"High-Minded Sex:" An Interesting Tournament Outcome

Literary Hub, an online aggregator, today announced the winner of it's single-elimination tournament aimed at selecting the best example of "literary sex writing" from an initial round of 16 samples taken from four different historical eras.

A passage from James Baldwin's novel "Giovanni's Room" took the blue ribbon after all eight judges weighed in on final round, Lit Hub said, adding that the decision to select Baldwin over Jeanette Winterson was "almost unanimous."


Unfortunately, for the sake of writers wishing to learn sometime from the competition, Lit Hub provided no reasons as to just why the judges chose Baldwin. In earlier knock-out rounds, individual judges more often than not said why they had chosen one passage over another.

But the final outcome was nonetheless very interesting. Back in the first elimination round, when Baldwin was selected over Erica Jong, I made the following observation: "Baldwin is arguably writing more about love than about sex while gently depicting the latter."

Actually, one could go father than that and argue that he doesn't depict sex at all -- neither explicitly nor by means of some writerly metaphor of the sort that wins approbation in classes where the "craft" of writing is taught.

Yes, the two men Baldwin is depicting first somewhat unexpectedly kiss:

"I started to move and to make some kind of joke but Joey mumbled something and I put my head down to hear. Joey raised his head as I lowered mine and we kissed, as it were, by accident. Then, for the first time in my life, I was really aware of another person’s body, of another person’s smell."

This leads to something more, which Baldwin describes as follows:

"I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding, intolerable pain came joy; we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love."

What's different about this compared with all of the other competing passages? There is NO explicit description of one or more sex acts and there is NO mention or description of anyone's genitals, either explicitly or in some fanciful form. So what's the message? The best way to depict sex in literature is to refer to it as opposed to actually describe it.


This outcome is one that I, personally, find very reassuring.

Let's now turn to my novella "Manhattan Morning," about which my most severe critic to date complained: "there's not even a depiction of the sex (that took place between two characters)."

He's right. While readers get a detailed description of just how it came about, if they want to know how the sex, between an older man and a young woman, looked or felt, they are going to have to use their imaginations based on what else they know about these two people, or perhaps on the basis of their own experiences.

Does this approach rise to Baldwin's level of writing? Well, no, but the basic idea is the same.