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Authored by David Leeming, a biographer of both Baldwin and Delaney who also served as Baldwin’s secretary-assistant from 1964 to 1967, this chapter recounts key episodes in the relationship between Baldwin and Delaney.

In this chapter, Hilton Als meditates on the legacy of queerness left by Beauford Delaney for Black artists. Als imagines the initial encounter between Delaney and James Baldwin in New York City and their recognition of each other as queer Black outsiders.

In this chapter, Ed Pavlić accounts for the interlude in James Baldwin's life between leaving Hollywood in 1969 and the summer of 1970—immediately before his full-time residence in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, where he would complete No Name in the Street. Baldwin aimed to retreat from his public and moment-by-moment engagement with American racial politics so that he could assess what had happened during the 1960s, reengage his private life, and figure out where to go next. The chapter covers his time in Istanbul, including the months in which he lived with Beauford Delaney, and is based on letters Baldwin wrote to his brother David during that time.

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