Adewale Maja-Pearce, ‘Black and gay: antithesis of the US dream’, April 04, 1986, Volume 50, Issue 14, p. 9.

Adewale Maja-Pearce review of The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction, 1948-1985, James Baldwin.

The review focuses especially on Baldwin’s essay: “Here be Dragons”.

‘Taking as the starting point his appalling experiences as a black homosexual in the New York of the forties, he exposes the howling emptiness at the heart of American society: feeling itself threatened by such a helpless individual, it needs to drive him to the edge of madness in order to be able to attempt to live with itself. It is fine essay. The famous rhetoric is employed to brilliant effect. But the joke is ultimately on him. It first appeared, under the title “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood”, in the pages of Playboy. From the point of view of Playboy this makes perfect sense: ow better to gain intellectual respectability than to commission an essay from of the country’s leading writers? And yet what is Playboy but a paralytically infantile expression of the male idea of sexuality that Baldwin so rightly deplores? In the end one is left with the image of Hugh Hefner, a can of coke in one hand and a busty blonde in the other, having the last laugh. And perhaps Hefner is right. Perhaps it really is the case that there is nothing money can’t buy. Perhaps Baldwin only got beaten up three times a week and twice on Sundays because he was poor, not because he was black and homosexual. After all, it is money which is the basis of the American Dream…’.