Baldwin’s controversial novel has prompted complex discussions on many issues, including representations of homosexuality, bisexuality and struggles with internalized homophobia.

The entire story is narrated by David during "the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life," when Giovanni will be executed.

Back home, the two men talk, and David convinces his father to let him skip college and get a job instead.

After a year in Paris, penniless, he calls Jacques, an older gay male acquaintance, to meet him for supper so he can ask for money.

Jacques enjoins David not to be ashamed to feel love; they eat oysters and drink white wine.

They broach the subject of Hella, about whom Giovanni is not worried, but who reveals the Italian's misogynistic prejudices about women and the need for men to dominate them.

He meets a slight acquaintance, Sue, in a bar and they go back to her place and have sex; he does not want to see her again and has only slept with her to feel better about himself.

When he returns to the room, David finds a hysterical Giovanni, who has been fired from Guillaume's bar and falsely accused of stealing from the till.

He leaves, but runs into Giovanni several times and is upset by the "fairy" mannerisms that he is developing and his new relationship with Jacques, who is an older and richer man.

David imagines that Giovanni went back into the bar to ask for a job, going so far as to sacrifice his dignity and agree to sleep with Guillaume.

David, wracked with guilt over Giovanni's impending execution, leaves her and goes to Nice for a few days, where he spends his time with a sailor.

As Valerie Rohy of the University of Vermont argues, "Questions of origin and identity are central to James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, a text which not only participates in the tradition of the American expatriate novel exemplified by Stein and, especially, by Henry James but which does so in relation to the African-American idiom of passing and the genre of the passing novel.

As such, Giovanni's Room poses questions of nationalism, nostalgia, and the constitution of racial and sexual subjects in terms that are especially resonant for contemporary identity politics.

All characters are portrayed through David’s experiences and prejudices; he is the representation of whiteness; he is tall and blond-haired; he grows up in a toxic environment regarding masculinity; and he struggles throughout the novel between his internalised homophobia and his sexuality.

Indeed, Giovanni came from a poor village in southern Italy and had in Paris a precarious job as a bartender with a small wage with which he could only provide for himself, and his class made him darker for someone like David with all his prejudices.

He spends much of his time comparing himself to every man he meets, ensuring that his performative masculinity allows him to "pass" while negotiating the public sphere.

The difference between the two themes, in this case, is that David's manhood seems to be more to do with his sexual relationships, whereas his masculinity is guided by learned public behaviours he claims to inherit from his father.

Baldwin's positioning of manhood within the narrative aligns it also with nationhood, sexuality and all facets of performance within the public sphere.

Josep Armengol linked Baldwin's description of manhood as a way of him navigating his experiences of blackness in the LGBTQ+ community, particularly when David describes his earliest same-sex encounter with a boy called Joey.

The novel negotiates the behavior of publicly LGBTQ+ people alongside those who are still "closeted", like David, and how these differing perspectives have an effect on the individual as well as the community that they navigate.

Ian Young argues that the novel portrays homosexual and bisexual life in western society as uncomfortable and uncertain, respectively.

[7] The novel's protagonist, David, seems incapable of deciding between Hella and Giovanni and expresses both hatred and love for the two, though he often questions if his feelings are authentic or superficial.

As they meet in a Parisian gay bar, David appears reluctant to speak to Giovanni, though once their conversation begins, he falls in love.

However, when asked if the book was autobiographical in an interview in 1980, Baldwin explains he was influenced by his observations in Paris, but the novel was not necessarily shaped by his own experiences:[7] No, it is more of a study of how it might have been or how I feel it might have been.

[3] This was a surprise for his readers, since Baldwin was primarily known for his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, which puts emphasis on the African-American experience.

[10] Highlighting the impossibility of tackling two major issues at once in America, Baldwin stated:[10] I certainly could not possibly have—not at that point in my life—handled the other great weight, the 'Negro problem.'

[3] Baldwin's American publisher, Knopf, suggested that he "burn" the book because the theme of homosexuality would alienate him from his readership among black people.

[13] Giovanni's Room was ranked number 2 on a list of the best 100 gay and lesbian novels compiled by The Publishing Triangle in 1999.

"[9] As Herrera states, much of the criticism was due to Baldwin’s race, even though the novel was deliberately written to focus on sexuality alone.

While Baldwin was attempting to write a more or less "raceless" novel, this could not be achieved due to the societal yearning for racial discourse.