Out of the Laager, Into the Streets: The Origins, Rise, and Fall of Reform Organizing in South

By Jacob Tobia

A thesis submitted for honors in Program II: Activism and Leadership Durham, North Carolina 2014

1 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... 3 PRELUDE ...... 7 INTRODUCTION ...... 9 CHAPTER 1: SEPARATE DEVELOPMENT, SEPARATE IDENTITIES: THE ORIGINS OF GAY REFORM ...... 26 CHAPTER 2: , STAYING IN: THE RISE OF THE GAY ASSOCIATION OF ...... 67 CHAPTER 3: ON SHIFTING GROUND: TURBULENT POLITICS AND THE END OF GAY REFORM ...... 106 CONCLUSION: GASA’S LEGACY AND THE RISE OF GAY LIBERATION ...... 148 POSTLUDE ...... 159 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 161

INDEX OF FIGURES

FIGURE 1: "SO THIS IS A CAPE MOFFIE DRAG" DRUM, JANUARY 1959...... 56 FIGURE 2: GASA MEMBERSHIP DATA, DEC. 1982 TO MAR. 1983 ...... 80 FIGURE 3: COMIC FROM FEBRUARY 1983 ISSUE OF LINK/SKAKEL ...... 86 FIGURE 4: DECEMBER 1984 COVER OF LINK/SKAKEL ...... 97 FIGURE 5: ADVERTISEMENT FOR REFORM, EXIT, JANUARY 1986 ...... 116 FIGURE 6: LEON DE BEER 1987 ELECTION ADVERTISEMENT ...... 142

2 Acknowledgements

The prospect of properly acknowledging all of the people whose lives have in some way contributed to this thesis is akin to the prospect of naming all of the rocks, boulders, and pebbles that make up Table Mountain. And yet, taking a moment to pause and reflect on those who have contributed so readily to my life and academic growth is a worthwhile and nourishing goal.

I’ll start in the place that is perhaps the most obvious by first thanking my indefatigable advisor Professor Karin Shapiro, who first challenged me to think of myself as a historian. Through her nurture and occasional prodding, she has helped me to spin an immense tale of struggle, conflict, and transformation. Throughout the course of writing this thesis, her intellectual engagement was only matched by her venerable collection of jewelry. Great thanks are also due to Mary Tung and Karlyn Forner, two colleagues and fellow thesis/dissertation writers who have patiently waded in and out of queer history with me, and have taken the time to actually read multiple iterations of hundreds of pages.

I’d also like to thank Professors Bill Chafe, Bob Korstad, Janet Ewald and Robin Kirk for heartily supporting my academic work and growth over the course of writing this thesis.

Perhaps the single-greatest contributors to this thesis have been the staff at the Gay and Archives at the University of the Witwatersrand in , including

Anthony Manion, Nancy Castro-Leal, Gabriel Khan, Cherae Halley, John Marnell,

Nomancotsho Pakade, John Meletse, and perhaps most importantly, Adelaide Nxumalo.

Thanks to their diligent work and patience, I gained unprecedented access to both archival material and interviews with leaders in the South African LGBTQ movement. Moreover,

3 their steadfast dedication to preserving queer history in South Africa, as well as the dedication of academicians such as Mark Gevisser, Graeme Reid, and Neville Hoad, provides an inspirational model for queer communities across the globe to take a more proactive stake in preserving their history.

When I first arrived in Johannesburg in the summer of 2012, I knew four people in the entire city, and didn’t really have a friend to speak of. Friendship and community were critical in providing a foundation for my research, and this thesis would not have been possible without the love and support of the incredible friends that I made during my two stays in South Africa. While in Joburg, I built lasting friendships with people who graciously took me under their wing, showed me the town, and provided much needed transport to parties. Thanks in particular are due to Ayseha Krige, for being an empathetic roommate while I was in Johannesburg and teaching me to make delicious daal. Thanks are also in order for Zazi Dlamini, Russell Clarke, Kieron Gina, Simon Mayson, Mmakgosi Kgabi,

Rahiem Wisgary, Lurdes Laice, Aimar Rubio, and Jessica Glenndinning—all of whom provided me with a rich and at times raucous social life in Jozi. I’d also like to acknowledge

Liesl Theron, Londi Gamedze, Sylvie Wirtjes, Tabitha Paine, Lucinda Van Den Heever, Dean

Peacock, and Cherith Sanger, many of my wonderful friends and fellow activists in Cape

Town.

As a historian, I’m deeply indebted to the fifteen or so activists who took the time to be interviewed for the documentary film that I am producing in conjunction with this thesis, including Bev Ditsie, Justice , Justice , ,

Funeka Soldaat, Joy Wellbeloved, Jabu Periera, , Gavin Hayward, Mary Louw,

Paddy Nhlapo, Mikki Van Zyl, Robert Colman, and Shaun De Waal. While our interviews

4 concerned a later period of South African history than that which is covered in the pages that follow, through speaking with me about the LGBTQ movement, its current tensions, and its historical path, they were able to elucidate key ideas that came together as the framework for this thesis. Though there are few direct citations of these interviews in this thesis, the ideas and frameworks I learned through speaking with each of them are woven into the fabric of this work.

At Duke, I also have many people to thank, including the Office of Research Support,

Trinity College, and the Center for Documentary Studies for their generous financial support. More importantly, I want to acknowledge the housekeepers, dining staff, janitors, and library staff who have worked so tirelessly over the past four years to support my life as a student at Duke. Without their invaluable contributions and care, this thesis would not have come into being.

Lastly, I’d like to thank my parents Jane Tobia and Abraham Tobia, and by brother

Matthew Tobia, all of whom were patient enough to go along with my plan to jet off to

South Africa, and were kind in understanding the stress of writing a thesis. Through their love, unconditional affirmation, and willingness to let me experiment over the past four years, I have been able to bring this project into fruition.

As a historian, I have merely worked to understand the lives and legacies of those who participated in South Africa’s struggle for LGBTQ equality. The true credit for this thesis goes to those courageous queer people who, despite confusion, danger, adversity, and dissent, managed to speak up for people like me in the context of a repressive and defensive government. Through their historical example, I am able to understand my past and my lineage as a queer activist. While writing this thesis, I have been begun to see

5 myself not as an outcast or a historical anomaly, but as an integral part of the human family.

Too often, queer people are made invisible in the historical record, are erased from communal history, and are relegated as outsiders. For queer people like me, the impact of this erasure is devastating. Because we do not understand our queer past, we are made to face the world without a frame of reference, without a historical sense of self. This thesis is but a small attempt to rectify that erasure; it is in that spirit that I dedicate this thesis to all queer people, who like myself, were never taught the history of their community. In many ways, the motto of the South African Gay and Lesbian Archives rings true:

“Without Queer History, There is No Queer Future.”

6 Prelude

Author’s Field Note: July 14, 2013

It was dark by the time that we left the conference. The looming silhouette of Table

Mountain was framed in the distance by bright city lights from the other side. From my vantage point, I couldn’t actually see the lights, only their aura emanating into the wet winter air. On the other side of the mountain, glittering neighborhoods of the city bowl clung to the side of the mountain as it sloped gently towards Table Bay. Above the parking lot outside the conference venue, there hung a single streetlight bathing the lot in tungsten orange.

It had been a long day: the second annual Black Lesbian Conference started early in the morning and concluded late that evening. Raucous assembly, discussion, breakout groups, and spontaneity filled the day. While a representative of the police was addressing the group, the room erupted into protest song. The representative tried to speak out over the music to no avail, attempting to explain that, yes, in fact, the police did care about the pandemic of anti-queer violence sweeping through communities across the country. The music continued, and the representative swiftly walked out of the meeting, apologizing and asserting that she had another meeting to attend.

After the conference concluded, I found myself musing on the strangeness of the juxtaposition. That night, I was going to a party at Crew, Cape Town’s largest gay bar in the upscale gay neighborhood of the Waterkant. I’d been to the club before, and in many ways, it felt somewhat like the bars I was used to at home. The club played mostly Western music—

Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Daft Punk, Madonna—and was filled with well-toned white gay men of

7 various ages. After spending the day in Khayelitsha, the relatively well-to-do crowd of Crew felt distant, decadent, and hollow. The stark gymnasium walls of the conference venue stood in great contrast with the shimmering, glitter-drenched tableau of the bar.

I got in the car and looked out the window as we drove back into town. Clouds began rolling in as we rounded Table Mountain, and by the time we arrived at Crew, you could no longer see to the top of Devil’s Peak. That night, as I drank cheap beer and made my way across the dance floor, the whole scene, the privilege of it all, festered in my mind.

8 Introduction

To the untrained eye, the narrative of the South African LGBTQ rights movement is one of liberation. It begins in 1966, when the police raided a gay house party in the upscale suburb of Forest Town; continues through 1982, when courageous activists formed the Gay

Association of South Africa; parades through 1990, when the first Gay Pride March wound its way through the bustling streets of Johannesburg; rallies past 1996, when South Africa became the first country in the world to protect gays and from in their constitution; and ends in 2005, when the Constitutional Court legalized same-sex marriage throughout the country. Many would say that, over the course of 40 years, gays and lesbians were able to effectively bring about equality and liberation in South Africa, so much so that South Africa has been able to take a key role on the world stage in promoting gay rights throughout the African continent.

In some ways, it is possible to say that lesbians and gays have found a sense of liberation in South Africa; but that statement is predicated profoundly upon where one chooses to look.

In her seminal queer text, The Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick begins by framing her argument around one simple axiom: people are different.1 The truth she articulates is one that is so simple as to seem innocuous, and yet, it is all too quickly forgotten in queer communities and throughout retellings of queer history. Any two queer people, even those who appear to be the most similar, will be marked by one difference or

1 Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 22.

9 another, and when you amalgamate thousands of queer people into a community, the differences expressed within that community become innumerable.

Too often, in the quest to understand queer history and create a cohesive narrative of queer struggle, historians cast these differences within queer communities aside. They are viewed as distractions from the greater arc of queer liberation, brushed aside as internal strife that ultimately becomes irrelevant to the struggle against an oppressively heterosexist world. For purposes of identitarian coherence, and in many cases simple convenience, historians and activists alike overlook divisions in queer communities across the world.

But what do we lose when, in the process of creating our communal history, we ignore division? Who do we silence in the act of historical homogenization? And more importantly, who becomes marginalized? Who is cast aside?

Nowhere are those differences more immediately visceral than in the history of

South Africa’s gay and lesbian struggle. In exploring South African queer history, the differences between queer people demand to be heard, both as a necessary historical element and as a site of historical conflict.

This is due in part to the heterogeneity of South Africa’s population. A combination of Black, Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, white, Indian, coloured, East Asian, and many other groups,

South Africa’s rich cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity makes it among the most colorful nations in the world, but through the aegis of apartheid these differences were weighted with vast inequality. Under the yoke of white supremacy, racial and ethnic difference became not only a site of cultural difference, but also a site of political struggle. Indeed, the policies and repressions of the apartheid government were so severe and the struggle

10 against it so intense, that to this day, the anti-apartheid struggle and its associated movements have characterized countless endeavors into South African history.

But how was this intense political struggle mapped onto South Africa’s early movement for gay and lesbian rights? How did the early gay rights movement in South

Africa contend with apartheid? And in a heterogeneous, unequal nation, can a movement predicated solely on sexuality ever serve as a point of unification? Can queer people in

South Africa come together as queer people? Or are the divisions too deep, the rift between groups too cavernous, for there to ever be a sense of gay community?

In fact, these differences played such a vital role that they demand a retelling of

South African Queer history as not one movement, but two distinct movements that ebb and flow throughout South Africa’s past.

The later period of South African queer history—what I have coined the South

African gay liberation movement—is perhaps the most well known. It emerged in the mid-

1980s and focused its politics on standing against the apartheid government in order to secure gay and lesbian rights in post-apartheid South Africa. The gay liberation movement did not center its advocacy around a Western model of gay identity and organizing, but welcomed a broader and more diverse set of strategies and identities, leaving room for alternative, multi-ethnic understandings of queer sexuality and mobilization. This period in

South African gay history began with the formation of the Gay and Lesbian Organization of the Witwatersrand in 1987, continued through the end of apartheid in 1994, advocated for the inclusion of protection in the South African constitution in 1996, and continues to the present day as black queer South Africans in particularly are still faced with endemic violence and discrimination.

11 The period that preceded South African gay liberation—what I refer to in this thesis as the gay reform movement—is less often discussed. The gay reform movement spanned from 1968 to 1987, centered on a single-issue Western understanding of gay and lesbian identity, and focused on working with the apartheid state to gain respect and rights for gay and lesbian people within its existing structures. The story of the gay reform movement began in the 1950s and 1960s, when white gay communities predicated on a Western model of gay identity began to form in the major urban centers of Johannesburg, Cape

Town, and . It continued through 1968, when white gay men and women formed the first coherent—albeit clandestine—gay political movement aimed at combatting state persecution of homosexual acts. It revived in the early 1980s when white gays and lesbians formed the Gay Association of South Africa and undertook a host of community-building and reform-oriented political activities. And it ended in 1987, when the white organizers of the Gay Association of South Africa finally realized that, given South Africa’s political and racial differences, a reformist struggle for gay rights could never succeed.

While both the gay reform movement and the gay liberation movement are equally compelling, this thesis seeks to examine the rise and fall of the gay reform movement. In understanding the gay reform movement, this thesis endeavors to understand the role(s) that division played in queer South African communities and how disparities within the queer community shaped its historical evolution from the formation of the Homosexual

Law Reform Movement in 1968 through the collapse of the Gay Association of South Africa in 1987.

In many ways, this thesis is the story of how the Western gay rights framework employed by the gay reform movement failed in South Africa from the 1960s through the

12 1980s. It is the story of a time when, despite great effort and resilience, diverse people could not be bound into a cohesive gay movement by sexual identity alone, particularly in the face of an overwhelming political struggle against apartheid. It is a story about how, for so many black South Africans during the 1960s through the 1980s, the identities of “gay” and “lesbian” felt abstract, unnecessary, foreign and politically inert when placed beside the apartheid system of racial domination. And most importantly, it is the story of how a gay reform movement in apartheid South Africa could never succeed unless it recognized the hypocrisy inherent in demanding rights for one group while refusing to speak out against the political suppression of another.

Historiography

In general, the emergence of gay and lesbian history and queer studies into mainstream scholarship is a relatively new phenomenon. Historians such as George

Chauncey, David Greenberg, John D’Emilio, Rictor Norton, and David Halperin have created a vast body of scholarship concerning gay and lesbian history.2 Their work ensured that the experiences of gay and lesbian communities came to be seen as legitimate and captivating subjects of historical inquiry. Though the scope of their work has predominately been concerned with gay and lesbian history in Western Europe and North

2 See George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, (New York: Basic Books, 1994), John D’Emilio, “Gay Politics, Gay Community: San Francisco’s Experience,” In History of in Europe and America, edited by Wayne R. Dynes and Stephen Donaldson, 85-113. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), David Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), and Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity, (: Cassell, 1997).

13 America, they were able to establish a precedent and a methodology for chronicling gay communities.

On its own, this sort of history is often incomplete. When it comes to the history of queer communities, the terms, ideologies, and cultural understandings that surround the formation of queer identity become a central part of serious academic engagement. Given that a Western model of gay identity only began to emerge and crystallize in South Africa in the 1960s, it is important to think critically about the historical roots of Western gay identity. In keeping with this perspective, this thesis relies heavily on concepts that were pioneered at the nexus of queer theory and gay and lesbian history.

