as deliberately divisive; whilst simultaneously knowing they could profit from his work by marketing its taboo subjects as forbidden novelties. And by emphasising these traits of his work, it was thus a design to subsume this perception about his work as the content of it entirely. This measure was employed by normative critics determined to impose their definition as the only meaning to the novel; and to destroy its chances of ever being perceived as great art by ridding his art of its nuance and depth. This ensured normative and deviated identities remained such. It was an attempt by the literary canon to propagate a taxonomy that supported a system guaranteeing what was deemed normative, i.e. whiteness and heterosexuality, control. They controlled the discourse; so they controlled the reception.   

And it wasn’t so much because of Baldwin’s own, so-called “deviated” identity that triggered Giovanni’s Room’s reception, but rather, it was the novel’s topic matter. Literature by the 1950s had more than become accustomed to homosexual writers, so long as queerness itself remained out of the pages, or at best, only subversively hinted at. That’s not to say there were no stories depicting queerness, but they could never be considered with the same aesthetic and formalistic merit they deserved compared to their heteronormative peers. Nor could they end happily—indeed this was an explicit, editorial order by publishers. Love was not allowed to transcend in queer stories; queerness had to cause ruin. If it didn’t it would not be published. All stories centring on homosexuality were, and could only ever really be about shame. Giovanni’s Room, in all of its brilliance, could not escape this.

But Baldwin refused to hide nor did he accept the consequence of being visible. So when Another Country was published in 1962, a story that featured characters both gay and straight, black and white, it could no longer fit into these categories forcing critics to revaluate their approach to his work—with The Sunday Times writing, ‘Let other novelists read Mr. Baldwin and tremble. There’s a whirlwind loose in the land.’ Baldwin had wagered how his contemporary society’s obsession with racial and sexual barriers would not be able to contain a novel determined to show them “another” world in which all aspects of identity could intersect. He was correct—with the ‘whirlwind’ becoming an apt metaphor in describing how the rigorous system, which prevented Baldwin from ever being able to speak, had finally been turned against those who had imposed it in the first place. Language, which had been designed to designate a normative and an Other, had now been used to demonstrate their assimilation. 

This, by his own admission, became Baldwin’s chief ambition. As he stated in the short film Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris, when asked who he is writing for, he responds: ‘I’m writing for people, baby. I don’t believe in White people. I don’t believe in Black people either for that matter.’ White and Black; Straight and Gay, are all labels all supplanted by an equal Humanity.

Through this tenet Baldwin saw how segregation was detrimental not just to Black Americans, but all Americans. Because it encouraged a system which disallowed the opportunity for unity under this common, universal flag of humanity. Nation, race, religion, sex: in Baldwin’s eyes the taxonomy associated with each category, and the categorisation itself, detracted and prevented society from achieving this ultimate realisation. Suddenly, writing wasn’t enough to communicate this necessary message. It was why he became such a revered orator during the Civil Rights Movement, and why he expanded his work into public speaking to begin with. He was a public speaker who could write; he was a writer who was just as eloquent with a microphone as he was with a typewriter. And if, in his novels and his essays he matched the compassion of Martin Luther King, then it was in his rhetoric he emulated the determined fire of Malcom X. Indeed, if Malcom X symbolised the sword and Luther King the shield of the Civil-Rights Movement then it was Baldwin who symbolised the knight capable of wielding them both.

James Baldwin took the language forced upon him and claimed it for his own. In turn, he became the first Black-Gay writer who was able to successfully, on a public scale, integrate blackness and queerness into a white and heterosexual aesthetic. English Literature as such owes him a debt. For Baldwin reminds us that language and literature can and should belong to everyone, in equal measure. And whilst, yes, the English Language and overall literary aesthetic of today can still be seen in terms of hetero-whiteness due to its societal role as the normative, he made it possible for future Black, Queer, and other minority writers to assert their own agency over a language which historically took it away. James Baldwin knew his limitations: he could not erase history, but he could write his own.