Winnie Mandela and Mugabe are ferocious homophobes. However, I've not read that there any appreciable anti-gay sentiment expressed in the anti-apartheid struggle.
Nice webpage on Simon Nkoli, gay anti-apartheid activist, http://www.mask.org.za/SECTIONS/ArtsAndCulture/ac_new/museums%20&%20history/nkoli1.htm
REVIEWS: R038 Date Published:9/13/1995 www.ctheory.net/text_file?pick=255 Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Editors
Queer Cry of Freedom Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron, eds., Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa, New York: Routledge, 1995.
Michael Dartnell
Reading Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa brought back memories of very different (and privileged and safe) subversion and desire from my own teen-age years.
I remember going one day with my mother to the Dominion supermarket in my native suburban Winnipeg. I was about 14 or 15 years old. My hormones were racing and I knew that I was homosexual, that I wanted to kiss men, be close to them. But I had no idea of how to satisfy my desire. I didn't know any homosexuals and was terrified by any association with them. I didn't know what it meant to be "out" or what it would mean to me in just a few years. All I knew was that I wanted my own sex. I had extensively experimented with my best friend. I loved every minute of it, loved him passionately, felt hurt and confused by his ambiguity, discomfort and rejection of my affections as each love-making session finished. (He now - sputter - lives with his wife and child somewhere in Dallas). It wasn't enough for me, even then. I sensed that there were others like me, but where? As my mother compared prices down the aisle, I moved swiftly over to a magazine stand. I was keenly aware that suburban Winnipeg in the early 1970s did not hold many answers to my questions, but nonetheless took to regular, furtive reconnaissance through the supermarket's tame selection of home-maker and fashion magazines. I hoped to catch a glimpse of a naked man. A few years earlier, I had learnt to keep an eye on women's magazines after my sister brought home a feature article on a male Italian fashion model who bared his buttocks. I proceeded like a Soviet agent in a US embassy office: thorough, swift and intense. Oh, those secret thrills! I raced wide-eyed through the magazines, aware of an intense hard-on, fearing my mother's return.
As I glanced over one local magazine on this particular day, the word "homosexual" screamed back. I nonchalantly dove on the publication, turned the pages and found an article about Winnipeg's "homosexual problem". Wow! I was having a homosexual problem myself! In shocked tones, Prairie citizens were informed about the dozens of men who haunted the grounds of the provincial legislative building day and (especially) night. I stood dumbfounded. At last! And in the centre of the city? I didn't know it at the time, but my "find" (an early indication of my future academic research skills) would not only (directly) lead to sex and affection, but also (indirectly) to self-identity and community. All this (!) from a glance in a Dominion supermarket, muzak lulling my unsuspecting mother, the smell of hot dogs and oven-fresh baked goods wafting through the air.
Despite early traumas, anxiety and confusion, I today realize that I was fortunate. I am, after all, a white Canadian male who later went to graduate school and escaped to larger gay and lesbian communities in Toronto, Montreal and elsewhere. Not every fag, dyke or bisexual has access to these opportunities. However, I was often reminded of my early fears and excitement over my "secret" as I read the excellent collection of essays in Defiant Desire. One essay, "My childhood as an adult molester",1 defied anything I could have imagined in my old closeted days in Winnipeg. The South African environment is obviously infinitely more hostile than even suburban Winnipeg in the early 1970s, but it also provides surprising positive and negative measures of and analogies with North American queer life. Surprised and delighted, I discovered a queer ("moffie" - fag, "manvrou" - dyke, literally: "man-woman") community that is ready to dare and push for its own advancement and interests in South Africa's budding democratic culture. The South African scene is a striking contrast compared to Canada, where gays and lesbians turn out by the hundreds of thousands to celebrate Toronto's Pride Day, but all too often fall back into a polite and complacent tolerance of intolerance that puts far too little heat on the newly emboldened homophobes in our public life.
Gevisser and Cameron's edited collection covers a range of South African queer experience: historical overview, legal issues, drag balls, outlaw lesbians, saunas, township gay and lesbian life, butch/femme role-playing, top/bottom role-playing, military fairies, black gay activism, Winnie Mandela's homophobia, AIDS activism, gay literature, personal testimony and tribute, and lesbian organizing. The scope is broad and fascinating, a celebration of South Africa's rich queer diversity that literally left me laughing and crying, cringing and cheering. It is a stunning testimony to the South African gay, lesbian and bisexual will to live as they want to live, love as they want to love, contribute as they can to their brothers and sisters. The contributors and many others mentioned in the text engaged in their self-discovery despite a racist, fascist state that waged war on them while it tried to exterminate most of the population. Their defiance of a state gone mad exhibits a will to live/love/passion that has much to teach queers in the ecstasy-soaked raves of the West.
Since the mid-eighties, queer studies in North America has seen a panoply of discourses that view the body as a political site subject to censor and moralization. For lesbians, the struggle bravely strives to appropriate their own cultural, social, emotional and political space. No doubt but that this battle has a long way to go. However, the very fact that a chronically-ignored group in society is beginning to publicly define its issues is a new and significant development in the sexual wastelands of North America. A paradoxical measure of "success" is the very attention accorded the lesbophobic, ill-considered, and apparently well-paid ranting of Camille Paglia, Newt Gingrich's objective buddy. Gay male "discourse" on the body (if it can be called this at all) is quite different. Despite superficial improvement and uneasy ambiguity over the fact that they are, after all, "men" in a patriarchy, gay men in North America face daunting challenges within themselves (not only in the US Congress or Canadian House of Commons). Gay male attention to the body asserts a "masculinity with a difference" that has spawned an array of closet machos disputing who does the best drag, who has the biggest "tits" (pectorals), who does more drugs, who parties most, who consumes most, who fucks most.2 In this light, gay men haven't carved out much space for themselves as a unique group away from the glimmer of the dance hall disco ball. Gay-male writers such as Randy Conner, Arthur Evans and Mark Thompson3 have charted out a new "gay spirituality", but are still marginal to a highly commercialized mainstream gay-male culture that, burnt-out and numbed-out by AIDS/HIV, is somnabulantly plunging into drug-induced hedonism. Gay men need a spiritual response to the emotional burn-out fostered by the AIDS holocaust, homophobia, drug and alcohol abuse, rootlessness and domestic violence. They need nourishment to begin to come to grips with the emotions and energy necessary to sustain their identities and political battles against a determined and well-organized set of foes. Just as importantly, it would help them flourish as individuals who (yes, it's true Dorothy) eventually turn 30.
Although its tone is in many ways political and socio-cultural, Defiant Desire hits home at this spiritual-emotional level. A sexual minority that has survived in an unbelievably hostile setting, brazenly claims its rightful place within a triumphant liberation movement, stands up to left-wing homophobia and boldly moves into national politics through marches, organization and the constitution of the new South Africa. <SNIP>
Michael Pugliese