As a concept, gay identity is a modern idea that only began to emerge in the middle of the twentieth century. Many historians have worked to establish that everything we know and celebrate currently about gay identity—from “coming out” to “the closet” to drag culture to New York City—is a modern, Western, and somewhat arbitrary social construction. Furthermore, throughout history, various cultures have organized and understood human sexuality in vastly different ways, and the current paradigm of gay identity represents only one method of sexual organization and understanding in a long string of methodologies.3

A number of historians and theorists have, over time, begun to untangle the complex and oftentimes obscure roots of gay identity in the modern age. For the most part, these historians and theorists—Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and John Boswell, to

3 With the emergence of queer theory into the academy in the early 1990s, important critiques of overarching identity structures and communal understandings of sexuality and gender identity were brought to the forefront of queer scholarship. Theorists and historians such as Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler, among others, have brought about valuable new frameworks for doing this sort of analysis. See, Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, (London: Penguin, 1978), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, (Berkley: University of California Press, 1990), and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (New York: Routledge, 1990).

14 name only a few—have expended a majority of their energies on chronicling the development of gay identity in Europe and North America.4 It has only been in the past two decades or so that historians and post-colonial theorists have begun addressing questions of gay identity in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Global South more generally.

This discrepancy in historical analysis has left an immense task before historians seeking to address histories of sexuality in the Global South. Historians who write about same-sex desire, sexuality, and gay identity in the Global South are oftentimes faced with trying to fit the history of non-Western peoples and cultures within a distinctly Western sexual identity framework. Given the postcolonial nature of South Africa, and given that gay identity did not originate in the global South, critically examining the social construction of gay identity is a necessary precondition for engaging in South African queer history.5

In this respect, South Africa’s heterogeneity presents a unique and politically tempestuous terrain. On the one hand, have historically shared a very strong connection to European and Western culture. Because of this intimate connection,

Western ideas concerning sexuality and gay identity have always enjoyed significant currency in white South African culture and were adopted very early on in white South

Africa communities. So, when analyzing white South Africa, particularly up until the 1980s, utilizing terms such as “gay,” “homosexual,” or “lesbian” is often a historically accurate and necessary part of writing South African History.

4 George Chauncey, Gay New York, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Medieval Europe, insert a few other titles. 5 William J. Spurlin and John C. Hawley are other theorists who have done a notable job applying queer theory in the context of postcolonial societies. See William J. Spurlin, “Broadening Postcolonial Studies/Decolonizing Queer Studies,” In Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections, edited by John C. Hawley, 185-198 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).

15 The same is not true, however, of black communities. Black communities in South

Africa were much more insular in their relationship to Western culture. Particularly given the strict censorship and poverty imposed on black South Africans during apartheid, their access to cultural material produced in the Western world and to gay establishments in urban areas was more constrained than the access afforded to their white counterparts.

Because of this, non-white queer people in South Africa did not use the terms “gay” and

“lesbian” for a significant portion of South African history. The result of this heterogeneity is that it becomes difficult to discuss, in any unproblematic way, “gay history” in black

South African communities, and any attempt to do so is at best a linguistic oversight and at worst an imperialist and historically inaccurate characterization.

While these differences in terminology concerning sexual identities are important, they are only engaged with lightly in Chapter One, and further work needs to be done that specifically chronicles linguistic patterns of self-identification in South African queer communities. For the purposes of simplicity and clarity, this thesis uses terms such as ‘gay,’

‘lesbian,’ ‘moffie,’ ‘stabane,’ and others only as terms of self-identification. When historical subjects do not self-identify as gay or lesbian, but demonstrate alternative, non- heterosexual sexuality, this thesis will simply use the term ‘queer’. 6

None of these scholarly contributions concerning language and identity would be as relevant to South Africa without the foundational work of South African historians themselves. Over the past twenty years, the South African academy has produced a sizeable amount of material concerning queer history. Notable authors of this discipline include

6 For example, the term “gay and lesbian South Africans” refers specifically to South Africans who use the terms gay and lesbian to describe themselves, whereas the term “queer South Africans” refers to all South Africans who display a sexuality that diverges in some way from the dominant sexuality of their culture.

16 Graeme Reid, Edwin Cameron, Anthony Manion, Ruth Morgan, Neville Hoad, Melanie Judge,

Shaun De Waal and most notably, Mark Gevisser.7 Through publishing anthologies such as

Defiant Desire, Sex and Politics in South Africa, and To Have and To Hold, these historians have managed to put a large amount of primary and secondary source material into published circulation. Furthermore, activists on the ground have maintained meticulous archives of historical materials that are stored at the Gay and Lesbian Archives at the

University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Most of these archives remain underutilized, and historians continue to process all of the documents that they contain.

The juxtaposition between underutilized archival material and anthology-oriented publication calls for greater historical scholarship with a focus on synthesis. At present, the story of the South African gay and lesbian struggle—particularly in the 1980s—is in glimmering fragments. This thesis is a first attempt to piece those fragments together into a more cohesive mosaic.

Scholars outside of South Africa, mainly Brenna Munro, Ashley Currier, Henriette

Gunkel, Carl Stychin, and Ryan Thoreson have also taken a keen interest in South African queer history. 8 Oftentimes in this body of scholarship, the early gay rights movement is

7 See Defiant Desire, edited by Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron, (New York. Routledge, 1995), To Have and to Hold: The Making of Same-Sex Marriage in South Africa, edited by Melanie Judge, Anthony Manion, and Shaun de Waal, (Auckland Park, South Africa: Fanele, 2008), Pride: Protest and Celebration, edited by Shaun de Waal and Anthony Manion, (Johannesburg: Fanele, 2006), Trans: Life Stories from South Africa, edited by Ruth Morgan, Charl Marais and Joy Rosemary Wellbeloved, (Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2009), Sex and Politics in South Africa, edited by Neville Hoad, Karen Martin, and Graeme Reid, (Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2005), and To Have and to Hold: The Making of Same-Sex Marriage in South Africa, edited by Melanie Judge, Anthony Manion, and Shaun de Waal, (Auckland Park, South Africa: Fanele, 2008). 8 See Brenna Munro, South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), Hariette Gunkel, The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa, (New York: Routledge, 2010), Ashley Currier, Out in Africa: LGBT Organizing in Namibia and South Africa, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, Carl F. Stychin, “Constituting Sexuality: The Struggle for Sexual Orientation in the South African Bill of Rights,” Journal of Law and Society 23, no. 4 (December 1996): 455-483, and Ryan Thoreson, “Beyond Equality: The Post-Apartheid

17 glossed over as unimportant and is relegated to introductions and short pages. In part, this is due to the current climate in South African scholarship. At present, work that relates directly to the anti-apartheid struggle, examines the South African constitution’s sexual orientation equality clause, or profiles the contemporary struggles of gay and lesbian organizers is popular within the academy. Such stories are valuable because they tell a narrative of the triumph of the South African gay and lesbian movement over oppression.

But such narratives also neglect to mention the profound failures of South Africa’s gay reform movement in the 1980s. Rather than glossing over them, this thesis focuses exclusively on the failures that occurred when a conservative—and more often than not— wealthy gay white community took on a significant struggle for gay rights.

Given the way that South African historiography has cast black liberation struggle as the master narrative of South African history, the of early gay white organizing is patently clear to almost everyone who engages with it. Because of this, it is easy to write the gay reform movement off as cowardly, backward, ignorant, or even oppressive, which most historians have done. But to do so is to lose sight of what is a notable attempt at community action during extraordinary times. Furthermore, while white gay activism may not have been formally aligned with the anti-apartheid struggle, it is difficult to address such organizing as explicitly “pro-apartheid.” In a very fundamental way, white gay organizing struck against the heterosexual Calvinist heart of white Afrikaner apartheid ideology, and as such, played a significant role in the broader progressivism that swept through some white communities in the 1980s and 1990s.

Counternarrative of Trans and Intersex Movements in South Africa,” African Affairs 112, no. 3 (October 2013): 646-665.

18 Furthermore, while it is accurate to cast gay white organizers at the time as overwhelmingly racist, it is difficult to cast them as “privileged” in any unqualified way.

Nowhere in the world was it ‘easy’ to be gay in the 1980s, and in the repressive context of

South Africa, gay identity brought about an emotional burden and sense of stigma for many individuals. Moreover, the white gay community in South Africa faced the same specter that hung over all gay communities of the time—AIDS. Historically, gay white AIDS of the 1980s has been forgotten in South Africa and erased from the master narrative of the presumptively ‘heterosexual’ disease.9 As this thesis will later discuss, AIDS became an issue of paramount importance for the white gay community during this time, and white gay activists are solely responsible for pushing the agenda forward towards more effective treatment and prevention of the disease in the 1980s. This critical AIDS activism would ultimately lay a foundation for nationwide treatment of the disease as it reached epidemic proportions in the general population during the 1990s.

The Gay Association of South Africa was not simply a ‘racist group that failed.’

Rather, through tracking the way that race and class limited and fragmented the South

African gay community throughout the 1980s, this thesis calls for a rewriting of gay and lesbian “liberation” movements throughout the world. No gay and lesbian movement, from the Aids Coalition To Unleash Power in the United States to Britain’s modern-day

Stonewall, is immune from the intersecting plights of racism, sexism, and classism. Through openly and non-dismissively engaging in South Africa’s gay reform movement, this thesis seeks to provide a template through which to ask more difficult questions of movements whose racial context is not so obvious.

9 Gerald M. Oppenheimer and Ronald Bayer, Shattered Dreams? An Oral History of the South African AIDS Epidemic, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, 24.

19

Sources

Like any subculture, the origins of South Africa’s gay and lesbian community are difficult to trace. While some primary documents exist concerning the rise of early gay and lesbian communities, they are isolated to a few personal notes, photo collections and interviews. Given geographic distance and the lack of digital archive availability, I have had very limited access to these kinds of resources while writing this thesis. Instead, I rely primarily on published accounts of the early 1950s and mid-1960s to understand and synthesize the early formation of gay and lesbian communities in Johannesburg and Cape

Town.

As the Homosexual Law Reform Movement begins in the late 1960s, a paper trail becomes a bit more easily discernable. Sparse organizational records exist from the movement that lend historians rudimentary access into the movement’s internal functioning and organization, but the largest opus of information about gay and lesbian life and prevalent attitudes about gay and lesbian people from the late 1960s exists in the records of the South African Parliament. In 1968, Parliament created a Parliamentary

Select Committee to investigate the nature of homosexuality in South Africa, and it left hundreds of pages of records, testimony, and reflections from the parliamentarians who participated, religious leaders of the time, doctors, and community members. It is this body of work that informs a large portion of the first chapter.

The black media play a prominent role in understanding queer life in the black community during the 1950s and 1960s. Drum, the most popular black magazine on the

African continent throughout that period, sporadically published profiles on queer life in

Cape Town’s District Six and elsewhere throughout the country. While the accounts take

20 the form of sensationalist and offensive reporting by today’s standards, they nonetheless provide a valuable window into the queer lives of non-white South Africans.

In the 1980s, records of gay and lesbian life in South Africa, particularly among white South Africans, become much more abundant. Beginning in 1982, the gay reform movement begins to rigorously document itself, albeit from a white, predominately middle class perspective. This documentation takes the form of Link/Skakel, the monthly newsletter of the Gay Association of South Africa. The newsletter, which would later become the independent gay magazine Exit, chronicles the political developments of the gay reform movement with surprising specificity, outlining new organizational priorities, providing summaries of major meetings, publishing a rich array of editorials from members of the local and international community, and covering the major social events that took place in the community. The major limitations of Link/Skakel and Exit were that, because they were both published in Johannesburg, the reporting often tended to be

Johannesburg-centric, making it more difficult to gain insight into what was going on in other locales throughout the country. Furthermore, because Link/Skakel and Exit catered to a predominately white audience, there is limited exposure to non-white life in its pages, although that lack of visibility itself becomes a politicized issue in the mid-1980s. Despite these shortfalls, the pages of Exit and Link/Skakel provide much of the primary source material for the final two chapters of this thesis because they encapsulate in great detail the perspective of the gay reform movement.

In addition to Link/Skakel and Exit, there exist a plethora of organizational records, letters, and meeting minutes from political groups of the time. Unfortunately, in the course of writing an undergraduate thesis, I have not had the time to consult all of these sources. A

21 more in-depth investigation and synthesis of the vast archive of queer materials at the

University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg is a necessary and worthwhile project, but would require far more time than two semesters of research and writing.

In a sense, this thesis represents only the first foray into a much deeper pool of material, but that is not to undersell its thoroughness. Through consulting parliamentary records, gay newspapers from the time, and a plethora of secondary materials, I have been able to piece together a first image of the gay reform movement.

Summary

This thesis covers the rise, crest, and fall of the South African gay reform movement from its inception in the 1960s through its demise in the late 1980s, a trajectory that is neither linear nor easy to disentangle chronologically. This is due in part to the fact that, almost as soon as the gay reform movement began rising to prominence, those who rejected its single-issue framework challenged and undercut it. So as it is succeeding in its own goal to engage the apartheid state in reform, it is also teetering towards demise along with the apartheid state in the mid to late 1980s. This thesis works to arrange these trends not necessarily chronologically, but in a way that makes them most intelligible.

Keeping in this vein, chapter one compares and contrasts the beginnings of the gay reform movement with the experiences of non-white South Africans during the same period in the 1950s and 1960s. Through charting the development of gay culture in

Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town, chapter one examines the formation of gay identity among white communities and chronicles how the social communities built among white gay South Africans were politically mobilized following the 1966 Forest Town raid and the

22 1968 Parliamentary Select Committee Inquiry into further criminalizing homosexuality.

The mobilizations of the gay reform movement were unabashedly white-centric throughout this period of time, and very little crossover occurred between white and black queer communities other than casual sex. Meanwhile, non-white South Africans developed a rich culture of gender non-conformity and alternative sexuality that did not conform to

Western understandings of sexuality.

Following the 1968 mobilization, the gay reform movement fell quiet throughout the 1970s and only emerged again in the early 1980s following a series of police raids on popular gay bars of the time. Chapter two explores the meteoric rise of the Gay Association of South Africa (GASA), the largest national gay and lesbian group in South Africa, from

1982 to 1984. During this time period, GASA grew exponentially and engaged in a series of politically-relevant campaigns, all with the goal of transforming—but not abolishing—the apartheid state. These campaigns ranged from organizing around HIV/AIDS to establishing community centers, and they were unprecedented in their scope and public nature.

Through examining the gay reform movement expansive growth in the early 1980s, chapter two provides a unique insight into the work and stories of those who sought to challenge the apartheid government concerning its treatment of gay and lesbian people.

Chapter three will examine the resistance and challenges faced by the gay reform movement from 1984 to 1987—challenges that ultimately led to its demise. The backlash against the reformist gay movement came from predominately non-white South Africans and their allies; who found the gay reform movement to be exclusionary on the basis of race, and who bemoaned GASA’s refusal to take a stance against apartheid. A central figure in this struggle is , an anti-apartheid and gay rights activist who GASA refused

23 to support following his imprisonment for anti-apartheid activities. Nkoli’s case became a chief cause within the international gay and lesbian community, and the unwillingness of gay reform movement leaders to stand behind him contributed significantly to the end of the gay reform movement in South Africa. Through examining the racial politics of the gay community at the time, understanding the contentions arising from apartheid, and examining the fallout from those contentions, chapter three will illustrate the downfall of gay reformism in apartheid South Africa.

Following the demise of gay reformism in the late 1980s, a new cohort of gay liberation movements emerged that were predicated specifically on an anti-apartheid stance. These movements and their genesis will be briefly explored at the end of this thesis.

Through a combination of engagement from the international community, anti-apartheid organizing, and partnerships on the part of the gay liberation movement, activists were able to sow the seeds of gay rights within the leadership of the African National Congress

(ANC), the chief organization of apartheid resistance in exile at the time.

Gay identity politics are neither infallible, nor perfect coalitions. Exploring the rise and fall of gay reformism under apartheid prompts much broader questions about queer organizing generally. How can queer people organize and build community across difference? Under what conditions can markers of queer identity build coalitions across other political differences? When is queer identity an effective tool for political mobilization, and when is it unsustainable? In the context of apartheid South Africa, gay identity could not overcome the vast political and racial divisions that existed between

South Africans who supported the apartheid government—either tacitly or explicitly—and

South Africans who sought to overthrow it. Through examining this shortfall of single-

24 issue gay politics in South Africa, this thesis seeks to pose challenging questions for gay and lesbian movements across the world.

