“Oh, well,” said Giovanni, “these absurd women running around today, full of ideas and nonsense, and thinking themselves equal to men—quelle rigolade!—they need to be beaten half to death so that they can find out who rules the world.”

I laughed. “Did the women you knew like to get beaten?”

He smiled. “I don’t know if they liked it. But a beating never made them go away.” We both laughed.

Baldwin's writing is frequently transcendent, but I know too many het men who read stories about gay men to ruminate and mourn some imagined homosexual awakening they may have had while they continue to mistreat women, so the blatant misogyny in Giovanni's Room left a bad taste in my mouth. I hate that gay men get an uncritical free pass as allies when they're so often misogynist pieces of shit. If I wanted to listen to a white gay man (yes I know Baldwin is Black, I mean his characters) talk about how women are inferior I would hit up the forty year old pro-cop anti-abortion conspiracy theorist I used to work with at Starbucks. I don't need it in my literature, and I'm not going to make myself care about these characters.

I suggest looking instead to work about gay men that stands in solidarity with women, like Captain Ni’mat’s Last Battle, for example.