‘In a Queer Time and Place’: Queerolization in Giovanni’s Room and Black-Label

James Baldwin and Léon Damas have never been compared in terms of their representation of exile and uprootedness in the capital of France. More than the geographical and material distance from their respective native countries, which in fact they have left with a certain disgust, there is the constant discomfort of engaging with the Other (the same sex individual or the other ethnic different sex partner). Both writers have therefore been pioneers in the description of a double impasse and a double line to cross: as black subjects in a white dominated world, and as men who felt also attracted to same sex-partners. While Damas was not (at least not outing his gayness as Baldwin has done) queer, he adresses in Black-Label (1956) many of the same anxieties as those in Giovanni’s Room (1956) and they are related to performing black masculinity in a white dominant heterosexual racist society (Gyssels 2010)