Over the past few years in this country, we’ve been having a larger conversation about what it means to be a man. Or, more broadly, what maleness means. We all know what we ought to believe a man is, because every patriarchal culture (which is to say, most cultures) has taught us that to be a man is to possess variations of the same few key qualities, many of which arguably had more value in an age when physical might was actually necessary for human survival.

The fact that more people — males, females and those of us who consider themselves neither — are having more wide-ranging discussions about those supposed prerequisites can make it seem like being a man has become more complicated. But in fact, it’s never been easy for many of us to follow the conventions of gender (though females, I’d posit, are granted more latitude than men when it comes to certain expressions of our gender identity — our runner-up prize for a historic lack of power). The difference is that now the definitions of maleness are slowly, creakingly, expanding: or, for the braver among us, being discarded altogether.

And yet exploding age-old ideas of manhood is hard and long-term work. The writer James Baldwin was 32 when his second novel, “Giovanni’s Room,” was published in 1956; in the years since, the book — a portrait of a romantic sexual relationship between two men in postwar Paris, Baldwin’s home, off and on, for much of his adult life — has become a canonical work in the queer (and black, and American) literary canons. But as the critic Hilton Als notes in his sharp, searching reconsideration of Baldwin’s classic, the novel is more complicated than it’s credited for being, as well as rich with self-loathing and doubt; it is, he argues, a book Baldwin “had to write, less as a way of discussing his sexuality than as a way of discussing what America had done to his sexuality, along with his capacity for intimacy and, indeed, the whole notion of masculinity” itself. What makes “Giovanni’s Room” radical is Baldwin’s refusal to cleave to what the larger literary establishment thought he ought to write about: He was a black man who dared to write a white protagonist; he was a gay man who dared to put queerness on the page. He did so during a time when it was perilous to be black or gay, when to be either (much less both) was to never be granted full humanity from his country of birth.