25 Chapter 1

Separate Development, Separate Identities: The Origins of Gay Reform

“Given the historical inequities of apartheid, gay white men have the financial resources to render themselves far more visible in terms of media representations and have had more impact on urban geographies, which can go some way in accounting for the equation of gayness and whiteness in the popular consciousness.” -Neville Hoad, South African Queer Theorist10

By the mid-1970s, the Skyline Bar—or as patrons knew it then, the ‘Butterfly Bar’— had solidified its status as the gay bar in Johannesburg.11 As one regular patron put it, the bar “was always full,” with people shuffling in and out during all times of the day.

Throughout the 1970s it served as a critical gathering place for Johannesburg’s gay community, functioning as one part bar, one part community center. On occasion, men would stop by the Skyline for a quick drink after a mid-afternoon shopping trip, only to leave in the wee hours of the night, groceries still in hand.12 Yes, there were other bars that leaned in a queer direction and there were hotels and restaurants that happened to cater to a predominately gay clientele, but by 1970s the Skyline had achieved an unmatched level of infamy throughout the city. If you were gay, white, and looking for a good time, the Skyline was simply the place to be. It represented the dingy, poorly-lit Waldorf Astoria of a burgeoning gay white community that had begun to transition from the hushed tones of suburban house parties to a more public murmur on the streets of Hillbrow.

10 Neville Hoad, “Between the White Man’s Burden and the White Man’s Disease,” GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5, no. 4 (1999): 564. 11 Mark Gevisser, “A Different Fight for Freedom,” in Defiant Desire, eds. Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron (New York. Routledge, 1995) 41. 12 “Jock” in Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 41.

26 Depending on which gay men you ask, many would even claim that the Skyline Bar as Johannesburg’s first “proper” gay bar. There were gay bars that came before it—most notably The Dungeon, a bar that opened in Johannesburg in 1969—but the Skyline Bar took the cake in terms of culture, eminence, and centrality within the white gay community.

As an institution, it anchored the neighborhood of Hillbrow as a gay Mecca from the 1970s all the way through the 1990s.

But to look at the Skyline as the first proper gay bar without a better understanding of historical context is to have already taken a profound misstep, because the idea of “being first” implies that the Skyline is somehow a genesis, a rainbow stripe of sorts painted on an exclusively heterosexual and cisgendered tabula rasa.13 To underestimate the importance of the Skyline as a pioneering public space within the gay community is to deny a fundamental catalyst of a vibrant political movement. But to over-emphasize the importance of the Skyline as the first public gay space is to deny the fact that same-sex intimacy, gender transitivity, and alternative sexuality have always had an impact on

Johannesburg and South Africa more generally. Moreover, given that the mostly white

South Africans used the term “gay” to describe their identity throughout the 1960s and

1970s, centering histories of same-sex intimacies in South Africa exclusively through the lens of gay identity ensures that these histories remain almost entirely white.

Due to a combination of cultural, political, and structural factors, the formation of a politicized gay identity and the beginnings of political organizing only occurred in white communities prior to the 1980s through a combination of two factors. First, white gay

South Africans had been exposed to the gay movements that took place in Western Europe

13 The term “cisgender” refers to individuals whose gender identity is aligned with their birth sex, i.e. the opposite of transgender.

27 and the United States and were able to model their identities and movements off of those from the West. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, white gay identity took on a politicized nature when queer white communities were subjected to state intervention, criminalization, and punishment surrounding the 1966 Forest Town Raid and the 1968

Parliamentary Select Committee investigation of homosexuality. With the threat of increased penalization of queer sexuality, white gays and lesbians had to band together and form a political movement in order to evade state persecution. This political movement— the Law Reform Movement—relied on working within the of the apartheid government to bring about change from within.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, alternative sexuality in South African communities of color did not form along a Western gay/straight binary. This was due to the fact that the apartheid government did not attack black same-sex sexuality in the same way as white sexuality. Because the apartheid government did not concern itself with same-sex sexuality in black communities, there was never the need for a politicized sense of gay identity or for a gay movement within black communities. Furthermore, most queer black people at the time did not have intimate knowledge of gay rights movements in Europe and the US.

Instead, alternative sexuality in black communities took on a plurality of forms. These forms—such as moffie, skesana, and injonga identities—were portrayed in black media of the period, but were seen to describe behaviors, not political identity.

The historical differences in the formation of gay identity between white and non- white communities served to create an unequal foundation upon which the subsequent history of 1980s gay reform activism stands. Because gay identity formed disparately between white and non-white communities, white gay communities began to politically

28 mobilize decades before black communities even began identifying as gay en masse. It is this initial disparity in the formation of gay identity that allows white gay men to build the reform ideology that characterized gay activism from the 1960s through the 1980s.

***

Arguably, the historical roots of same-sex intimacy among white people in South

Africa extend back to the colonial era. According to historian Robert Aldrich, eighteenth and nineteenth century Europeans held a pervasive view that the indigenous cultures found in the colonies tolerated widespread homosexuality.14 Colonies were seen as places of exotic, overt, and “sinful” sexuality, where the sexual mores that were so stringently enforced on Europeans did not apply.15 In the rogue mining culture of early Johannesburg, prostitution, brothels, and sexuality lived hand in hand with the pioneer mindset that characterized the city. By 1895, ninety-five brothels were already listed in Johannesburg’s municipal records.16

By the 1950s and 1960s, South African law had changed from utilizing the language of “sodomy” to utilizing the language of “unnatural offense,” but the basic principle remained intact: sexual intimacy between two men was a crime. And yet somehow, despite

14 In addition to this belief, the colonies were also male-dominated enterprises, where (white) women were scarce and skewed male-to-female ratios often resulted in situational male homosexuality. As a result, many of the most influential and vicious colonial personalities—including Cecil Rhodes and Lord Kitchener—were involved with younger men in ways that were intimately homoromantic if not explicitly sexual. Throughout his time in South Africa, Cecil Rhodes maintained a close relationship with a young man named Neville Pickering that his peers appraised as an “absolutely lover-like friendship”: so much so that when Pickering fell sick, Rhodes traveled halfway across the country—forgoing a lucrative diamond mining contract in Kimberly—to care for him. Lord Kitchener, on the other hand, moved about with a regular band of handsome young men, never married, did not have relationships with women, and had a taste for “fine fabrics, neatly set tables, and pretty porcelain” See Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 2003), 5. 15 As Anne McClintock puts it, the colonies provided “a porno-tropics for the European imagination—a fantastic magic lantern of the mind out into which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears.” Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Postcolonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), xiii. 16 Charles Van Onselen. The Fox and the Flies: The World of Joseph Silver (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), 152.

29 criminalization, homosexual subcultures emerged throughout South Africa, particularly among white men living in the urban centers of Cape Town and Johannesburg.

In Cape Town and Johannesburg both, World War II played a seminal role in the development of homosexual activity and culture. Prior to the Second World War, evidence of homosexual interactions is sparse but for a thin smattering of court cases condemning men for engaging in sodomy or unnatural vice.17 In addition, there are vague allusions to establishments predating World War II that catered to a predominately homosexual clientele.18 Before World War II, the rapid urbanization that swept the country throughout the 1920s and 1930s served as the main driver for the development of a white homosexual subculture—particularly due to the growth of mines and subsequent support systems and urban economies that developed around them.19 Increasing urbanization led to lifestyles that were more independent and less connected to family life.20 This independence, which throughout South African history has traditionally been afforded mostly to white, wealthy men, allowed individuals to seek out homosexual encounters and begin forming the roots of gay communities across the country.

17 Ironically enough, at the same time as colonizers themselves were often engaged in same-sex intimacies, they began imposing a penal code that criminalized any sexual contact between men. When the Dutch colonized the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, they brought along with them Roman Dutch common law, which provided death by hanging as the punishment for anyone found guilty of sodomy. Following the British occupation of the Cape Colony in 1803, homosexual acts remained criminalized, and legal persecution of individuals who engaged in same-sex intimacy continued, albeit sporadically. While the colonial roots of may seem to be a distant cry from apartheid-era South Africa, in reality these laws continued to be enforced, reincarnated, and adopted in various forms throughout South Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. See Kevan Botha and Edwin Cameron, “South Africa,” in Sociolegal Control of Homosexuality: a Multi-nation Comparison, eds. Donald J. West and Richard Green (New York: Plenum Press, 1997), 5-6. 18 In Sociolegal Control of Homosexuality, pg. 21, Edwin Cameron writes, “A gay bar existed in Johannesburg on the corner of Commissioner and Troye streets in the early 1900s before roads were tarred.” While it may be possible that some kind of proto-gay bar existed in this location, Cameron does not substantiate this claim with any historical evidence and thus, in the eyes of the author, it is highly suspect to simply be part of gay urban lore. 19Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 18. 20 For more on this, see John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David Halperin, (New York: Routledge, 1993).

30 With World War II, however, white homosexual life in Cape Town and Johannesburg underwent a significant and marked increase in fervor. This is due, in large part, to the increased militarization of the country during this period and the subsequent presence of large groups of young bachelors in major urban centers and ports. In essence, wherever military bases or navy ports were set up, homosexual subcultures began to emerge. These early homosexual subcultures in the 1940s took on two predominant forms: public cruising—where men would solicit each other for sex in public areas—and private clubs.21

Following the end of World War II, the subcultures that developed around these cruising locations continued to thrive. While the soldiers were gone, popular knowledge of where and how to solicit sex continued to circulate among homosexually-inclined men.

This continuation is strongly evidenced by a 1956 police roundup that was conducted on the Durban Esplanade—a waterfront area where homosexual men had been cruising since

World War II—during which 35 men were arrested for “indecent assault.”22 Such cruising areas maintained their popularity well into the 1960s.23

World War II didn’t simply contribute to a robust cruising culture; World War II also led to the first inklings of a nascent bar scene for homosexual men. In the 1940s the bar at

21 In Cape Town and Durban, ports became regular public cruising areas, and a rich local tradition of cruising began to emerge. Through word of mouth and largely informal networks of communication, soldiers, sailors, and men interested in sex with other men set up informal locations where one could expect to have access to sex. During this informal and clandestine period, interracial cruising was commonplace in urban centers and remained so throughout the twentieth century, although it is difficult to calculate how many men participated in cruising with any specificity due to its unstructured nature. In landlocked Johannesburg, the cruising culture centered around the newly set-up military base in Joubert Park, and also extended to nearby Park Station A fence surrounded the military base in the center of the city, and accounts exist within popular lore that men used to engage in oral sex late at night through the fences found around the park. See Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 19. 22 Rebecca Sinclair, “The Official Treatment of White, South African, Homosexual Men and the Consequent Reaction of Gay Liberation from the 1960s to 2000.” (PhD diss., Rand University, 2004), 64. 23 In fact, some scholars have even argued that the popularity of these cruising locations and the subsequent 1956 Esplanade roundup in Durban lead to the inclusion of homosexual conduct in the 1957 , a piece of legislation that will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. See Rebecca Sinclair, “The Official Treatment of Homosexual Men,” Chapter 1.

31 the Carlton Hotel in downtown Johannesburg came to be known as a progressive place where social mores of the time were made more fluid. At the five-star Carlton Hotel bar, whites and blacks could mingle freely, something that many other private businesses at the time forbade. This progressive attitude also made the Carlton Hotel an easy place for homosexual men to gather. It was hardly a “gay” bar—predominately heterosexual people managed the bar and the bar had a sizeable heterosexual clientele—but it opened up a space where often wealthy, white, predominately English-speaking men could begin to meet one another.24 In addition, a club opened on Noord Street in downtown Johannesburg known as the “Red and Green,” which approximated something like a gay bar. According to gay folklore, a traffic light was placed in the club that normally showed a red light; while the red light was on, patrons knew they could safely dance with same-sex partners. In the case of a police raid, the owners of the club would switch the light to green, “and mixed couples would suddenly emerge on the dance floor.”25 But these bars and clubs were not stable enterprises by any stretch of the imagination, and homosexual men shifted quickly between various bars—from the Carlton Hotel, to the Waldorf Hotel, to the Astor Hotel, and back again—depending on the reaction and patience of the management. 26

While these bars were often places of racial mixing, people of color as well as less- affluent South Africans could only enter hotel bars if they were in the company of a white

24 Ken Cage, Gayle: The Language of Kinks and Queens, A History and Dictionary of Gay Language in South Africa, (Auckland Park: Jacana, 2005), 11. 25 Kevan Botha and Edwin Cameron, “South Africa,” in Sociolegal Control, 21. 26 As Mark Gevisser, an eminent public intellectual of the South African gay and lesbian movement, puts it: “In those days, none of the bars were owned by people from within the gay community: the gay ‘crowd’ would decide upon a venue—usually the lounge-bar of a swank hotel—and colonize it…If the management responded with a modicum of civility, the word would spread.” See Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 23.

32 person and dressed appropriately. Given that the homosexual subculture centered around hotel bars, it remained mostly inaccessible to a majority of South Africans. 27

Many well-to-do white men at the time lamented the fact that coloured South

Africans managed to get into the bars at all, and these same men believed that bars began to “go downhill” as the number of admitted coloured patrons increased. Even for those few coloured men who were admitted, the bars were rife with racism, with many white patrons believing that “it was an honor for a coloured man to suck white cock.”28 There were other, grungier pubs where coloured South Africans would be permitted, but for the most part, non-white South Africans were only allowed access to early gay spaces through friendship with their white counterparts. Even early on in the history of South Africa’s gay community, black and white South Africans did not often build substantial relationships across color lines. This social division would only continue to grow in the 1960s and 70s.

The situation differed substantially for queer white women. Due to the patriarchal structures of South African family during the time, white women were afforded few opportunities for independence away from family life. Accordingly, no large female corollary to the male homosexual subculture existed and there were no “lesbian bars” to speak of, but that is not to say that no female subculture existed. While women were not allowed to attend the male-only hotel bars, they found other ways of forming loose,

27 Historian William Leap characterizes this fine line as a nexus between demeanor and attire: “To be admitted to one of the hotel bars, a coloured man either had to be in the company of a white patron or had to be someone the doorkeeper/bouncer knew, from previous visits, to be trustworthy. Appropriate attire and demeanor were also essential—which meant that coloured drag queens, even when wearing their finest apparel, were likely to be denied entrance into hotel bars.” See William L. Leap, “Strangers on a Train, Sexual Citizenship and the Politics of Public Transportation in Apartheid Cape Town,” in Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, eds. Arnaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin F. Manalansan IV, (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 224. 28 Ibid, 225.

33 underground communities.29 From the 1940s until the 1970s, white queer women met predominately at private apartment parties that were able to masquerade as ‘girls’ nights.’30 White homosexual women were also able to gather through sports teams such as the “No-Man’s Cricket Team,” a female-only cricket team in Kensington.31

Prior to the 1960s, the men and women who participated in these queer subcultures did not consider themselves to be “gay” or “lesbian”. In part because of the rise of the apartheid government and the Christian Nationalist framework that the apartheid government used, queer life remained a mostly insular, secretive, and invisible presence in white culture. Because of social stigma and the growing conservatism of South African culture during this period, one’s “deviant” sexual preferences were rarely articulated as a significant portion of one’s identity.

