Love, loneliness, sexuality, violence...there's no escaping the fact that Baldwin's text is jam-packed with topics that your students may not be wholly familiar or comfortable with. That isn't a problem, though; in fact, it's an opportunity to expand their literary horizons.

Perhaps the most obvious topic we're talking about is queer theory, which considers how sexuality isn't a black and white concept. It's not just boy meets girl, falls in love, and lives happily ever after. Usually students will only begin reading material on this topic in the later stages of high school, if not college, so Baldwin's novel may be the students' first time thinking about all of this. That's not to say that this will be difficult to teach. In fact, it's pretty exciting to get to introduce them to these new ideas.