Politics & Power Quote by James A. Baldwin

Baldwin doesn’t ask permission; he changes the terms of the argument. By opening with “Everybody’s journey is individual,” he frames desire as lived experience, not ideology. The deliberately plain follow-up - “If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy” - refuses euphemism and refuses melodrama. It’s a sentence with the moral confidence of a shrug: love happens, and the person narrating it doesn’t owe anyone a defense brief.

Then comes the pivot, and it’s pure Baldwin: a reversal that turns accusation into diagnosis. Calling homosexuality a “disease” isn’t treated as a neutral opinion but as evidence of the accuser’s inner disorder. The line “says more about them than it does about homosexuality” is less a comeback than a method. Baldwin is always interested in what America’s obsessions reveal about America: its terror of difference, its need to police bodies, its habit of disguising fear as morality.

The subtext is that “disease” is a social technology. It medicalizes what it wants to punish, outsourcing prejudice to pseudo-science so the punisher can feel clean. Baldwin, writing in a mid-century United States still steeped in psychiatric pathologizing and legal repression, recognizes that stigma isn’t just insult; it’s infrastructure. His intent is not simply to normalize queer love, but to expose the national psyche that requires queer people as a scapegoat - and to insist that the real pathology is the hunger to label other people’s intimacy as contamination.