Instead, many of the people who participated in the queer subculture were married, had children, and lived visibly heterosexual lives. Furthermore, many of the people who practiced same-sex intimacy did not do so exclusively; rather, they continued having regular sexual encounters with the opposite sex and would mostly engage in same-sex intimacy on the side. Because of the clandestine nature of early queer culture, prior to the

1960s, white queer men and women did not comprise a public community, and they certainly did not take a political stance towards their sexuality. And yet, by creating social spaces, queer white South Africans had set up a powerful social network that would soon

29 Ken Cage, Gayle, 11. 30 Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 20. 31 While white homosexual subcultures were easiest to access for upper class men, working class white women actually enjoyed the most frequent access to these cultures in the female world. At the time, the lives of wealthy white women were heavily regulated by family obligations and male supervision, whereas their working class counterparts were able to have a greater simulacrum of independence. Accordingly, in the 1960s there were two night clubs visited predominately by working class queer women in Johannesburg— Spider’s Web and Chick Venter’s. See Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 21.

34 become a vehicle for political mobilization. Through forming social relationships, hooking up with one another, and establishing communal space, the seeds were sown for a white gay movement to emerge.

***

From the generally secretive queer environment of the 1940s and 1950s, South

Africa’s white homosexual subculture began to grow throughout the 1960s. As more people found out about its existence, the network of men and women who were involved in the nascent community began to gradually increase. Furthermore, as men who had been involved in the subculture throughout the 1940s and 1950s got older, more and more of them began owning their own apartments and homes, which they sometimes lived in as couples.

One such couple, Beyers Malan and Monty Lewis, lived in the Torwood House.

Located in the posh neighborhood of Forest Town just a few minutes north of downtown

Johannesburg, the house stood out as a beautiful, two-story home complete with a sprawling yard and a garden out back. In January of 1966, a friend of Malan’s was visiting for the week with his French lover, and Malan wanted to throw an extravagant party that would show his guests exactly how much fun queer life in Johannesburg could be.32

Throughout the month of January, the couple went about ensuring that every queer white man in Johannesburg knew about the party they were throwing. But in 1960s

Johannesburg, with the apartheid state firmly entrenched and Afrikaner on the rise, vocally advertising a queer party was a dangerous thing to do. Ultimately, the couples’

32 Rebecca Sinclair, “Official Treatment of Homosexuality,” 70.

35 desire to ensure that this party would go down in history as the “party of the century” would be realized, but in a different sense than they’d originally intended.

In order to promote the party, Malan and Lewis went about calling friends and making fliers that they then distributed at the New Library Bar, a well-known bar for queer men at the time.33 The buzz for the party began to build, and before they knew it, Malan and

Lewis:

Began to hear, via the grapevine, that the party was being seen as the social event of the decade. All the drag queens were going to be there…there were even rumours that a Cabinet Minister’s son (possibly Vorster’s) was gay and that he would, as well, be attending the party.34

Although Lewis and Malan’s accounts may be somewhat overblown, one thing is clear: the party had quite the hype. Unfortunately for Malan and Lewis, gay men weren’t the only ones who had heard the hype about the Forest Town party. As many queer men at the time were aware, the police frequently lurked outside of the New Library Bar and used the bar as a way to get information about the goings-on of queer men. So, on the night that Malan and Lewis distributed fliers about the party, the police also managed to get a copy.35

On the evening of January 22, 1966, hundreds of men streamed into the Torwood

House. The party was a smash. Held on the house’s back verandah and throughout its sprawling gardens, men were dressed in elegant finery: from tuxedos to ostrich feathers.36

Soon enough, men were having sex in the private gardens surrounding the house, and a significant portion of the party’s alcohol had been consumed.37 At this point a small group of undercover policeman entered the party with a squad waiting outside. At first, the

33 “Joe,” in Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 30. 34 Rebecca Sinclair, “Official Treatment of Homosexuality,” 71. 35 “Joe,” in Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 30. 36 Rebecca Sinclair, “Official Treatment of Homosexuality,” 72. 37 Ibid, 73.

36 party’s guests simply thought that they were “rough trade”—masculine men who identified as straight but had sex with other men—and they continued the party. After a few minutes, one of the policemen approached Malan, the impromptu bartender for the night, and asked for a drink. Malan quickly poured him one and passed it across the counter. The policeman insisted on paying for the drink, and Malan laughed him off; the party was what was known then as a “bottle-party” meaning that all of the guests had brought their own alcohol and shared with each other. The policeman insisted, and Malan jokingly took a small sum of money from him.38

Given that Malan had now ‘sold alcohol without a liquor license’, the police now had full reign to raid the party, and that is promptly what they did. Before guests could fully piece together what had happened, the police were inside and in the backyard rounding people up. After revealing himself as the owner of the house, Malan was handcuffed and placed in a squad car outside where he overheard policeman saying, “Did you see how the moffies were kissing? They are grabbing each other’s arses. They should all be killed.”39

But much to their dismay, despite raiding a party of over three hundred people, the police would leave the Torwood House essentially empty-handed. That evening, of the hundreds of men they processed, they were only able to arrest ten men due to a discrepancy in South African Law. By 1966, South African law did not criminalize homosexuality or cross-dressing writ large; rather, it criminalized homosexual acts or cross-dressing in public. This meant that, despite finding a party of three hundred men,

38 Ibid, 71. 39 This is a translation from the original Afrikaans: “Het jy gesien hoe soen die moffies mekaar? Hulle vat aan mekaar se gatte! Hulle behoort almal vrekgemaak te word.” Rebecca Sinclair, “Official Treatment of Homosexuality,” 72.

37 some of whom were even having sex outside, almost none of them could be arrested, because they were doing so on private property and were thus guilty of no offense.40

The next day, the newspapers exploded with headlines about what became known as The Forest Town Raid: “Vice Squad Find 350 Men in One House” proclaimed the front page of The Star and “350 in Mass Sex Orgy!” heralded the front page of the Rand Daily

Mail.41 In the popular imagination of most South Africans, these headlines conjured up pornographic images of unconscionable sexual behavior. The Star described men “…in various stages of undress and behaving in a ‘grossly obscene’ manner.”42 The descriptions of the party, “sent shockwaves through the white establishment.”43 Adding insult to injury, the party occurred in Forest Town, a respectable, wealthy, white suburb that many South

Africans expected to be immune from such vices. Degenerates from the lower class did not frequent the party; instead, “doctors, lawyers, and company directors,” frequented the party, “many of whom had travelled a long way to attend the gathering.”44 No longer could homosexuality be confined only to seedy bars downtown; it had transformed into something that could infiltrate the very heart of white society and morality. It was perhaps this fear, more than any other, which triggered the resulting moral panic.45 Throughout the following year, headlines continued to decry the seriousness of this moral problem for

40Of the ten men who they did manage to arrest, nine of those men were arrested for ‘masquerading as women’ in public, but only when the police were able to determine that they had arrived at the party in the gowns that they were wearing (thus admitting to cross-dressing in public) as opposed to changing into the gowns once they had arrived at the party (which would’ve constituted cross-dressing in private, an activity that was fully legal), see Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 30. 41 See “Vice Squad find 350 men in one house,” The Star, January 22, 1966 or “350 in Mass Sex Orgy!” Rand Daily Mail, January 22, 1966. 42 “Vice Squad find 350 men in one house,” The Star, January 22, 1966, in Andrew Tucker, Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity, and Interaction in Cape Town, (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 41. 43 Glen Retief, “Keeping Sodom Out of the Laager,” in Defiant Desire, eds. Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron (New York. Routledge, 1995), 101. 44 ‘”Five pay “men only” party fines,” Rand Daily Mail, January 24, 1966. 45 Henriette Gunkel, The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa, (New York: Routledge, 2010), 52.

38 white communities.46 The Sunday Express featured headlines about “South Africa’s growing social problem,” claiming, “one in ten may be deviant.” 47

Following the public outcry, the apartheid police and government responded accordingly. The head office of the South African Police sent a memo to all local branches that homosexuality was “being practiced between male persons throughout the country and that offenders are not pursuing an organized modus operandi.”48 In response, local police forces and vice squads ramped up their efforts to “bust” queer parties in private homes, raiding homes in Johannesburg and as well as clubs in Durban.49

In the wake of the Forest Town raid, it became a commonplace occurrence for police to raid gay bars, round up men who they caught dancing with one another, take their photographs, and log their license plate numbers.50 For gay men who found themselves tangled up in this sort of police entrapment, “a serious threat was that one’s name and picture would appear in the daily newspapers.”51 Some queer men thought that this newly- posed danger of arrest made the clubbing experience “more fun.”52 But for a majority of queer men, the prospect of being publicly outed terrified most queer men and served as

“almost a guarantee of his losing his job and being rejected by his family.”53

46 “They often meet in bars,” Sunday Express, March 12, 1967, in Andrew Tucker, Queer Visibilities, 42. 47 K. Wallace, “Spotlight on S.A.’s Growing Social Problem: One in Ten May Be Deviant,” Sunday Express, March 12, 1967. 48 Glen Retief, “Keeping Sodom Out of the Laager,” in Defiant Desire, 101. 49 As Kevan Botha characterized it, “Gay men generally became the targets of police action in assuaging public panic. Known gay men were rounded up and threatened with public exposure unless they named friends and gay acquaintances. Those who resisted had their names and occupations published in the print media.” Kevan Botha and Edwin Cameron, “South Africa,” in Sociolegal Control, 23. 50 Glen Retief, Policing the Perverts: An Exploratory Investigation of the Nature and Social Impact of Police Action Towards Gay and Bisexual Men in South Africa (Cape Town: Institute of Criminology, , 1993), 20. 51 Ibid, 20. 52 Andrew Tucker, Queer Visibilities, 45. 53 Ken Cage, Gayle, 14.

39 And yet, despite the increase in raids and roundups of queer men, the South African

Police remained dissatisfied because, while they were able to intimidate queer men with the possibility of exposure, they were ultimately unable to pursue prosecution. Again, this is because homosexual acts were only criminal in public. Without a change in the law, the police continued to have their hands tied by the inability to impose legal sanctions.

Realizing this “problem” confronting the police, J.M. Keevy, the South African Police

Commissioner, wrote a letter to the Minister of Justice, B.J. Vorster, requesting a change in the law which would criminalize all homosexual conduct in private. As it stood, “despite police observation…it is apparent that stringent measures cannot be taken against homosexuals in terms of existing legislation.”54 Following his letter, the Police Head Office in Pretoria undertook an investigation into homosexuality in 1967, which concluded “our present legislation is quite inadequate to cope with this very real problem.”55

By 1967, the South African Police and the Department of Justice held the opinion that the laws against homosexuality needed to be strengthened. Speaking in Parliament on

April 21, 1967, P.C. Pelser, the Minister of Justice, articulated why:

History has given us a clear warning and we should not allow ourselves to be deceived into thinking that we may casually dispose of this viper in our midst by regarding it as innocent fun. It is a proven fact that sooner or later homosexual instincts make their effects felt on a community if they are permitted to run riot. Therefore we should be on the alert and do what there is to do lest we be saddled later with a problem which will be the utter ruin of our spiritual and moral fibre.56

He went on to recommend the legal changes proposed by the South African Police that would make any homosexual acts—committed in public or in private—criminal. Following

54 Rebecca Sinclair, “Official Treatment of Homosexuality,” 75. 55 Ibid, 77. 56 Republic of South Africa, Debates of the House of Assembly, Cols 1405-6, Cape Town, 1967, in Glen Reteif, “Keeping Sodom Out of the Laager,” in Defiant Desire, 99.

40 Pelser’s recommendation, Parliament deemed it necessary to conduct further study on the matter “because the bill was so controversial.”57 Most parliamentarians at the time viewed homosexuality as immoral, but controversy surrounding the bill emerged because the bill represented a significant and legally messy imposition on the private lives of white citizens.

Furthermore, many progressive parliamentarians of the time believed that while homosexuality was immoral, it should be treated and “cured” rather than punished.

Due to the controversy surrounding the bill, Parliament set up a Parliamentary

Select Committee to research homosexuality and make a recommendation for an advisable course of action. Soon thereafter, nine members of Parliament were appointed to the Select

Committee, which quickly began its work by calling for confidential submissions on the topic from the general public in 1968.58 In many ways, the establishment of a

Parliamentary Select Committee rang the death knell of the legislation, because at the time,

Parliamentary Committees were notorious for delaying and preventing unwanted legislation from being passed.

Nonetheless, the Minister of Justice’s recommendation for the criminalization of homosexual conduct combined with the public inquiry of the Parliamentary Select

Committee struck a newfound sense of terror throughout South Africa’s white queer subcultures. For the past three decades, white queer people had been working to build a thriving, albeit underground, sense of community. In the course of two years, this nascent gay community seemed on the verge of collapse. Criminalization of private homosexuality would fundamentally alter the lives of most queer South Africans and make them liable for arrest and imprisonment. Moreover, prior to the Minister of Justice’s recommendations,

57 Rebecca Sinclair, “Official Treatment of Homosexuality,” 84. 58Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 32.

41 sexual acts between queer women in South Africa were technically legal. If the new law were to succeed, it would ban all homosexual conduct, not just conduct between men. With the establishment of the Parliamentary Select Committee, queer women were under attack by the government, striking immense fear in the hearts of many people who were used to being left alone. 59

And so, for the first time in South African history, a gay political movement coalesced in order to resist further criminalization of homosexuality. In 1968, white men and women across Pretoria and Johannesburg launched the Homosexual Law Reform

Movement, known colloquially as Law Reform.60 While the organization was historic, it had limited scope and visibility. At the time, “white lesbian and gay activists still favored guarded visibility,” due to the repressive nature of white South African culture.61 The agenda and activities of the organization clearly reflected this preference towards a more conservative movement. According to psychologist and activist Gordon Isaacs, there were two clearly defined objectives of the Law Reform Movement. First, the organization worked to raise money to pay the bail of men who were arrested for homosexuality and helped to fund their legal defense. Second, Law Reform worked to hire lawyers and advocates who could prepare submissions, on behalf of queer men and women, for the Select Committee.62

From the onset of Law Reform, the organization took a single-issue approach to politics. As an organization, it existed for legal advocacy and lobbying, and did not

59 As one woman, Jackie, recalled: “We were terrified. There was a rumour that women would not be allowed to live together. I remember going absolutely cold and thinking, how are we going to live if we can’t live together?” “Jackie,” in Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 32. 60 Ashley Currier, Out in Africa: LGBT Organizing in Namibia and South Africa., (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 31. 61 Ibid, 32. 62 Gordon Isaacs and Brian McKendrick, Male Homosexuality in South Africa: Identity Formation, Culture, and Crisis, (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1992), 155.

42 encourage any actions, such as protests or marches, that could be perceived as against the state. In general, the group of people organizing Law Reform held a deep sense of fear that, if they spoke out too vocally against the state, they’d be arrested or the organization would be banned. This had been the fate of most organizations that spoke out against the government—including the African National Congress and the Pan-African Congress—and the organizers of Law Reform feared a similar fate. Accordingly, they focused all of their energies on the ruling National Party and worked within the legal framework imposed by the apartheid government.63

Given the clandestine nature of its activities, Law Reform met predominately in members’ houses and other private settings. It adopted a three committee structure: one committee worked on preparing submissions to the Select Committee, one compiled leading psychological and scientific research concerning homosexuality, and one was dedicated to fundraising. In order to support their efforts, Law Reform set the goal of raising R40,000 by hosting parties and various fundraising events across the country.64

Law Reform even managed to hold a public meeting at the Park Royal Hotel near Joubert

Park that was attended by over one hundred people. It became the first public meeting of gay men and lesbians in the history of the country.65

As a result of these parties and gatherings, white gay men and lesbians were able to come together as never before, and a new sense to unity was created among those who participated. According to one woman, “gay life flourished and there were more parties than ever before. People seemed to forget their differences, and everyone pitched in.”

63 “Joe,” in Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 35. 64 Ibid, 33. 65 Henriette Gunkel, The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality, 53.

