Gay is unAfrican (?)

It becomes increasingly difficult for me to shrug off the accusation that my gayness is not African. In fact it is not. I am a product of all the American and British media I consume. This is because all of us learn how to be from other people, and because there have been no people to learn gayness from other than those I found on the internet and on T.V. and in gay magazines. This is where I found the assumptions through which I make sense of my sexual political world.

I know it is not smart right now for a gay African man to be calling himself unAfrican (here is my legitimacy on a silver platter Bob/Kibaki/Museveni/Zuma). The point I want to try and make is that in battling the order of heteronormativity, a new order has been created and that order has diffused (incompletely) from the "west" across the world. There is a normative way of being homosexual, and there is a rubric of sexual identity that purports to describe everyone everywhere. You are either straight, L, G, B, T or I. Each of those letters comes with an identity. You have to chose one.

When Graeme Reid**, an anthropologist, studied "homosexual men and lesbians" in Ermelo, Mpumalanga in 2006, he found that being gay there was "almost synonymous with being effeminate or, in local parlance, a 'lady', or sis-Buti." He found that the separation of gender identity and sexual identity implied by the rubric did not play out in Ermelo. Instead, gay participants in the study saw themselves as members of a "third gender category, separate from men and women". One of the participants said: "In my family it is my mother and we [children] are six . I would say that at home there were three boys and two girls. Then there is me, who is gay." This is just one example in one context where the rubric fails.

So what?

This idea that our discourse around sexuality does not accurately reflect the lives of people who are sexually attracted to people of the same sex has two implications. One is obvious but important - we risk excluding and alienating people when we advocate for sexual freedom and when we study sexuality. The other is a strategic implication. Well, a question really. By using a language of sexuality which is divorced from the culture of a place, from the experiences of people that live there, do we not perpetuate the myth that same-sex attraction is a foreign thing? There is no word to describe my identity in seSotho that I am comfortable using. I resort to english words and I use a language of queerness which has been received from scholarship and activism and pop culture in the west. I wonder if it would not be easier to dismiss the claim that gay is unAfrican if gay was something that we expressed in our languages and was true to the lives of all kinds of South Africans.

In a time when (hetero)sexual identity is a rallying point in a war against cultural imperialism, shouldn’t we be more deliberate in crafting a discourse which is true to our lives, and which is seen to be authentically African, South African, Sotho?


**The study was quoted in a conference paper:
Homosexual and bisexual labels: The need for clear conceptualisations, operationalisations and appropriate methodological designs
by Sandfort T., and Dodge, B.
in From Social Silence to Social Science.... it has a long subtitle and many editors.

I am what I am

I am what I am
I am my own special creation.
So come take a look,
Give me the hook or the ovation.
It's my world that I want to take a little pride in,
My world, and it's not a place I have to hide in.
Life's not worth a damn,
'Til you can say, "Hey world, I am what I am."

Everytime I see a show, I find a new diva to obsess over.  Douglas Hodge in La Cage Aux Folle (The Birdcage). Woweee, this lady can sing!

Diaparo tsa Keresemese

Boys in white dresses with blue satin sashes;
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes;
Silver-white winters that melt into springs;
These are a few of my favorite things

Its time to be jubilant and filled with the spirit again. Starbucks says so, Amazon says so, and the kiddies skating in Bryant park - giddy with laughter say so. I have bought my christmas clothes: A new pair of hefty, manly, leather Timberland boots (the sales assistant told me that they were exactly what I needed and that he was the only one in the city who could sell them to me), and a new winter jacket of questionable pedigree. Christmas clothes used to be a very literal thing when I was about 7. They were clothes that would make their debut in the public on christmas day, or at the earliest, christmas eve. They could be worn inside the house once or twice for about 10 minutes as a sneak preview. Sometimes my parents would ask us to model the clothes once we got home, especially if there were guests around. My parents derived lots of entertainment from making us do stupid things when we were young - they still try. The purchase of those clothes was always an occasion: usually on the weekend after the November payday (or close to it). We would be woken up early on a saturday and rounded up into the car to go to town. Bloemfontein City Centre was such an exciting place to be. All those gaudy people and christmas decorations, the big Edgars clothing shop, Juicy Lucy (a chain restaurant), Pizza... everything anyone ever needed could be found there. I did not break tradition this year, I wore my christmas jacket on the way back from the shop just to check its phlyness on the street... and I may have been strutting to the beat of Lady Marmalade.

Those of you who are close to me may be alarmed to read that I bought leather shoes after all that hand-wringing and prostheletyzing about animal killing and wearing. "He has lost his way" you may be saying, "He has been taken by the city lights and the fast boys". It is true friends, your humble village-mouse has fallen from grace. It all started when I attended a student society film screening mostly because I was hungry and did not feel like having cereal that night. I should have known not to; my mother taught me at an early age to never attend an event hungry, especially not a funeral. I fumbled in after the film had started. By the dim silver glow of the screen I strained to see what kind of wrap I had picked up. It looked like crab meat or chicken. But decidedly more like crab meat. The first bite tasted chicken-ish, there was mustard so I was not sure. By the fourth bite I knew what was happening and I did not stop it... I could not stop it.

I felt sad when the lights came up. My usual rule is that when it is dark enough for one not to see one's own hand stretched out in front of one, then whatever one does in such darkness does not count; one can continue to live as if nothing happened. I knew, though, that not even my rule could erase this tragedy. Fast forward 2 weeks and I am being fed a piece of turkey by a temptress with a tastefully decorated apartment - 3 days after that and I am buying dead animal shoes for the winter. I have been brought down low.

Now I am impatiently waiting for the snow to come. Its not here yet. It better come - for the sake of those two dead cows I will be wearing.