Alt: two men slow dance together in a kitchen (still from Wong Kar Wai's 1997 film Happy Together). Overlaid bits, computed from each pixel's RGB representation, flicker on and off, representing the digitization and surveillance of love. The bits both erase and obscure: a simultaneous warning (of how digital surveillance threatens love) and expression of optimism (there remain deep personal truths such surveillance cannot capture). I wanted the image to mirror Giovanni's Room and to be as visually arresting as the images the novel evokes, but could not find any directly referencing the novel that made sense. I chose a still from Happy Together because the film takes on a similar valence as Giovanni's Room, telling a story of love and pain that unfolds across the globe from home.

"If your countrymen think that privacy is a crime, so much the worse for your country."

This is what Giovanni tells David in Giovanni's Room. It is a declaration of his right to love David free from the surveillance of the state, as it comes after David tells Giovanni homosexuality is criminalized in America.

Privacy is essential to love. I had the luxury of indulging in James Baldwin in a quarter-long English class dedicated to the writer, and this idea seemed to surface again and again. Maybe it's because, as we drew from a number of his works, to love somebody is to see somebody — demanding the presence of something the lover can see that others cannot.

For example, in Giovanni's Room (which Baldwin calls a novel about "what happens to you if you're afraid to love anybody" in a 1984 Village Voice interview), Giovanni sees David with a clarity David is unable to reciprocate. He sees that David will leave; that David cannot really go home; that David is afraid to love him; that David does not really love Hella either.

And in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin writes to his nephew of his brother (his nephew's father): "I don't know if you've known anybody from that far back; if you've loved anybody that long...you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort. Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his...I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it." Baldwin's love gives him a perspective others cannot access; indeed, it gives him a view even his brother does not have.

But the present is shaped by a continual diminishing of privacy. Communication, once done in spaces in which we could reasonably ensure no third party was watching, is now laid bare and ossified in digital channels at least part of the time. Moves to digitize love itself (in particular, romantic love, through curious 21st-century inventions like algorithmic matchmaking) reduce love from a liberating act of social responsibility to a highly choreographed and hypervisible performance defined by rules (for example, rules about when it is acceptable to tell somebody you love them, as if this should not be said as soon as it is true).

Moreover, we are subject not just to the collection of private data by the state and the corporation but also to its aggregation and evaluation: in other words, attempts to visibilize us, often beyond what we have consented to. This reality seems antithetical to the ones Baldwin may have envisioned as he repeatedly expressed the importance of privacy to love.

For example, in "Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood," published in 1985 in Playboy, Baldwin writes: "It is virtually impossible to trust one's human value without the collaboration or corroboration of that eye — which is to say that no one can live without it. One can, of course, instruct that eye as to what to see, but this effort, which is nothing less than ruthless intimidation, is wounding and exhausting: While it can keep humiliation at bay, it confirms the fact that humiliation is the central danger of one's life. And since one cannot risk love without risking humiliation, love becomes impossible." This eye includes those entities which surveil: we behave differently when we know we are being watched, and when we say we "have nothing to hide," we confirm our fear of our own humiliation over our belief in our own freedom.

Baldwin makes even more direct a statement in the Village Voice interview, in which he calls his own sexuality, and his process of learning it, an intensely private matter and eschews the label of "gay," describing it as a response to the "false accusation" somebody who might adopt it has "no right to be here." Both the interview and the essay comment on the effort to assign love some label that not just defines it by who does it but concedes queer love is shameful when, as he writes at the start of "Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood": "there is a man in every woman and a woman in every man." The stifling of such love with such shame is a central tragedy of Giovanni's Room.

"I suppose what I am really saying is that one's sexual preference is a private matter," Baldwin says, in that same interview. "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." Yet our present moment is punctuated by the lengthening of this list of institutions that intrude and interfere.

So what do we do? I'm not sure. I've had the privilege of loving a few people, especially during my undergraduate years. I always made a point of practicing this love in the most present, most protective, most offline and finally most freeing way that I could — fiercely guarding those deep personal truths digital surveillance cannot capture. But I'm a very private person by nature and I just can't imagine it any other way. I don't deny that digital spaces of belonging can be magical, can bring love within easier reach. I just can't help but think of every action in such a space as a performance for some bigger eye, whether it's watching or not, whether it does or doesn't care.

I write this from San Francisco; it is summer 2024. Digital surveillance seems to abound here and the city voted for more of it just a few months ago. Even so, I can't in good faith say something like "we should all use Tor!" — everyone deserves privacy, not just those who know how to find it, and anyway the idea that the individual is responsible for finding it signals, I think, a lack of political imagination. But right now, maybe protecting ourselves and our loved ones fiercely is all we've got.