Travel Muse Magazine

I’d like to live in a world where free Bible bins were replaced with copies of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room — where Salvation Army shoppers are lured to an unassuming box of words and later recite lines like, “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition” (p. 92) as they cross their hands and pray at night.

Baldwin wrote about this world in The Fire Next Time. He grew up in the church, preaching as a teenager in Harlem before he became a literary great. When he was 24, he left New York for Paris with $40 — escaping American racism in an act he believed, according to The New York Times, saved his life and made it possible for him to write.

I first picked up the 169 page novel my junior year of college in Queer Ancestry class. It had been on my “to read” list for a few years and it was finally time to crack it open around 11 p.m. the night before class. I was afraid I would be asleep by page 30 or give up and “wake up early” to read it, but I quickly found myself — lamp-lit, a couple teas deep, with my duvet half on the floor — on the last page at 6 a.m. It was one of those all nighters I knew in my soul, where I discovered something destined for me. Was it Paris? Baldwin? Illicit love maybe.

Giovanni’s Room is a 1956 novel about an American named David who falls in love with an Italian bartender named Giovanni and cannot bring himself to say so — because he cannot accept himself, and that internal war makes intimacy impossible. It is a book about denial, about inferiority —  feelings the queer community and ancestors have been plagued with for centuries. It became one of those books I wish I had found sooner, but needed to wait in order to take in its full meaning. I’ve never physically been to Paris, but Baldwin has taken me there every time.

Paris is a city of lovers, art, writers, of things devastatingly beautiful and achingly hopeful, of everything you imagined and everything you didn’t. Baldwin’s Paris lives not near the Eiffel Tower or the Seine, but mostly inside a small dark room on the eastern edge of the city. Two men tried to love each other and one of them couldn’t let himself. Find your copy first — make it your companion from the moment you land, then use this guide to see Paris with Baldwin…

Your copy

Giovanni’s Room is a book that should earn its wear (leave the Kindle at home). Let your edition be the coaster under your espresso cup, a stabilizer for your rocking café table, a folder for your transit tickets and other scraps you can’t help but take home — make it a part of your trip.

There is an undeniable magic to letting a book warp, fray and collect sand on your travels, especially if you purchase it from a bookstore in Paris. Lucky for us, the “largest, best-stocked gay bookstore” in the city, Les Mots à la Bouche, has been operating since 1980. The English section was added early on because gay Americans couldn’t find the books they were looking for anywhere else in Paris. Browse fiction, essays and art books across two floors — upstairs for literature, downstairs in a vaulted stone basement for film, theater, art and video.

giovanni’s neighborhood

Place de la Nation is a wide, worn circle on the eastern edge of Paris — a place you won’t find on other guides. Giovanni lived in a room somewhere near here. Baldwin tells us so in a single word, when the two men leave the bar together for the first time and Giovanni gives the taxi driver his address — “Nation” (63). 

“I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room,” writes Baldwin (p. 85). Walk the streets radiating off the circle — let it be a little ugly, a little tired. Imagine a room or that room.

david’s borrowed money

David, broke, meets Jacques — older, generous, and not without his own motives — at a rather nice restaurant on Rue de Grenelle and walks away with ten thousand francs before the aperitifs are finished (p. 26).

La Petite Chaise has been on this street since 1680, when it started as a wine shop — making it arguably the oldest restaurant in Paris. Split the confit lamb shoulder, their hand-cut tartare, or the duck breast and think about what you’d do with ten thousand francs. Expect to spend €60-90 per person with wine. Reservations recommended.

Baldwin’s cafe

Baldwin skipped around Saint-Germain-des-Prés early in his Paris years and often found his way to the second floor of Café de Flore, notebook and fountain pen in hand. In his essay “Equal in Paris,” he wrote that he consumed “rather a lot of coffee and, as evening approached, rather a lot of alcohol.”

It was there he met Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, and where he wrote much of Go Tell It on the Mountain. Bring something to write with, go upstairs and order a cappuccino.

cruising grounds

Once (and still) a red-light district full of neon lights and prostitution, Pigalle was the kind of neighborhood that tolerated what the rest of the city wouldn’t. Baldwin cruised these streets knowing, as he wrote, “You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back” (p. 116).

Pigalle has become one of Paris’ “most sought-after neighborhoods” with cocktail bars where the cabarets were and restaurants where the sex shops stood. (To be clear, there are still many sex shops here, particularly along the Boulevard de Clichy near the Place Pigalle. This is also where you’ll find the famed Moulin Rouge.) You’re visiting a neighborhood mid-transformation, aware of the impermanence that has always defined it — whatever it is today, it won’t be this exactly again.