43 Another man noted the sense of empowerment that many people felt as part of the movement: “for someone who had been nothing but a little queen…to find herself now actually working to put pressure on the government to respect gay rights. I think it opened a window in many individual lives.”66

As the Law Reform Movement began organizing white gays and lesbians in unprecedented ways, the Parliamentary Select Committee began the arduous process of understanding homosexuality, hearing from members of the (white) community, and crafting a recommendation for Parliament. The debates and records left behind by the

Select Committee provide a detailed—and surprisingly comedic—snapshot of public attitudes towards homosexuality in white communities. Overall, the Select Committee did not debate whether or not homosexuality was wrong, everyone serving on the committee assumed at the time that it was wrong; rather, the committee split between the view that,

“gay men and lesbians were corrupting the youth and needed to be punished,” and the opinion that “gays and lesbians were sick and need to be treated, not put in prison.”67

Furthermore, the Select Committee overwhelmingly preoccupied itself with the question of white homosexuality; at the time, they did not discuss black homosexuality.68 This contrast between grave concern over white homosexuality and apathy towards black homosexuality became a significant theme throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

The Select Committee began its work in Cape Town in 1968. 69

66 “Hannah,” and “Joe,” in Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 33. 67 Glen Retief, “Keeping Sodom Out of the Laager,” in Defiant Desire, 102. 68 Ibid, 103. 69 The demographic characteristics of the Select Committee represented an interesting cross-section of white South Africa. Of the nine parliamentarians who were chosen to serve on the Select Committee, six were English, three were Afrikaans, one member was Jewish, and three were doctors. In general, the composition of the Select Committee gave it an overall progressive lilt. Many of the members were not socially conservative , and the presence of multiple doctors prompted a much more sympathetic,

44 As it began its work, the Select Committee first heard from Major F.A.J. Van Zyl, who served as the representative of the South African Police to the Select Committee.

Throughout his testimony, Major Van Zyl struck an overall alarmist tone and sought to communicate to the Select Committee that “homosexuality in all its forms constitutes a threat to the Republic.”70 Accordingly, he began his testimony to the Select Committee with a now-infamous description of the Forest Town Party:

Males were dancing with males to the strains of music, kissing and cuddling each other in the most vulgar fashion imaginable. They also paired off and continued their love making in the garden and in motor cars in the streets, engaging in the most indecent acts imaginable…[which] filled even hardened members of the Criminal Investigation Department with disgust and revulsion.71

He carried on by stressing the desire of homosexual men to “influence young boys,” and emphasized that “as with every virulent infection, it [homosexuality] spreads.”72

Some members of the Select Committee were resistant to Van Zyl’s alarmist discourse, and did not buy into his arguments in favor of criminalizing homosexuality. At one point in the hearing, a member of the Select Committee asked Van Zyl point blank if he could say with any certainty that white homosexuality negatively impacted the police’s ability to ensure law and order.73 With that question, the Select Committee had trapped

Van Zyl, either he had to admit that homosexuality did obstruct the police force’s ability to enforce law and order, thereby making the police force look weak, or he had to concede

treatment-oriented response to homosexuality in lieu of increased punishment. The parliamentarians on the committee were Mr. S Frank (chairman), Mr. J. T. Kruger, Mr. M.L. Mitchell, Mr. T. Langley, Mr. L le Grange, Dr. A. Radford, Dr, W.L.D.M. Venter, Mr. J.J. Engelbrecht, and Dr. E.L. Fisher. See Rebecca Sinclair, “Official Treatment of Homosexuality,” 89. 70 Rebecca Sinclair, “Official Treatment of Homosexuality,” 96. 71 Republic of South Africa, Report of Select Committee for the Immorality Act Amendment Bill, 1968, in Glen Retief, “Keeping Sodom Out of the Laager,” in Defiant Desire, 101. 72 Republic of South Africa, Select Committee Report, 1968, in Kevan Botha and Edwin Cameron, “South Africa,” in Sociolegal Control, 24. 73 Republic of South Africa, Select Committee Report, 1968, in Rebecca Sinclair, “Official Treatment of Homosexuality,” 96.

45 that homosexuality did not in fact pose any threat, invalidating the police force’s call to criminalize homosexuality. When pressed, by the Select Committee, Van Zyl chose the latter option, and saying that homosexuality “as such” did not interfere with the police’s ability to enforce law and order.74 Other government agencies also stood against the moral panic that the police sought to induce, namely the Department of Social Welfare and Pensions, which testified “a recent survey carried out at regional and branch offices of this department…[concluded that] there is no problem worth mentioning.”75

Following this discussion of homosexual men, the Select Committee then turned to lesbian women, a topic that had never been addressed before by the government before.

Despite having never received any complaints about lesbian activity before, and for reasons that have perhaps been lost to history, their conversation concerning lesbian women centered around one pivotal object: the dildo.76 In their quest to protect sexual purity in

South Africa, the police had decided that outlawing dildos would prove to be an effective strategy “to stop lesbianism.”77 Despite its serious legal repercussions, the discussion of dildos by the nine white male committee members revealed both their ignorance of the topic but also the clumsiness with which they approached the topic of homosexuality more generally. As a committee, they were very concerned about the size of dildos, and were worried that dildos that are larger than normal penises would ruin a woman’s ability to gain sexual pleasure from a man. 78

74 Ibid, 96. 75 Ibid, 100. 76 Kevan Botha and Edwin Cameron, “South Africa,” in Sociolegal Control, 22. 77 Ibid, 23. 78 This clumsiness is further reflected in the transcripts of the proceedings: Dr. Radford: Do you think that the police brought this [prohibition of dildos] in with the idea that there should be a prosecution of lesbianism?—I suppose so, because apparently this particular

46 Amidst the frequent confusion of the Select Committee, the opinions that proved to be most persuasive were those of psychologists and of clergy, who were both surprisingly progressive in their outlook. Moderate clergy and psychiatrists primarily viewed homosexuality as a sinful illness that could not be remedied by imprisonment. Generally, both medical professionals and religious leaders of the time took a more compassionate view of homosexuality and believed that homosexuals needed to be ‘treated’ or ‘saved,’ not punished.79 To this end, the prominent psychologist L.S Freed published a pivotal article in the 1968 South African Medical Journal which argued that criminalization of homosexuality would not help to address the real causes of homosexuality: poverty and improper socialization.80 The South African Medical Journal also published an editorial asserting that homosexuality “requires understanding and help, not debasement and punishment.”81

Shortly afterward, the Society of Psychiatrists and Neurosurgeons of South Africa began issuing public statements against criminalization, campaigning “against what it perceived as harsh policies towards mentally ‘ill’ individuals.”82 These arguments fell on receptive

type of article can only be used by women, and I think that that amounts to lesbianism, does it not? Dr. Fisher: Not really. I would say that the article can be used by a single woman for masturbation?—But it is not intended for that purpose…As far as I know the main object for which this thing is intended is for lesbianism… In order to gain further guidance on the subject, the Select Committee even went so far as to have a lesbian woman—“Miss B”—testify anonymously. During her hearing, she denied knowledge of lesbian women using dildos regularly during sex. The committee went on to ask her about lesbian sex more generally, asking, “Do you achieve an orgasm in this sexual urge that you practice?”78 Republic of South Africa, Select Committee Report, 1968, in Kevan Botha and Edwin Cameron, “South Africa,” in Sociolegal Control, 31. 79 Tiffany F. Jones, “Averting White Male (Ab)normality: Psychiatric Representations and Treatment of ‘Homosexuality’ in 1960s South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 34, no. 2, (June 2008): 399. 80 L.S. Freed, “Homosexuality and the Bill,” South African Medical Journal 42, no. 22, (1968), 567. 81 Editorial, “Homosexuality and the Bill,” South African Medical Journal 42, no. 19 (May 11, 1968), 458. 82 Tiffany F. Jones, “Averting White Male (Ab)normality,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 408.

47 ears, particularly given that three of the nine members of the Select Committee were doctors.83

Members of the clergy also took an active role in the select committee and surrounding public debate. The debate on the religious side had much more to do with biblical interpretation than with government policy, but in a style that is typical of the

Christian nationalism of the National Party, the domains of religion and government were very closely linked in the eyes of the Select Committee. Two of the more vocal clergy members were Reverend Robert Selby Taylor, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, and

Reverend Ambrose Reeves, the Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg. In a submission to the parliamentary committee, Taylor argues that the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah cannot be used as grounds for condemning homosexuality because the real sin of the people living in Sodom was the sin of idolatry.84 Rev. Reeves took an even more progressive stance, “we have to still ask if the Scriptures also condemn the physical expression of affection between two persons of the same sex who claim to be in love with one another.”85

Not all members of the clergy treated homosexuality with such sensitivity. Frank

Charles Fensham, a professor of Semitic Studies and Afrikaans Culture at the University of

Stellenbosch, also testified before the Select Committee.86 He brought a harsher, less tolerant perspective typical of the Dutch Reform Church at the time, testifying “men who defile themselves with mankind (homosexual men) are subject to law and are punishable

83 Ibid, 405. 84 Rebecca Sinclair, “Official Treatment of Homosexuality,” 102. 85 Rebecca Sinclair, “Official Treatment of Homosexuality,” 105. 86 Rosemarie Breuer, “F.C. Fensham,” Stellenbosch Writers http://www.stellenboschwriters.com/fensham.html (accessed April 7, 2014).

48 as a crime against God, the state, and the individual.”87 He would continue on in the traditional vein of Christian nationalism, asserting that that South Africa had only prospered in the past because it had put God first and that South Africa should abide by scriptural law as a Christian nation.88 His viewpoint was not atypical at the time—many

Afrikaner Nationalists believed that the apartheid government should center its laws in conservative Christian ideology.89

Navigating between these two extremes, the Select Committee had a complicated and delicate task on their hands. On the one hand, they had to appease the demands of conservative people, many of whom were members of the Dutch Reform Church, but they had to do so without stepping on the toes of more progressive South Africans. Following months of hearings, submissions, and testimonies, the Select Committee drafted their recommendation and passed it along to Parliament.

Overall, the conclusion of the Select Committee process ended up with a fairly progressive response from the government. In 1969, Parliament passed the Immorality

Amendment Act, which served three main purposes. First, instead of criminalizing homosexuality in private, the Immorality Amendment Act criminalized any homosexual acts that are performed at a party. 90 The Immorality Amendment Act defined both of these terms broadly, defining a homosexual act as “any act that is calculated to stimulate sexual passion or give sexual gratification,” and a party as “any occasion where more than two

87 Letter from F.C. Fensham to P.C. Pelser, Minister of Justice, Cape Town. 24. Feb. 1968, in Rebecca Sinclair, “Official Treatment of Homosexuality,” 105. 88 Rebecca Sinclair, “Official Treatment of Homosexuality,” 107. 89 Ibid, 114. 90 B. Van Niekerk, “The ‘Third Sex’ Act,” South African Law Journal 87 (1970): 88.

49 persons are present,” under .91 Parliament also raised the age of consent for homosexual sex to nineteen and, following much consideration, criminalized the possession of dildos and other sexual paraphernalia by saying that, “Any person who manufactures, sells or supplies any article which is intended to be used to perform an unnatural sexual act, shall be guilty of an offence.”92

Many who were involved with the Law Reform Movement celebrated the scaled- back version of the legislation as a victory. Despite the fact that the amendment criminalized homosexual conduct at parties, many members of Law Reform were grateful that homosexual acts in private remained unassailable to the government. As one Law

Reform member put it, “We had done it ourselves. We were threatened and we fought back and won. For the very first time. It felt great!”93 Progressives and conservatives alike received the change fairly positively, as an editorial in the Cape Times explained, “At first sight, the Select Committee appears to have produced human, common-sense provisions for dealing with a problem that is as old as Western Civilization.”94 The Cape Argus further opined, “The essence of the approach was that innocent members of society must be protected against the effects of homosexuality without penalizing homosexuals for deviations from social norms they could not help.”95 Other more conservative publications, such as The Bloemfontein Friend, ensured their readership knew that the new law “does not imply that homosexuality between consenting adults will be permitted…it continues to

91 Republic of South Africa, The Immorality Amendment Act, 1969 (Act No. 57 of 1969), WikiSource, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Immorality_Amendment_Act,_1969 (Accessed April 7, 2014). 92 Ibid. 93 “Gareth,” in Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 36. 94 “Editorial,” Cape Times, March 19, 1969, in Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” 35. 95 Cape Argus, March 18, 1969, in Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” 35.

50 remain an offence under common law.”96 The legal community shared a sense that the new law was poorly written, vague, would be difficult to adjudicate and that, “the problem of interpreting the homosexuality provision in our Immorality Act will sooner or later arise; concomitant with this problem our courts will have to face up to the problematic nature of a just punishment for a contravention of that provision.”97

Following the conclusion of the Select Committee’s proceedings, the Law Reform

Movement disintegrated. There were attempts to continue the important political and community-building functions of the organization, but because the group was tailored specifically to influence Parliament in 1968, “attempts in the early 1970s by gay people to maintain the impetus for law reform and action proved to be unsuccessful.”98 As one member put it, “The whole thing just seemed to evaporate. Everyone went back to their little cliques and bridge clubs. All the mixing and interaction and socializing just ended.”99

The Law Reform Movement stands as a foundational moment in South African queer history. In most respects, it was not a movement that aimed at cultural transformation or long-term community mobilization. The men—and the few women—who operated Law

Reform had a much more modest goal in mind: they were campaigning for the right to be left alone and for the right to privacy concerning their sexual lives. The 1968 Parliamentary

Select Committee did make legal changes to the Immorality Act, but by and large, these changes did not drastically alter the lives of most gay men. Before the new law, clubs and parties were selectively raided by the police and vice squads, and after the law, this still took place. The ‘witch hunts’ which were so feared by many in the white gay community

96 The Bloemfontein Friend, March, 19, 1969, in Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” 35. 97 B. Van Niekerk, “The ‘Third Sex’ Act,” South African Law Journal, 93. 98 Gordon Isaacs and Brian McKendrick, Male Homosexuality in South Africa, 155. 99 “Joe,” in Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 36.

51 never seemed to materialize, and as the 1960s faded into the 1970s, the government backed off of most of its efforts to control or impede the white gay community.

While Law Reform ultimately fizzled out, it left a lasting legacy in the minds of white queer South Africans and set the tone for the gay reform organizing that followed. Through

Law Reform, queer white South Africans learned that, through playing by the rules, not rocking the boat too much, and respecting the authority of the government, they would be able to avoid persecution. In effect, Law Reform and the proceedings of the Parliamentary

Select Committee gave queer white South Africans hope that the apartheid government could be engaged on the issue of decriminalization. This hope that the apartheid state could be persuaded to respect the autonomy of white queer people would go on to undergird gay reform organizing of the next two decades.

***

By the late 1950s, South Africa’s white communities had already seen the emergence of distinct queer subcultures throughout major urban centers. Notably absent from this history, however, are the stories and experiences of non-white South Africans

Prior to the 1980s, queer white South Africans and queer non-white South Africans did not interact frequently. This led to separation between white and non-white queer communities and to relative invisibility of non-white queer South Africans in the dominant narratives of white “gay culture” during this period. So, in discussing South Africa’s queer past, it is difficult to talk about a singular queer subculture; rather, subcultures were segregated by race, class, and the apartheid system.

Throughout the mid-twentieth century, the apartheid government attempted to create rifts between non-white South Africans by splitting non-white South Africans into

52 three racial categories: black, coloured, and Indian. While these categories were necessarily sloppy, they were loosely oriented around skin color and were defined in opposition to one another. 100In general, the apartheid government treated black people with contempt and afforded them very few privileges and little autonomy. Coloured people occupied a slightly different position: because they were ‘part-white,’ they were afforded somewhat greater privilege under apartheid ideology.101

The differentiation between black and coloured South Africans became more entrenched as the apartheid state began formally codifying its policy of racial oppression.

