The CT Pride Pink Ball

I have been receiving emails meant for the volunteers of this year's Cape Town Pride festivities. Today's email talks about the upcoming Pink Ball. They are flying in a speaker from the U.S.:

You will also be privileged to be addressed by Melanie Nathan. US based, South African born and qualified, Melanie is internationally recognised for being outspoken on LGBTI and women’s rights issues and her writings about corrective rape have been enormously significant in terms of getting the SA Ministry of Justice to consider legislation. This is an address not to be missed! Thank You to British Airways for flying Melanie to South Africa!

Why is Cape Town Pride flying someone in from the US to address the issue of Corrective Rape, when there are people in Cape Town and in South Africa who have not only survived but have created safe-spaces for women, and have organized around this and other issues that affect women? Working class lesbian women (who bear the brunt of homophobic violence) can speak for themselves. We need not speak for them, and we need not speak about them. Working-class LGBT-identified organizations and their leaders do not lack intelligence, they lack resources. We should be creating opportunities to learn about their needs and their strategies, with the purpose of supporting those needs and strategies.

What a wasted opportunity Cape Town Pride!

Conan the Barbarian: The Musical (Arnold Schwarzenegger)

Crush your enemies, see them driven before you.
Hear the lamentation of the women!

For more ridicumusicals: http://jonandal.tumblr.com/

Prelude to Skiing

I am well on course in my mission to accumulate American experiences before Immigration Services (in concert with some administrators at my school) ask me to leave the country. Yesterday I went skiing on Hunter Mountain. To be more accurate, I went skiing down a smallish mound of snow next to the mountain. It was hard work trying not to ski right over the dozen or so deliriously happy little children sharing the slope with us. Our ski-teacher had done a better job of teaching us how to go than he had of teaching us how to stop. Anyways, I like to think of the situation as a dynamic obstacle course.

A seasoned veteran of symphony concerts and other high-culture events in Bloemfontein, I was expecting to be the only black person at the resort. To my surprise, there were 6 or 7 of us. I think all of us met at the equipment hire queue. Within a few minutes we were all standing next to each other. Each silently wondering what the other was doing here.

Talking about the queue, the devil is in the details! No one told us that equipment hire is like trying to board an international flight (or going to the Department of Home Affairs). Except, as Janet put it, at every station you are given more things to carry. We queued to get to the computer terminals at which we entered our details and received a print-out that then permitted us to go to the second queue. At the second queue we waited to get to the lady who took our printout and equipment hire ticket and stapled them together, and allowed us to the third queue. At the third queue we were given the ski boots (like a straight-jacket for your ankle), that made it difficult to walk to the fourth queue. The fourth queue was for checking-in our personal stuff and the fifth to get the helmet that is (according to the last of 3 waivers we signed) "protective at slow speeds".

For the 6th challenge, they changed things up a bit and instead had us stand in a 10-people-deep huddle across about twenty meters where about 5 employees shouted numbers out over each other and over the hubbub of the scrum. (We had been given a piece of paper with a number on it at one of the 5 previous stations). After 15-20 minutes when my number was called out and I triumphantly tried to collect the ski's, it was pointed out that I needed the paper from station 1 and my rental ticket which had been stapled together by the lady at station 2. My heart sank. I had lost it. I had lost my boarding pass. I had to return to station 5 and look for it. Fortunately, it was on the floor behind the counter.

By the time we finished getting the ski's, finding the place where the ski-lessons were given (an odyssey in its own right) and taking the lesson, Janet and I agreed that it was time for us to have lunch and a beer as a reward for the hard work, and so we did.

Questions and 3am thoughts

1. Snow is ugly. And it is unpleasant. Why are you dreaming of a white christmas?

2. Go-go boys are cute. Why do they always leave an unexplained oily residue on the fingers?

3. You will never meet a nice boy at the club. Go home and watch a rom-com.

4. Grey sweatpants are always ugly. Bhuti, why are you trying to sit next to me in the subway? And why are your thighs all up in my grill? Can you not press your knees together and look straight ahead like everyone else?

5. Facebook is addictive. But at least I'm not on crack.

A poem I cant get out of my head

A Song for Many Movements
by Audre Lorde

Nobody wanted to die on the way
caught between ghosts of whiteness
and the real water
none of us wanted to leave
our bones
on the way to salvation
three planets to the left
a century of light years ago
our spices are separate and particular
but our skins sing in complimentary keys
at a quarter to eight mean time
we were telling the same stories
over and over and over.

Broken down gods survive
in the crevasses and mudpots
of every beleaguered city
where it is obvious
there are too many bodies
to cart to the ovens
or gallows
and our uses have become
more important than our silence
after the fall
too many empty cases
of blood to bury or burn
there will be no body left
to listen
and our labor
has become more important
than our silence.

Our labor has become
more important
than our silence.

The South African LGBT Flag

Late last year, at South Africa's biggest annual queer party, a brand-new "South African Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered flag" was launched. The setting was the annual Mother City Queer Project (around 10,000 attendees) whose theme this year was "Gay and South African Pride". The designer of the flag, Hugh Brockman, says "I truly believe we (the GLBT community) put the dazzle into our Rainbow nation and this flag is a symbol of just that…look at all these costumes, this event, even Cape Town at large. It is a testimony that we as the Gay community have a lot to offer in skills, talent, inspiration, business (millions in PINK MONEY) and life".

I was reminded of this flag when I watched Chimamanda Adichie's TED talk entitled "The Danger of the Single Story". Ms Adichie warns us about the power of stories in framing our understanding of the world, particularly about peoples. She warns us to be wary of the single story - the single, neat narrative that claims to tell the story of all of a people, a culture, a country. There are many stories, and understanding comes from hearing many of those.

This flag represents to me, a single story of gayness. Gayness is white, affluent, young, male, attractive, fun, liberated (or in the process), talented, worldly, classy. Gayness is "dazzling" with "skills, talent, inspiration, business". As pointed out by the website of Cape Town Pride, "It is an international fact that the LGBTI market is both affluent and influential… On the whole, South African LGBTI individuals are high-yield, trend-setting, brand-conscious, loyal and have ample disposable income." This is not possible with our high poverty and unemployment rates. Obviously CTPride is not talking about all of us.

The flag was designed by few, is owned by few, but it claims to represent many. In doing so, this flag does not unite us, it obscures our own brown, fat, skinny, old, female or poor faces and voices. It places us behind the white, affluent, male, young… It tells only one of our many stories.


Click the link for my friend Jake's essay on the same theme, but more substantive.

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Last wednesday my research supervisor told me that he had just received terrible news about the murder of David Kato. Today was the first time I felt really sad about it - just because my first instinct is always to do, and so I have occupied myself trying to organize a candlelight vigil with members of the student organization I am in.

I wanted to write something about what David's murder means to me. But my dim anger and helpless (and unhelpful) sadness are stuck in my throat, just behind my mouth. I am mute. So it is sad Barbra Streisand songs, thick ice-cream with bits of chocolate cookies in it and my black stilleto's which still have not made their debut on the sidewalk. My head is full.