Goldstein: So you think of homosexuality as a universal?
Baldwin: Of course. There's nothing in me that is not in everybody else. But homosexual is not a noun, at least in my book.
Goldstein: What part of speech would it be?
Baldwin: Perhaps a verb. You see, I can only talk about my own life. I loved a few people and they loved me. It had nothing to do with these labels. Of course, the world has made all kinds of words for us, but that's the world's problem.
Goldstein: Is it problematic for you, the idea of having sex with other people who are identified as gay?
Baldwin: Well, you see, my life has not been like that at all. The people who were my lovers were never, well, they word gay wouldn't have meant anything to them.
Goldstein: That means that they moved in a straight world.
Baldwin: They moved in the world.
Goldstein: Do you think of the gay world as being a false refuge?
Baldwin: I think, perhaps it imposes limitation which is unnecessary. It seems to me simply a man is a man, a woman is a woman, and who they go to bed with is nobody's business but theirs. I suppose what I'm really saying is that one's sexual preference is a private matter. I resent the interference of the state, or the church, or any institution in my only journey to whatever it is we are journeying toward. but it has been made a public question by the institutions of this country. I can see how the gay world comes about in response to that, and to contradict myself, I suppose, or more precisely, I hope, that it is easier for the transgressor to become reconciled with himself or herself, than it was for many people in my generation—and it was difficult for me. it is difficult to be despised, in short, and if the so-called gay movement can cause men and women, boys and girls to come to some kind of terms with themselves more speedily, and with less pain, then that's a very great advance. i'm not sure it can be done on that level. my own point of view, speaking out of Black America, when I had to try to answer that stigma that species of social curse, it seemed a great mistake to answer in the language of the oppressor. As long as I react to ''nigger,'' as long as I protest my case on evidence of assuptions held by others, I'm simply reinforcing those assumptions. As long as I complain about being oppressed, the oppressor is in consolation of knowing that I know my place, so to speak.
excerpt from: Go the way your blood beats: An interview with James Baldwin by Richard Goldstein., 1984