The laws of the apartheid state rested on a long tradition of legal racial subordination in

South Africa, such as the Land Act of 1913, and the (Natives) Urban Areas Act of 1923, but the apartheid state took these laws one step further.102 In the 1950s, Parliament passed both the Population Registration Act, which “imposed racial classification on the entire population,” and the Group Areas Act, which “geographically separated the different classified groups.”103 As a result of this differentiation, these communities developed unique histories that, in many cases, did not overlap.104

Queer subcultures have a rich and vibrant history among coloured communities in

South Africa. To understand the roots of coloured queer identities in South Africa, we need look no further than District Six, a multiracial neighborhood in Cape Town that served as

100 In many ways, South Africans understood race as a complex codification based on an individual’s culture, language, social circles, ethnicity and skin color. Black people could generally trace their ancestry back to indigenous African communities and spoke a diverse array of languages. Oftentimes, coloured people spoke Afrikaans and could trace their lineage back to a combination of white, black, and slave ancestry, but the determination of who exactly was “coloured” never comprised a precise science. 101 Andrew Tucker, Queer Visibilities, 70-72. 102 Henriette Gunkel, Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality, 29. 103Ibid, 29. 104 Because black queer subcultures and coloured queer subcultures developed separately from one another, they are addressed separately in this chapter.

53 the “spiritual home” and national center of the coloured community.105Located just west of central Cape Town, District Six boasted a thriving coloured and multiracial community since the beginning of the colonial era. As such, it had developed its own customs, traditions, and urban geography that paired vibrant diversity with innovative survival.

In keeping with this tradition, District Six developed a dynamic queer subculture largely distinct from Western conceptions of homosexuality. In District Six, loud, boisterous, cross-dressing queens known colloquially as moffies ruled the queer subculture.106 The etymology of the word moffie is still the subject of some debate, but the term allegedly developed from the word Afrikaans word ‘mof’ meaning the muff of a sleeve.107 Although the term is used pejoratively today, it did not have the same derogatory meaning in the 1950s and 60s. Whatever its origins, the term moffie had become ubiquitous throughout coloured culture by the 1950s and would quickly spread into common use among white and black communities as well.108 Walking up and down

Hanover Street, the main road that ran through District Six, one could see effeminate moffies walking out in the open, crisscrossing between the many hair salons that served as crucial gathering spaces for moffie communities.109 The annual “Cape Carnival” afforded moffie culture the greatest visibility in District Six. The Cape Carnival celebrated the coming of the new year with a joyous parade, and in addition to having many moffie

105 Andrew Tucker, Queer Visibilities, 74. 106 William L. Leap, “Strangers on a Train,” in Queer Globalizations, 222. 107 Shaun De Waal, “Etymological Note: on ‘Moffie’,” in Defiant Desire, eds. Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron (New York. Routledge, 1995), xiii. 108 By the 1940s and 1950s moffies in coloured communities had even developed their own language, called moffietaal, which enabled them to communicate openly among one another about queer life. Moffietaal—or Gayle, as it would later be known—relied on using names in place of many nouns. For example, a “Dora” was a drink, a “Hilda” was an unattractive man, and a “Priscilla” was a policeman. By the 1950s Gayle had even spread to white communities, a testament both to the popularity of the language and to the ability for coloured moffies to sometimes transgress lines of race during the apartheid era. See Ken Cage, Gayle, 32. 109 Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 27.

54 participants dressed in “heels, frills, fishnet stockings, hairy armpits [and] trashy jewels, the “moffie queen traditionally led the parade.110

By the mid-1950s, moffie culture began to catch the imagination of coloured and black people across the country and received extensive coverage in prominent publications such as Drum and Golden City Post.111 These publications began to develop an almost reality

TV-like obsession with moffies, who were regarded with a strange combination of keen interest, glamorous veneration, and judgmental disdain. This strange tone is demonstrated in the January 1959 issue of Drum, which featured an expose entitled “Oh, So This is What

They Call a Cape Moffie Drag”:

It was the most astonishing party you have ever seen…there was whispering in corners, and smudged lipstick and high-pitched giggles. But there were no women…This was a party given by Cape Town’s famous ‘moffies’…There were rouged pugilist faces peeping from underneath ginger wigs. And sometimes the shoulders above the strapless evening dresses had muscles that would have done credit to a weightlifter. 112

110 Dhianaraj Chetty, “A Drag at Madame Costello’s: Moffie Life and the Popular Press in the 1950s and 1960s,” in Defiant Desire, eds. Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron (New York. Routledge, 1995), 115. 111 Dhianaraj Chetty, “A Drag at Madame Costello’s,” in Defiant Desire, 117. 112 I. Berry, “Oh, so this is what they call a Cape Moffie Drag,” Drum, January 1959, 60-61.

55

Figure 1: "Oh So This is What They Call a Cape Moffie Drag" Drum Magazine, January 1959.

Throughout the late 1950s, the 1960s, and into the 1970s, stories of moffies continued to abound. In the early 1960s, Drum and Golden City Post ran a photo series of private moffie parties in District Six at Madame Costello’s, a regular moffie haunt.113 The involvement of Golden City Post became so extensive that they began sponsor an annual

Moffie Queen competition at the Kismet Theatre in Athlone.114 As the competition grew,

113 Dhianaraj Chetty, “A Drag at Madame Costello’s,” in Defiant Desire, 121. 114 Dhianaraj Chetty, “A Drag at Madame Costello’s,” 119.

56 Golden City Post reported in riveting tones about the reigning moffie queen and the other moffies who dared to challenge her throne. 115

As time went on, the coverage of Drum and Golden City Post, even became sympathetic to moffies and began portraying them in a complex, political, and multifaceted light. In 1968, when the Parliamentary Select Committee began its work investigating homosexuality throughout the country, the front page of the Golden City Post featured a full page article titled “Leave Us Alone, Moffies Plead.”116 The article included not only testimony from P.C. Pelser, the Minister of Justice, it also empowered moffies themselves to speak out. Golden City Post quoted Kewpie—perhaps the most famous moffie of this period—in the article, “people should not try and interfere with our community. Nobody can change us.”117 By the 1970s, Drum reported on moffie culture in favorable, almost enthusiastic terms. In a 1976 expose on “The Gay World of Moffie Hairdressers,” Drum introduced moffies sympathetically, considering them “accepted, however unusual, as a part of the Cape society.” 118

And yet, despite the widespread visibility of moffie culture and communities, moffies led lives of social and physical precarity. Due to the internalized racism of many middle class coloured families and their desire to seem respectable in the eyes of whites, moffies were often viewed with contempt in the upper echelons of coloured society.119 In

115A June 18, 1967 article typified this type of reporting: the front page of Golden City Post blared “Moffie War Flares Over Bid To Depose Queen Piper Laurie.” The article salaciously covered a feud that developed between two moffies, Piper Laurie and Cupie Doll (aka Cappuccino), who were both campaigning for the title of Moffie Queen. “Moffie War Flares Over Bid To Depose Queen Piper Laurie,” Golden City Post, June 18, 1967. 116 “Leave us Alone, Moffies Plead,” Golden City Post, Jan 21, 1968, 1. 117 Ibid. 118 Jackie Heyns, “The Gay World of Moffie Hairdressers,” Drum, October 1976. Page 46-47. 119 Andrew Tucker, Queer Visibilities, 79.

57 addition, the gangs that roamed District Six, namely the Globe Gang, the Casbahs, and the

Scorpions, also made moffies targets of sexual violence.120

The apartheid government brought what little safe space moffies had created for their culture and identities in District Six to a halt on February 11, 1966, when it declared

District Six a “whites-only” area. Over the course of the next decade, the government removed over 60,000 people—including the moffies—from the vibrant heart of District Six to communities on the outskirts of the sandy Cape Flats.121 While a culture of drag queens would continue in some form to the present day, moffie culture and communities were definitively altered. Furthermore, the relocation to the Cape Flats—some 25 kilometers away from the city center—reduced what little interaction had taken place between coloured and white queer people. Now, if a moffie wanted to go to any of the white gay bars downtown, they were dependent “on having a car, knowing someone who had a car, or

[being willing] to negotiate the politics of Cape Town’s system of public transportation.”122

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the white establishment had a similar attitude towards queer subcultures in both coloured and black communities: they were only of concern if they interfered with the apartheid state’s ability to control and exploit black communities.

The lineage of queer subcultures within black communities goes back generations to indigenous cultures that predated colonization, although evidence of those queer subcultures is sparse.123 While the origins of many of these subcultures are unknown, many

120 As one moffie—“Rita”—put it: “There are many of us in the town. Our numbers grow…we meet often. Some sneer at us. Some understand. But we just adjust ourselves to the conditions. Our world is real. We cannot exist otherwise.” Dhianaraj Chetty, “A Drag at Madame Costello’s,” in Defiant Desire, 123. 121 William L. Leap, “Strangers on a Train,” in Queer Globalizations, 225. 122 Ibid, 226. 123 Rudi C. Bleys, The Geography of Perversion, 35.

58 of them continued into the apartheid era and were widely practiced in townships, rural communities, mining hostels, and prisons.

Perhaps the most widely known example of queer black subculture in South Africa during the years of apartheid was the phenomenon of “mining wives.” In the early twentieth century, gold and diamonds were found in substantial quantities in both

Johannesburg and Kimberly, and their discovery had vast implications for South Africa’s labor economy. Following the discovery of gold, black South Africans began to be seen as a powerful source of labor. Accordingly, throughout the country, significant systems of migratory labor emerged whereby black men from rural areas would live and work in

Johannesburg, Kimberly, or another such mining towns for most of the year, returning home to see their families only around Christmas.

A central feature of this system is the mining hostel, where many men would live in close quarters with one another throughout the year. These hostels became hotbeds for same-sex intimacy, and a relatively intricate system of “mine-marriages” began to emerge whereby older men would take a younger man in the hostel as their “wife”.124 These relationships were often mixed in nature between sexual intercourse and mutual support, and were rife with complex discourses surrounding gender and sexuality. 125

Throughout the next century, concerns about these relationships would be raised sporadically: among Chinese workers in gold mines in 1907, among miners in Boksburg in

124 T. Dunbar Moodie et al, “Migrancy and Male Sexuality,” 230. 125 As one miner recounts, “My girlfriend was a Basotho young lad. I was not ill-treating him as other boss boys did. I was very nice to him, did everything for him, and he was very polite. I did that firstly, because miners were not allowed to go and visit women in the township. I needed someone to be with me…I loved that boy very much. He had quick feelings…I loved him because he was a very quiet person.” Interview between Vivienne Ndatshe and Daniel, August 1982, in The Invisible Ghetto: Lesbian and Gay Writing from South Africa, eds. Matthew Krouse and Kim Berman, (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1995), 47-48.

59 1916, and even briefly among the Parliamentary Select Committee in 1968.126 Each time these concerns were raised, they were met with a similar response from the white establishment: tacit acceptance. 127 Apartheid leaders considered homosexuality a

“necessary evil in order to sustain the highly exploitative relationships that existed in the form of migrant labour…[and] contain the threat of unbridled black male sexuality.”128

Homosexuality on the mines also discouraged men from seeking sexual congress in surrounding towns and ensured a consistently productive workforce, because “workers who drank in town on weekends might be good for little work on Mondays.”129

Many scholars assert that homosexual relationships on the mines were subversive and transcended the boundaries of “situational homosexuality.” Historian Mark Gevisser posits that, while “there were those black men who practiced homosexuality for lack of a more appealing heterosexual alternative…there were also those who remained in town, living homosexual lives.”130 Additionally, Patrick Harries notes that homosexual cultures

“contradicted the imposed morality of industrialism and established an alternative propriety.”131

126 See Rebecca Sinclair, “Official Treatment of Homosexuality,” 43, T. Dunbar Moodie et al, “Migrancy and Male Sexuality,” 231, and Glen Elder, “Of Moffies, Kaffirs, and Perverts: Male Homosexuality and the Discourse of Moral Order in the Apartheid State,” in Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, eds. David Bell and Gill Valentine, (New York: Routledge, 1995), 62. 127 Documentation of these relationships among the white authorities emerged as early as 1902, when a Native Affairs Department Inspector wrote to his supervisor, “that the crime of sodomy has in the past been extensively practiced by natives in the compounds.” Within a week’s time, his supervisor replied, “This is a point with which I think it is inadvisable for us to interfere. It is a common practice among natives and would be impossible in my opinion for an inspector to cope with.” See Zackie Achmat, “Apostles of Civilised Vice: ‘Immoral Practices’ and ‘Unnatural Vice’ in South African Prisons and Compounds 1890-1920,” Social Dynamics 19, no. 2 (December 1993): 107. 128 Ibid, 59-60. 129 T. Dunbar Moodie et al., “Migrancy and Male Sexuality,” 240. 130 Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 18. 131 Patrick Harries, “Symbols and Sexuality: Culture and Identity on the Early Witwatersrand Gold Mines,” in Gender and History 2 no. 3, (September 1990), p. 333. See also, William J. Spurlin, “Broadening Postcolonial Studies,” in Postcolonial, Queer, 190, and Charles Van Onselen, The Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of ‘Nongoloza’ Mathebula 1867-1948, (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984), 50.

60 Mining hostels weren’t the only places where black queer subcultures were visible.

As the apartheid state continued to consolidate its power, black South Africans were systematically excluded from “whites-only” urban areas, and were forcibly removed into so-called homelands and townships. 132 Accordingly, loosely organized black queer subcultures began emerging in township communities; however, these subcultures were significantly more constrained than their white counterparts.

In townships, people were afforded very little privacy. Townships were

“uncomfortable and crowded spaces and the prying eyes of relatives, neighbors, and police informers were everywhere.”133 Black people were kept generally impoverished, and thus were not privy to the forms of independence that general affluence offered their white counterparts. In addition, the apartheid system of Bantu Education created school climates where teachers strictly punished any student expression of adolescent sexuality.134

Because of these factors, queer subcultures among black communities were driven far underground, and left a scattered, oftentimes incoherent historical record. These queer subcultures also did not fall conveniently within the western homosexuality- heterosexuality binary; instead, they more often played off of indigenous South African understandings of same-sex intimacy.

One example can be seen in the formation of female sexuality in both townships and rural areas. As with male homosexuality, same-sex intimacy among females occurred

132Glen Elder, Hostels, Sexuality and the Apartheid Legacy: Malevolent Geographies, (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 60. 133 William L. Leap, “Strangers on a Train,” in Queer Globalizations, 226. 134 Isak Niehaus, “Towards a Dubious Liberation: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Power in South African Lowveld Schools,” in Journal of Southern African Studies 26, no. 3, (September 2000): 391.

61 commonly within many African cultures throughout the continent.135 In Lesotho and throughout neighboring areas of South Africa, women often took on “mummy-baby” relationships, where girls or older women would begin an intimate friendship. In those friendships, one woman would serve as the “mummy” who then nurtured and mentored another woman, the “baby.” While these relationships were not always sexual, they were deeply romantic and often took on a sexual nature.136

Perhaps the best-known instance of queer sexuality among black women is to be found among female traditional healers called sangomas. Because sangomas played a pivotal role in traditional black South African culture, they were revered in local communities and treated with respect. Interestingly enough, many female sangomas had long-term sexual relationships with other women, whom they claimed were spiritually sanctioned by their ancestors.137 Given that the apartheid state never legislated against same-sex intimacy between women, neither “mummy-baby” relationships nor queer sangomas ever became the specific targets of apartheid legislation.

Similarly, among black men living in townships prior to the 1980s, queer subcultures relied predominately on non-western understandings of same-sex sexuality and gender non-conformity. Perhaps the most convincing evidence of this trend is the widespread use of the word stabane in township communities. The word stabane literally translates to “hermaphrodite,” but is commonly used to describe queer men and women in

135 Ruth Morgan and Saskia Wieringa. Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men and Ancestral Wives: Female Same-Sex Practices in Africa, (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2005), 281. 136 Judith Gay, “’Mummies and Babies’ and Friends and Lovers in Lesotho,” in Anthropology and Homosexual Behavior ed. Evelyn Blackwood, (New York, London: The Haworth Press, 1986), 101. 137 Ruth Morgan and Saskia Wieringa. Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men and Ancestral Wives, 233. See also, Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde, Black Bull, Ancestors, and Me: My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma, (Auckland Park: Fanele, 2008).

