Baldwin attempts to deal honestly with a number of sexual relationships most of which were taboo to previous writers. In Another Country it is suggested that security, order and common sense are illusions, and that only people like Rufus, Vivaldo, Cass and Eric, who submit themselves to the mystery and chaos of their emotions, are truly alive…. For Baldwin and his characters, sexual experience involves an entry into an unknown violent country…. Most people fear this journey into the unknown and never dare to examine the reality of their sexual impulses. In his treatment of sex, Baldwin has much in common with the writers examined by Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony. The descent into sexual experience is a journey undertaken only by certain heroic kinds of people towards a truth which is both painful and beautiful. In the novel sex is linked with images of infection, disease, poison, yet it is only through sex that the characters can overcome their isolation, and express their tenderness for each other. (pp. 116-17)

For Baldwin, therefore, to live, to perceive reality, is to submit oneself to suffering and chaos. Breakdown, neurosis, even suicide are a proper reaction to the human condition, for otherwise we are escaping from the truth. (p. 117)

Much of the novel suggests that homosexual relationships are the most real and satisfying for a man. As in David Storey's Radcliffe or Angus Wilson's Hemlock and After, the homosexual becomes the lonely, sensitive hero, whose perverse sexual appetites mark him out from the apathetic normality of the majority of people. The homosexual who accepts his own instincts becomes a hero because he is not afraid to acknowledge that sexual appetite cannot be circumscribed by social conventions. Perhaps Baldwin is particularly sympathetic towards homosexuality because such sterile relationships bring none of the problems of mixed marriage, the difficulties of the children and the heightening of the conflict between male and female. Marriage involves the participants in a public relationship, while the homosexual can retain his individuality unaffected by social commitments. In Another Country Eric alone achieves 'a sense of himself' because he is not afraid of the chaotic, violent passions imposed upon him by his sexual nature. Much of the violence of society is seen as the result of a failure in this type of recognition, a frustration of the true self by meaningless social taboos.

Baldwin's obsession with sex at times seems adolescent; but he has a marvellous ability to create character, and to depict with understanding and pity the violent emotions by which his people are beset. (p. 118)