In James Baldwin’s novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain”, the protagonist John, an adolescent gay boy with a strict preacher father, secretly goes to see a movie in Manhattan. He never reveals the title of the movie but describes the plot in detail and reads the tagline on the poster: ‘There’s a fool like him in every family — and a woman next door to take him over’. The movie is “Of Human Bondage”. 

The novel is semi-autobiographical so…