62 black communities.138 Additionally, the coloured term moffie also enjoyed common usage in black townships.

While the terms stabane and moffie were used extensively to describe queer men, they were not necessarily the words that queer men used to describe themselves. Queer men in township communities throughout South Africa created another distinct form of sexual identity that focused less on the gender of one’s partner and more on the role that one played in sex. In reef township communities there were three main categories of queer men: township communities used skesana to describe men who enjoyed being penetrated or playing the ‘passive’ role in sex, injonga to describe men who enjoyed penetrating their partner or playing the ‘active’ role in sex, and imbube to describe men who enjoyed doing either.139 Other communities, such as township communities in the Natal, used differing terminology, but the overarching categorizations were similar.140

Because of the fluidity of these identities, no solidified sense of a ‘community’ evolved between skesanas, injongas, and imbubes. Without a solidified sense of mutual identity, building a community with a sense of longevity or permanence became a difficult task. Accordingly, black queer subcultures during this period were hyper-localized. On occasion, small groups of skesanas might gather together to make dresses or bake and

138 Andrew Tucker, Queer Visibilities, 113. 139 Around these three terms, a loose subculture emerged with its own traditions, norms, and rules. Oftentimes, these varying roles were thought of in terms that were strikingly heterosexual, with many skesana’s describing themselves as women. As one skesana put it, “There must be a ‘man’ and a ‘woman’ in a relationship. A man [injonga] must act mannish in his behavior and his talks and walks. But a female [skesana] must be queenish in every way.” Skesanas would go to great lengths to protect a sense of femininity, often attempting to hide their penis in the bend of their legs during sex. In some cases, these roles were so malleable that injongas were not even considered to be “homosexual.” See Hugh McClean and Linda Ngcobo. “Those Who Fuck Me Say I’m Tasty,” in Defiant Desire, 164-168. 140 In the Natal, slightly different terms were used, the term isikhesana was used to describe the passive male partner, and iqenge described the dominant masculine partner. See Ronald Louw, “Mkhumbane and New Traditions of (un)African Same-Sex Weddings,” in Changing Men in South Africa, ed. Robert Morrell. (London: Zed Books, 2001).

63 there were some cases of township bars—called shebeens—that were known to be somewhat safe for non-conformist sexuality. 141 But overall, from the 1940s through the

1970s, queer black South Africans did not have an organized community to call their own.

***

In white communities, the apartheid state viewed homosexuality as “as an alien threat to the Afrikaner domain of masculinity.” 142 In an increasingly militarized state where conscription in the army was mandatory for all white men, homosexuality even threatened the ability for apartheid South Africa to defend itself from both outside forces and internal resistance, sending “panic down through the trenches of an unassailable order.”143

Perhaps the greatest irony of South African queer history is that, through its attempts to further penalize homosexuality in the 1960s, the apartheid government ended up galvanizing white gay identity and creating gay communities. As a result of the

Parliamentary Select Committee’s actions and subsequent press coverage, awareness about homosexuality throughout white South Africa skyrocketed, and more and more white queer people began to participate in South Africa’s nascent gay culture. In its efforts to police homosexuality among white communities, the South African government created a cause around which white queer South Africans could rally. More importantly, the increased publicity surrounding homosexuality encouraged more and more queer white

South Africans to think of themselves not as simply different, but as gay.

141 Ibid, 179. 142 Ashley Currier, Out in Africa, 43. 143 Glen Elder, “Of Moffies, Kaffirs, and Perverts,” in Mapping Desire, 62.

64 Accordingly, urban white gay communities finally began to form en masse, aspiring towards a western model of gay identity and community structure. This effort culminated in 1970, when the Butterfly Bar—South Africa’s first proper gay bar—opened its doors in

Hillbrow.144 Through its opening, gay South Africans sought to create a new space for themselves that emulated the likes of Greenwich Village, SoHo, or the Castro.145 Over the next ten years, white gay life would continue to grow and thrive in Hillbrow. 146

The apartheid state’s perspective on homosexuality in non-white communities differed significantly. By and large, the apartheid state viewed black and coloured homosexuality as incidental in their struggle to control the non-white population. In some ways, the apartheid state viewed the occurrence of homosexuality in non-white communities as further evidence of white superiority and moral purity.147 Non-white occurrences of homosexuality only “helped to prove that black men were ‘uncivilised.’”148

For all intents and purposes, the apartheid government never substantively concerned itself with homosexuality in non-white communities.

Because homosexuality in non-white communities never came under significant threat from the apartheid state, non-white queer communities did not galvanize in the same way as white queer communities. Furthermore, non-white queer people didn’t have the same opportunities as their white counterparts to create queer spaces other than a few informal shebeens, or township bars. In rare cases when they did, such as moffie life in

District Six, relocations under the Group Areas Act often wiped them out. So, by the early

144 Ibid, 41. 145 Neville Hoad, “White Man’s Disease,” GLQ, 563. 146 As Mark Gevisser reminds us: “The idea of a gay life, revolving around clubs, bars and neighborhoods, was being imported into South Africa by gay people who had travelled abroad and experienced the exhilaration of Amsterdam, New York, or San Francisco.” Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 39. 147 Henriette Gunkel, The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality, 41. 148 Rebecca Sinclair, “Official Treatment of Homosexuality,” 47.

65 1970s there were no gay non-white people, nor were there gay bars or clubs in non-white communities. These types of western sexual identifications simply did not exist in township and rural communities. When it comes to establishing gay spaces or gay communities, white South Africans effectively got a two or three-decade head-start.

By the end of the 1960s, gay identity and political mobilization had already been endowed with traits that would make participation by non-white South Africans problematic. The most visible articulations of gay identity in South Africa focused around emulating a white and Western understanding of sexuality and sexual liberation.

Furthermore, through the Law Reform Movement, gay white South Africans had solidly rooted gay politics in a single-issue ideology of reform. As white gay activists first defined it, the goal of gay politics in South Africa was to work with the apartheid state in order to secure protections for gay and lesbian people. This reformist ideology—one of working with the apartheid government for gay rights—created an ideological rift that could not be traversed. Ultimately, non-white South Africans could not participate in a gay movement that refused to challenge apartheid. Because queer subcultures were so thoroughly divided by race throughout the 1960s and 1970s, queer people of color did not yet contest the gay reformism practiced by white activists, but this contestation would go on to define gay organizing in the 1980s.

66 Chapter 2

Coming Out, Staying In: The Rise of the Gay Association of South Africa

“In those heady early days of what we thought of as ‘gay liberation’ in South Africa, we, the founder members of GASA, saw ourselves as courageous—and we were. The National Party government of the day was strongly oppressive, and we were in danger. But we were determined to make a difference.”

-Ann Smith, Founder-Member of the Gay Association of South Africa149

In April of 1982, a group of twenty-four gay and lesbian South Africans gathered in a small office in Hillbrow to undertake an ambitious and unprecedented project. For the first time in South African history, gays and lesbians were going to form a nationwide organization dedicated to advocating for their rights. In 1980s South Africa, when resistance to apartheid escalated along with state suppression of political organizing, this would be no small task. Mobilizing a gay and lesbian community to transform government policies—while living under a government that could ban any organization that spoke out against it—represented a daunting challenge. Moreover, trying to unite gay and lesbian

South Africans behind a common cause, a common organization, or a common identity during a time when South Africans were caught in the midst of bitterly racialized struggle represented a significant undertaking. The organization they formed came to be known as the Gay Association of South Africa (GASA), and over the course of its 5-year existence, it would ultimately face a losing battle against the political and racial divides that rocked

South Africa in the 1980s.

149 Ann Smith, “Where Was I in the Eighties?” In Sex and Politics in South Africa, edited by Neville Hoad, Karen Martin, and Graeme Reid, (Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2005), 59.

67

During the early years of GASA, from its inception in 1982 to its peak in 1984, a myriad set of challenges already confronted the organization: racism critically divided the gay community, sexism from gay men made including lesbians in the organization difficult,

HIV/AIDS began to ravage gay white men in South Africa, and organizers constantly debated whether or not to speak up against the apartheid government. At their core, all of these challenges were precipitated by GASA’s gay reform foundation and its refusal to challenge the apartheid government.

Yet, for the first two years of the organization, most of its members were swept up in a sense of optimism, progress and growth. During its early years, white and non-white gay and lesbian activists who stood against apartheid were willing to tolerate GASA’s reform-oriented strategies in the name of advancing gay and lesbian rights. Many of GASA’s members who opposed apartheid probably even thought that, after only a short period of time, they would be able to persuade GASA to take a stand against apartheid. In short, those who opposed apartheid and those who supported it both had high hopes for GASA, and assumed that it could weather the stormy identitarian seas of 1980s South Africa.

For those two precarious years between 1982 and 1984, it seemed that, perhaps,

GASA would be able to navigate the complicated political terrain of 1980s South Africa and foster a veritable gay rights movement. In many ways, the years of 1982 to 1984 represented GASA’s honeymoon period: the exciting years when the novelty and excitement of a recent union were enough to overcome the differences between each partner. During the early 1980s, queer people involved with GASA were willing to put their differences aside in order to grow a nascent movement into fruition.

68 But all honeymoons eventually come to an end, and partners in a union must begin living with one another day to day. While GASA would face that moment later in 1984, the organization enjoyed a two-year-long “honeymoon,”—a period of two years when the organization could recruit new members, coordinate meetings, and expand rapidly across the country without concern for the divisive political climate in which it operated.

***

For the most part, white gay life in the 1970s continued to be confined to the major urban centers of Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town, and these gay white communities kept relatively quiet. They straddled the delicate line between being underground enough to go unnoticed by the apartheid state and visible enough for gay men and lesbians, many of whom were still closeted or married, to find them. According to historian Ashley Currier, this was a period of “intentionally cultivated invisibility,” where queer people sought to create venues for socializing rather than political mobilization.150

Under these conditions, the neighborhood of Hillbrow began to blossom as South

Africa’s veritable bohemian paradise. While Hillbrow did not foster political mobilization for gays and lesbians at the time, it served as a place of great social freedom, urbanity, and queer life. Many cafes had an openly queer lilt and went unharassed by the apartheid government. For many who lived there, it seemed as if the high-rise buildings characteristic of the neighborhood acted as a wall to keep apartheid ideology at bay. In the imagination of

150 Ashley Currier, Out in Africa: LGBT Organizing in Namibia and South Africa, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 32.

69 many South Africans living under apartheid, Hillbrow became “the destination of every teenage runaway, a lively haven of drugs, dreams, and discos.”151

The growth of Hillbrow came about as part of a larger economic boom that occurred for white South Africans in the 1970s. While black South African communities remained largely impoverished, economic growth in white communities created the necessary conditions for the development of robust gay life: mainly through providing increased mobility, urbanization, privacy, and expendable income.152 Under these conditions, gay white businesses, cafes, bars, and clubs flourished throughout Hillbrow and other urban areas across the country.153 In addition to gay bars and clubs, localized gay social networks began to pop up throughout the country, such as a group called the Gay Aid

Identification Development and Enrichment (GAIDE) in Durban, or the Gaily Male, a pen- pal service that connected rural gay Afrikaans men.154 While these local networks did not have a significant political impact in the 1970s, they would prove to be an integral foundation for national action in the 1980s. But an implicit price had to be paid in order for the nascent gay community to avoid the condemnation of the apartheid state. To avoid

151 Neville Hoad, African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 113. 152 Mark Gevisser, “A Different Fight for Freedom,” in Defiant Desire, eds. Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron (New York. Routledge, 1995), 38. 153 During this period, some communication between members of the gay and lesbian community materialized in the form of underground publications, but these were limited in size and scope. In Johannesburg, a gay magazine called Equus began circulating which “promoted gay venues, allowed people to share feelings, and included pin-ups of local men.” A similar publication called Comment began circulating on a hyper-local level and had a somewhat more activist bent. Given that closeted individuals comprised a large portion of their readership, these magazines were highly secretive for fear of censorship and reprimand. See Gordon Isaacs and Brian McKendrick, Male Homosexuality in South Africa: Identity Formation, Culture, and Crisis, (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1992), 156. 154 Ibid, 44-46.

70 reprimand or intervention by the police and the government, the white gay community had to keep quiet and remain largely underground. 155

More generally, the 1970s was a bifurcated decade in South African history. Prior to the 1976 student uprisings in and across the country, the 1970s were a time of relative stability and growth for white South Africans. Ironically enough, the relative stability of the 1970s allowed vice squads and the apartheid state more regular opportunities to police gay and lesbian lives by raiding clubs, busting up parties, and policing cruising locations. This began to shift in 1976, when the Soweto student uprisings triggered a resurgence of violence and resistance across the country. As violence began to increase, suppressing black dissent consumed more and more of the apartheid state’s energy and attention, taking focus and pressure off of the white gay community.

Accordingly, the police implemented a “relaxation of control in large cities,” predominately because they realized that “trying to stamp out all homosexuality is a waste of time.”156 As historian and linguist Ken Cage understands it, for the most part “all the available police power was kept busy with the escalating black violence.”157

155 During the 1970s, the gay community broke the silence in only one significant instance. In 1972, a student at the University of the Natal in Durban named Mark West attempted to start a gay liberation movement in South Africa that could rival movements happening all across the United States and Western Europe. West served as a representative on the Student Representative Council at University of the Natal, and in April of 1972, he publicly announced the formation of the South African Gay Liberation Movement. The public press quoted him as saying “I believe, as do my followers, that homosexuals should come forward and demand their rights. We should not be forced to meet in dark bars.” His liberation movement lasted only three weeks, at which point the police paid him a visit and told him that the movement must be shut down. For gay white South Africans, the swift failure of the South African Gay Liberation Movement reinforced the idea that political action aimed at state policies and procedures remained out of bounds if they wanted to be left alone. See Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 43. 156Glen Retief, “Keeping Sodom Out of the Laager,” in Defiant Desire, edited by Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron, (New York. Routledge, 1995), 103. 157 Ken Cage, Gayle: The Language of Kinks and Queens, A History and Dictionary of Gay Language in South Africa, (Auckland Park: Jacana, 2005), 15.

71 The state of race relations and politics began to rapidly shift in the 1980s. The early part of the decade, with Prime Minister and later State President P. W. Botha at the helm, ushered in a paradoxical time of what many white South Africans saw as ‘reform’. P.W.

Botha became Prime Minister in 1978, only two years after the student uprisings, and undertook a significant platform of change and transition in the country’s government and economy that—though seen as progressive by many white people at the time, even in many facets of the international community—still left black South African’s disenfranchised.

Botha’s reforms did not stem from a sense of altruism or from a desire for greater equality with black people. Instead, they were more a result of increasing international pressure and spiraling domestic unrest. 158 The early 1980s also marked the beginning of immense economic pressure. From 1982 to 1984, falling gold prices sunk the South African economy into deep international debt, of which the full effects—rampant inflation, increased unemployment, and an increasingly limited job market—would not be seen until later in the decade.159

Because of these pressures, throughout 1981 Botha worked to foster more lenient state control for African Unions, allowing union groups such as the Federation of South

African Trade Unions (FOSATU) to flourish. 160 As a result, from 1981 to 1985, African trade unions were able to double their membership and real black wages in the

158 As historian Jill Wentzel characterizes it: “What was significant was the fact that the government was being compelled, however grudgingly, to move away from apartheid. The realities of the 1960s—the unlimited power of the National Party government and the powerlessness of back people—were slowly turning into the myths of the 1980s.” Jill Wentzel, The Liberal Slideaway. (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1995), 24. 159 Tom Lodge and Bill Nasson, All, Here, and Now: Black Politics In South Africa in the 1980s, (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1991), 31. 160 Chris Alden, Apartheid’s Last Stand, (London: MacMillan, 1996), 121.