The Market

David arrives at Les Halles with Giovanni wanting to leave, but unable to. When Baldwin wrote this scene, Les Halles was the heart of Paris — a massive wholesale food market that had fed the city since the 12th century. Picture vendors, the smell of meat and fish, crates of citrus and wet cobblestone.

“We had arrived at the choked boulevards and impassable sidestreets,” Baldwin writes (p. 47). The market was torn down and moved to Rungis in 1972, and the city filled the hole with the Nelson Mandela Garden. Although the market is gone, stand in the garden with Saint-Eustache behind your back and listen to the boulevards.

Guillaume’s Bar

Guillaume’s bar is where it all begins, a catalyst and a curse, a safe and dangerous home, yet also an uncomfortable mirror for David. Guillaume, the bar’s exploitative owner, ultimately sets in motion the chain of events that leads to Giovanni’s death.

Although the bar is a fictional place, the queer bar as a site of possibility and risk has a long literary ancestry. Oscar Wilde — a poet, author, and one of the most famous queer writers in history — was tried and imprisoned for “gross indecency” in 1895 and died in Paris in 1900. Wilde’s, a hotel bar named in his honor, is as good a place as any to raise a glass to that lineage.

the queer district

Le Marais is where the rainbow flags are now —  gay-friendly bars, clubs, bookstores, the visibility that Baldwin’s Paris never had. Queer life in Paris has never stayed in one place for long, moving from Montmartre and Pigalle to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, to Rue Sainte-Anne, to Les Halles, and — for now — to Le Marais. Gay people began arriving in the 1980s, drawn by affordable rents from the area being shunned by Parisians at the time.

Walk the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie knowing you are standing in the latest version of something very old — a community always looking for a new room.

Baldwin’s Stomping Grounds

Baldwin lived on Rue de Verneuil, moving between cheap hotels during his early Paris years. The Luxembourg Gardens were steps away — over 60 acres of gravel paths, fountains, iron chairs and 102 statues, created in 1612 upon the initiative of Queen Marie de Medici.

By this point in the trip you have been sitting, watching, taking it all in — exactly what Baldwin did here. He was always characterizing, writing, dreaming. Find a chair and a croissant and put something on the page.

The Writers’ Café

A few streets from the Luxembourg Gardens, Baldwin landed at Café Tournon alongside Richard Wright, Chester Himes and other Black American writers gathered in the 1950s — drinking coffee, playing pinball, talking through everything from art to racism.

It was among those writers that Baldwin was drafting his novel with only white characters. As he put it, “I certainly could not possibly have — not at that point in my life — handled the other great weight, the ‘Negro problem.’ The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book. There was no room for it.” 

Much of Giovanni’s Room was written a few miles away at Le Select in Montparnasse — another well-preserved Art Deco café. He made the book anyway. It has been in print for nearly 70 years for a reason, and you have walked the city that made it possible.

Why should you pick up a copy?

I’m drawn to Giovanni’s Room because it doesn’t sensationalize the queer experience into some ridiculous Netflix Original — it showcases the often ugly and truly shameful parts of loving someone a world won’t permit you to. And I don’t even mean loving someone openly, I mean being able to love that person at all. 

Baldwin himself said the novel is “not so much about homosexuality, it is what happens if you are afraid that you finally cannot love anybody.” My heart just can’t take it. And that mirrors an ever-present tension in the queer community today — being born knowing something nobody else does, being forced to figure it out with no rulebook and asked to live with that quietly while fighting and being conscious of it every single day. The cost of that fight, Baldwin shows us, is the people we could have loved.

It aches, relentlessly, because it was never history to begin with. David’s internal war — the shame, suppression, and inability to be present in a love he can’t stop running from — has never stopped being fought. The queer experience has certainly shifted, but it hasn’t softened. We have rainbow flags and legal marriages, and we also have many book bans, legislative rollbacks and the active dismantling of rights that were never secure to begin with. 

David flees America for Paris the same way Baldwin did, and the same way countless queer people have fled hostile towns, families, legislation, searching for that place. But Baldwin revealed that you may be able to escape, travel somewhere foreign, but your “self” is a nonnegotiable travel item. David crosses an ocean and finds the same war waiting on the other shoreline. Giovanni’s room is supposed to be his solution — a private world, sealed away — but that ultimately gets taken away. Undoubtedly, Baldwin created a classic to hold close to our chests and something for many to hoard in tote bags forever, something that knows us, something sacred. 5/5 stars.

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