Armengol, Josep M. “In the Dark Room: Homosexuality and/as 

Blackness in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.” Signs, 37.3 

(2012): 671-693. Print.

Armengol begins his articles by discussing the controversy of Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room, due to its “explicit homosexual content.”  He argues that Baldwin deflects race on sexuality, which results in whiteness being associated with heterosexuality and blackness being associated with homosexuality.  However, Baldwin exposes the relationship between whiteness and heterosexuality as “unstable, multiple, fractured, and even incoherent,” evidenced in the relationship between David and Giovanni in the novel.  Armengol concludes that Baldwin’s examination of the interconnectedness between homosexuality and heterosexuality and whiteness and blackness in effect reveals the constructedness of such categories and divisions.