The initial and compelling rejection of the person through the distinction of his sexual preference and, or, experience results in an early and traumatic alienation. Giovanni's Room brought Baldwin into the limelight and, also, out of the closet (Ehrenstein 61)
For David, the guidelines of morality had failed; in fact, they had deteriorated into the abyss of cultural concepts, which then came to symbolize freedom and conformity. A small but significant portion of the population has always consisted of people who are "different," who are outside the mainstream for one reason or another: the mentally ill, criminals, people with various physical disabilities and conditions, homosexuals, persons of indeterminate gender, and so on" (Hanson, 2000, p
Baldwin, however, considered himself more of an exile than an expatriate. This means that he was either banished by an 'other' or had chosen or self-exile due to hostile circumstances (Tomlinson 136)
Communication between the two is not re-established until later in the story, when his brother Sonny writes him a letter, chiding him for keeping his distance. Instead Teacher measures the news against his pupils: "I was sure that the first time Sonny had ever had horse, he couldn't have been much older than these boys were now" (Baldwin 123)
We should probably note that Teacher's reflections about Sonny might also be interpreted as a sort of cultural commentary about the late nineteen-fifties: the story mentions by name Charlie "Bird" Parker, the legendary jazz saxophonist, as being a musical idol of Sonny's. It was common knowledge in the nineteen-fifties that Charlie Parker was a heroin addict, as were numerous other jazz performers of the era, both black (like Billie Holiday) and white (like Chet Baker), but in the case of several high-profile black jazz performers like Parker and Holiday this heroin addiction was a matter of the public record when they were arrested -- indeed Johann Hari's recently-published study of the origins of the American War on Drugs notes that the prosecutions of Parker and Holiday for possession of heroin were a combination of publicity stunt and racial profiling, where the Federal Bureau of Narcotics promised Congress it would target not "the good musicians, but the jazz type" (Hari 1)
The worst epithet that the Kennedys had for a man was that he's a "woman." (Vidal 109) It is worth noting first that, like James Baldwin, Vidal was gay and out of the closet even in the pre-Stonewall era: therefore Vidal is not endorsing this homophobic joke about James Baldwin by the President of the United States, he is merely reporting it