Life friends, faith friends, souls to call one's own

To save myself, I finally had to leave for good. One makes decisions in funny ways; you make a decision without knowing you've made it. I suppose my decision was made when Malcolm X was killed, when Martin Luther King was killed, when Medgar Evers and John and Bobby and Fred Hampton were killed. I loved Medgar. I loved Martin and Malcolm. We all worked together and kept the faith together. Now they are all dead. When you think about it, it is incredible. I'm the last witness - everybody else is dead. I couldn't stay in America. I had to leave.

That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect,
For slander's mark was ever yet the fair;
The ornament of beauty is suspect,
A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air.
So thou be good, slander doth but approve
Thy worth the greater, being wooed of time;
For canker vice the sweetest buds doth love,
And thou present'st a pure unstainèd prime.

As is widely known to his generation and the one which came after, the government of the United States, and quite especially the governments exposed as unconscionably illegitimate, by Mr Baldwin and the figures he names, undertook to destroy his program of liberation by the very most active repression, overt and covert, against his sexuality as well as his race. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's famous formula for fascism's process of elimination was not practiced sequentially, here, but simultaneously, whence the phrase commie pinko faggot flourished not only in FBI files, but starkly unchallenged in the media. In every Presidential election since that of Richard Nixon in 1968, one Party has openly and exultantly embraced intimidation by bigotry as the calling card of its hardscrabble "base," so that, today, everyone with the slightest prayer of taking vengeance on his fears is a Republican, while Republicans willing to disown them are pathetically shackled. 

Now this Party wishes to stuff Mr George Allen down the throats of Virginians, in the United States Senate again. I encourage readers of this page to greet this reflex of politics by desperate bigotry and unreconstructed superstition as an occasion to take an interest in what it means for yet another generation of absolutely innocent young people, isolated by feder-alism from their own human rights. This page will follow that campaign against humanity with determined attention.


For now, look about you. Shall they leave? Or die in an unjust nation.










Colm Tóibín
Love in a Dark Time
  an interview
  with James Baldwin
Scribner, 2002©


William Shakespeare
Sonnet, LXX, 1-8


iii  Virginia Woolf