James Baldwin quotes about sexuality

Love him, love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities.

With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.

You play it safe long enough, and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.

If your countrymen think that privacy is a crime, so much the worse for your country.

You are the one who keeps talking about what I want. But I have only been talking about who I want.

You love your purity, you love your mirror—you are just like a little virgin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe diamonds down there between your legs!

What kind of life can we have in this room?—this filthy little room. What kind of life can two men have together, anyway?

And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation.

I was glad. I was utterly, hopelessly, horribly glad. I knew I could do nothing whatever to stop the ferocious excitement which had burst in me like a storm.

It’s like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.

From a great height, where the air all around me was colder than ice, I watched my body in a stranger’s arms.

I long to crack that mirror and be free. I look at my sex, my troubling sex, and wonder how it can be redeemed, how I can save it from the knife.

People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describing something dirty.

Then something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me: it had not occurred to me until that instant that, in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body’s power over me.

Why was too black for the newsprint to carry and too deep for Giovanni to tell.

I hoped to burn out, through Hella, my image of Giovanni and the reality of his touch—I hoped to drive out fire with fire.

Me, I want to escape, je veuz m’evader—this dirty world, this dirty body. I never wish to make love again with anything more than the body.

Perhaps I didn’t know it then. I only knew I had to get out of Giovanni’s room.

Even a Reverend’s got the right to take off his clothes sometimes and act like a natural man.

I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore.

She had fallen from that high estate which God had intended for men and women, and she made her fall glorious because it was so complete.

I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.

And Fonny’s body was a total mystery to me – the body of one’s lover always is, no matter how well one gets to know it: it is the changing envelope which contains the gravest mystery of one’s life.

It’s astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body – the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too. You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.