To the editor:
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Having seen The Amen Corner by James Baldwin at the Goodman Theater [reviewed April 6], I found the most disturbing part of the play not onstage but in the program booklet. In over two pages of biographical text covering Baldwin’s childhood, family, religion, career, influences, and politics, there is one oblique reference to Baldwin’s “sexual feelings that he had largely repressed.” I assumed that this 1950s rhetoric was the Goodman’s shameful way of insinuating that Baldwin was gay.
It is a sad aspect of our current culture that of all places a theater, for many years a safe haven for gays and lesbians, has now joined such institutions as the military, the Republican Party and the Christian church in their policies of exclusion and intolerance. Baldwin spent his life fearlessly speaking out about the injustices around him. I wonder what he would have said about this.
