James Baldwin is an African American writer, playwright and Civil Rights Activist, born in Harlem, New York City, to a poor unmarried woman, Emma Berdis Jones. For a short time in his youth he followed his father's steps as a preacher, and this has been among the influences on his prose. He left home at age of 17 and subsequent travels included long expatriation in France. Baldwin died of stomach cancer.

His novel Giovanni's Room, was about gay love and became a metaphor for the proverbial closet. Baldwin was not afraid to speak out on issues of oppression. An expatriate, Baldwin urged American society to discard its myths. He felt the most destructive one was "white superiority."

As an openly gay black writer, Baldwin occupied a key role in fictionalizing gay life in a racialized society, and presenting it not, as was frequently the case in the pre-Stonewall days, as a desperate existence of suffering individuals, but as the identity to be embraced and celebrated.

An excellent Philadelphia gay bookstore borrowed the title for its name.