72 manufacturing sector went up 29%, whereas white wages increased by only 1%.161 Botha also created systems of local black representation and instituted the Black Local

Authorities Act of 1982, an act that set up state-controlled black governments in towns and villages where black people could elect their own representation.162 Despite the progressive sheen, these black local authorities were still held under the tight control of higher up white authorities.

The half-baked reforms of the 1980s peaked in 1983, when P.W. Botha formulated and passed the Republic of South Africa Constitution Act of 1983, which established “a tricameral parliament with three houses.”163 The House of Assembly served as the representative body for whites, the House of Representatives for coloureds, and House of

Delegates for Indians, and the government intended each body to deal with the affairs of its own community. Notably, the new system did not give black South Africans the right to representation.164

In order to respond to these token reforms, and to the proposed 1984 constitution, a new national organization formed in 1983 that would characterize South African anti- apartheid organizing for the rest of the decade: The United Democratic Front (UDF). A

“broad coalition of student groups, youth congresses, civic associations, women’s organizations, church societies, and trade unions,” the UDF worked to provide a national

161 Jill Wentzel, The Liberal Slideaway, 20. 162 Chris Alden, Apartheid’s Last Stand, 131. 163 Gordon Isaacs and Brian McKendrick, Male Homosexuality in South Africa, 143. 164 Instead, it perpetuated a system of bantustans that had been in place since the 1970s. Bantustans, or homelands, were semi-autonomous states for black South Africans placed in rural and often-undesirable areas across the country. These homelands were supposedly in line with historical tribal boundaries, and provided the apartheid government with a further-strengthened ability to relocate black South Africans from urban areas to rural locales.

73 organizing framework for the fragmented nature of 1980s South African politics.165 At its peak, the UDF comprised 700 organizations and a total of 2 million members.166

In its early stages, the UDF worked to combat the token representation that the apartheid government offered to black South Africans in the form of local black authorities and neighborhood organizations. Believing that these systems contributed to black complacency within apartheid, the UDF leadership set out coordinating a vast movement of resistance and education against the 1984 reforms.167

What is perhaps most compelling about the era of reform in the early 1980s is the disparate ways that white and non-white communities saw this reform. Because of the organizing work of the UDF and others, most black South Africans saw the reforms for what they were: token changes that were meant to appease people of color and maintain white supremacy. For politically moderate white South Africans however, it may have actually seemed like times were changing and that South Africa would be able to transition into a more egalitarian form of government. Given the government’s propaganda at the time, many white South Africans may have legitimately believed that these reforms were well- received by the black community.

It is in this spirit of reform that the Gay Association of South Africa came into being.

Gay and lesbian white South Africans saw the reforms sweeping the country as their chance at gaining substantive change for gay and lesbian people, and given the reformist spirit of the times, a national non-racial gay association seemed for a short time to be a tenable objective.

165 Tom Lodge and Bill Nasson, All, Here, and Now, 34. 166Ibid, 34. 167 Jeremy Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front, (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2000), 92.

74 ***

In 1980, the police raided a popular gay bar called The New Mandy’s in downtown

Johannesburg. The raid took place during the Christmas holidays, catching patrons of the bar unaware and prompting a deep-seated sense of frustration and injustice in the attendees, many of whom were locked in the bar all night as the police took the time to process each person case by case.168

The raid reinvigorated a sense of political frustration among the almost exclusively white, middle class attendees, and comprised one of the largest raids on a gay venue since the raid in Forest Town. Accordingly, a small, local political organization formed in

Johannesburg in 1981 called Lambda. In that same year, three gay supper clubs formed across the country: the 6010 Club in Cape Town and the Alternative Men’s Organization

(AMO) and Unite in Johannesburg.169

On April 1st, 1982, three of the local organizations based out of Johannesburg—AMO,

Unite, and Lambda—came together for a joint meeting with twenty-four “very serious and very concerned,” representatives from each group.170 After a lengthy meeting and discussion, the three groups decided that they could best meet their objectives if they worked together, so they decided to form a new organization. They named the organization the Gay Association of South Africa.171 The new organization set out to address:

…the need for organized, sophisticated service to the gay community, for an intelligent, considered liaison between the gay and the non-gay communities, and

168 Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 47. 169 Gerry Davidson and Ron Nerio. “Exit: Gay Publishing in South Africa,” In Defiant Desire, edited by Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron, (New York. Routledge, 1995), 226. 170 “Gays Link Up: GASA is no April Fool’s Joke,” Link/Skakel, May 1982. 171 At the time, organizers had discovered that their original idea for a name “The South African Gay Association” or “SAGA” would share the same acronym as the South African Guide-dog Association,

75 for a united, strong force to counter and, it is hoped, correct the biased, prejudiced assault on the and peace of mind of gays throughout the country.172

GASA represented the first national gay and lesbian organization in South Africa’s history, and its founders quickly began recruiting new members. As an organization, GASA promised to be a democratic association of members that was, according to its constitution,

“non-profit making, non-racial, non-political, non-militant, and non-sectarian.”173 In the eyes of many of GASA’s founding members, the establishment of the Gay Association of

South Africa meant that the gay liberation movement had finally come to South Africa. As

GASA’s leaders understood it at the time, the primary goal of GASA was not to challenge the government directly, but to create social and community spaces where gays and lesbians could gather without fear of reprobation or sanction from the government. Only if the government attempted to interfere with those spaces would GASA be prepared to push back against government policy.174

In order to become a member of GASA, an individual had to pay a R24.00 membership each year. After someone had paid their membership fee, they were then given a membership card which entitled them to discounts at local gay venues, access to

GASA’s social events, and the ability to control the leadership and functioning of the organization by an annual voting process.175 Members would also receive GASA’s monthly newsletter Link/Skakel.176 This monthly newsletter—which would later turn into the countrywide gay magazine Exit—provided an invaluable connection to the gay community for individuals who lived in rural areas. Furthermore, it served as one of the only forums

172 “Gays Link Up: GASA is no April Fool’s Joke,” Link/Skakel, May 1982. 173 Henriette Gunkel, The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa, (New York: Routledge, 2010), 63. 174Ibid, 61. 175 “About Your GASA Membership,” Link/Skakel, May 1982. 176 “Skakel is the Afrikaans word for “link,” because the organization’s newsletter was published bilingually in Afrikaans and English, a subject that will discussed at length later in this chapter.

76 where gay men and lesbians could debate gay politics of the day.177 The magazine was by no means a perfect representation of the gay and lesbian community in South Africa, but it provides a nuanced snapshot of gay and lesbian politics of the time. Moreover, Link/Skakel and later Exit enjoyed mass circulation throughout the country on a then unprecedented scale. By 1983, after little over a year in circulation, Link/Skakel distributed approximately

5,000 copies of the magazine in total.

On May 3, 1982, GASA held its first meeting for general membership in the offices of a travel agency in downtown Johannesburg, and following that meeting, the organization began to take off at a heady pace.178 By June, GASA Executive Committee members were touting that GASA’s membership had already doubled in less than three months since its formation. They declared their first-ever membership campaign, dubbed Operation

Snowball, and they printed out thousands of fliers about the organization that they mailed to members to distribute around the country.179 By July, GASA began a religious discussion group called the Gay Christian Community.180 By August, they started an initiative to write an account of South Africa’s gay history, claiming “gays form as great a part of South

Africa’s history as Jan van Riebeeck and the Great Trek.”181

In order to increase membership and expand the clout of GASA across South Africa, the GASA Executive began reaching out to informal groups of gay men and lesbians around

177 Because of the important role that it played as a mouthpiece of the white gay community, a significant portion of the primary source material for this thesis comes from the collections of Link/Skakel and Exit. 178 “Gays Link Up: GASA is no April Fool’s Joke,” Link/Skakel, May 1982. 179 “Operation Snowball,” Link/Skakel, June/July 1982. 180 Initially named the Religious Fellowship Workshop, the name changed in December 1982. See “Zealous Start to RFW,” Link/Skakel, June/July 1982, and “Bishop Leads First Service,” Link/Skakel, January 1983. 181Referencing Jan van Riebeeck, the head of Dutch colonization in Cape Town throughout the 1600s, and the Great Trek, where thousands of Afrikaners displaced local populations by migrating across the country to Johannesburg, as pillars of South Africa’s history most certainly would have alienated many black members and members with British ancestry within the organization. See “GASA to Write Gay History,” Link/Skakel, June/July 1982.

77 the country about the possibility of creating local GASA chapters in their communities. By

July of 1982, they had already reached out to the 6010 Club in Cape Town as well as a

“group of gays from Soweto.” They also put out a public ask for gay contacts in other major urban centers, mainly Bloemfontein and Durban.182 The Star, one of the most significant newspapers in South Africa, even profiled the organization and as a result, GASA’s mailbox started to “overflow with letters, queries, congratulations, offers of assistance, and thank goodness, no letter bombs.” The editors of Link/Skakel celebrated this surge in correspondence and positive publicity as overwhelming evidence that “a very definite need exists amongst gays of all walks of life, to do something…to improve the lot of gays in South

Africa.”183

By September of 1982, the organization had grown so quickly that they began looking into the possibility of renting their own office and creating the first gay and lesbian community center in South Africa’s history.184 The organization mushroomed such that by

November of that same year, GASA opened the doors of its first office in the center of

Hillbrow.185 On the windows of the new office, GASA proudly displayed its triangular logo and name. As the organization continued to grow, GASA moved its offices to other spaces in

Hillbrow, but they always ensured that the space remained visible and prominent. In a time where gay visibility came with distinct risks, the GASA offices became something of an icon in Hillbrow.186

182 “Making Contact,” Link/Skakel, June/July 1982. 183 “Gasa Good News for Many: Silent Gays Speak out After Star Report,” Link/Skakel, June/July 1982. 184 “Growing GASA Needs a Home,” Link/Skakel, September 1982. 185 “Proud Triangle,” Link/Skakel, November 1982. 186 Alex Robbertze, a GASA executive member would later reflect: “There were worries that stones would be thrown at the windows, but it never happened. Once, someone suggested that we throw open the curtains and kiss for all of Hillbrow to see, and we did just that. We would often look out of the windows and see men,

78 By October of 1982, GASA had created firm plans to establish an array of programming that would be open to all members of the gay and lesbian community. GASA established, among other things, a discussion group for closeted gay men who were still married, a drama group, a gay hiking club, a motorcycle sports club, and what would become one of its most popular programming initiatives, a club for gay sports enthusiasts.187 In addition to those, GASA undertook the significant task of creating South

Africa’s first gay business and service directory, called the Pink Pages.188 While many of these initiatives—including the Pink Pages—never materialized, the vast array of projects and programming proposed by GASA in 1982 epitomized the immense optimism that the organization had given the reformist spirit of the time.

By November, GASA began a campaign to rapidly expand its membership and presence across the country. In November of 1982, 55 people were present at the launch of

GASA’s branch and a GASA branch officially launched in Durban.189 190 By

January of 1983, GASA had established branches in the Eastern Cape Province and

Pretoria.191 GASA’s expansion outside of Johannesburg represented a critical step towards becoming a truly nationwide organization, but the expansion of GASA’s membership to the

Orange Free State and the Eastern Cape—rural areas that were generally more

obviously out-of-towners, just standing there and looking up and pointing, as if they were tourists visiting a national monument.” See Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 49. 187 Multiple Articles, Link/Skakel, October 1982. 188 “Dial Pink!” Link/Skakel, May 1982. 189 “GASA Natal A Reality,” Link/Skakel, November 1982. 190 “Bloem Joins Up with Eastern Cape and Pretoria to Follow Soon,” Link/Skakel, December 1982. 191 “Gasa now in all SA Main Centres.” Link/Skakel, January 1983.

79 conservative than urban Johannesburg—also changed GASA’s politics on a national

scale.192

Despite its widespread growth across the country throughout 1982 and 1983, GASA

continued to be overwhelmingly centered in Johannesburg. By March of 1983, GASA had

grown to just short of 1,000 members, of which, approximately 620 were based in GASA’s

Johannesburg-based Rand Branch.193

GASA Membership Growth and Distribution, December 1982-March 1983 Dec. 1982 % Total March 1983 % Total % Growth Dec GASA Branch Membership Membership Membership Membership '82 to Mar '83

Rand/Johannesburg 433 71.9% 620 62.2% 40.9% Northern 62 10.3% 115 11.7% /Pretoria 85.5% Natal/Durban 40 6.6% 90 9.2% 125.0% Orange Free State 56 9.3% 75 7.7% 33.9% Western Cape 17 2.8% 52 5.3% 205.9% Eastern Cape 18 3.0% 34 3.5% 88.9% Total 602 980 62.8% Figure 2: GASA Membership Data, Dec. 1982 to Mar. 1983194

Because it created new chapters in places where no formal gay organizations had

existed before, GASA’s expansion happened quickly in many areas. Cape Town served as

the one exception to this rule. Gays and lesbians had been organized in Cape Town since

192 Early conflicts between more progressive and more conservative members within the organization— concerning how to best represent the gay community and what GASA’s relationship should be to the apartheid government—can be seen in letters to the editor that were featured in Link/Skakel. One GASA member wrote into the newspaper to complain about the fact that the gay minority cannot become a “militant minority” and still expect the respect of the “majority.” Another member wrote to condemn gay men who “provoke rejection from the rest of the community to a great extent by the extravagant behavior and ghetto slang that some of us adopt.” Some men in the gay community were so conservative that they refused to join GASA, berating GASA as an organization for feminine men who looked like “refugees from the set of ‘Cabaret’” and “persist in showing their matchstick legs in satin shorts.” See Phil Atkins, “On Coming Out,” Link/Skakel, September 1982, David Freeman, “L/S Rapped,” Link/Skakel, February 1983, and Michael Angelo, “Why I am not a member of Gasa,” Link/Skakel, April 1983. 193 “Membership Report,” Link/Skakel, June 1983. 194 Data based on membership reports featured in Link/Skakel February 1983 and June 1983 editions.

80 1981, with the formation of the 6010 Group, a local organization that built community among gays and lesbians, hosted social events, and provided counseling services.195 Since

GASA’s inception, the executive committee had attempted to reach out to the 6010 Group to incorporate them into GASA, but they were initially met with hesitation.196 The 6010

Group had two primary concerns. First, GASA’s membership fees were R24.00 per year, an increase of R14.00 over the 6010 Group’s membership fees of R10.00 per year. Secondly, many members in Cape Town believed that GASA was too Johannesburg-dominated to adequately take into account the concerns and needs of people living in Cape Town. Despite these hesitations, the 6010 Group decided to join GASA in June of 1983, renaming itself

“GASA 6010”.197

The 6010 Group’s hesitation to join GASA and the subsequent tensions between

GASA 6010 and the GASA National Executive were the first sign of intra-organizational conflict. By January of 1984, only six months after joining GASA, GASA 6010 issued an ultimatum at the GASA National Committee meeting in Pretoria.198 GASA 6010 members were overwhelmingly unhappy with GASA’s management at a national level and accused

GASA National of mismanaging membership dues. A chief complaint was that out of the

R24 that members paid in dues, only R6 went to fund the local efforts of GASA 6010—the other R18 went to fund projects in the head office in Johannesburg.199 Furthermore, GASA

6010 expressed disgust at GASA policies that they considered racist; specifically a walk that

GASA held in a whites-only park in Pretoria.200 While GASA 6010 ultimately reached a

195 Gerry Davidson and Ron Nerio. “Exit: Gay Publishing in South Africa,” In Defiant Desire, 226. 196 “W. Cape Branch Delayed,” Link/Skakel, May 1983. 197 “Overwhelming Vote to Join Gasa: 6010 SAYS YES,” Link/Skakel, June 1983. 198 “West Cape Meeting Issues ‘Ultimatum’,” Link/Skakel, January 1984. 199 “West Cape Unhappy,” Link/Skakel, January 1984. 200 Ibid.

81 resolution with the national committee, the situation demonstrated to GASA’s national organizers that holding together a national coalition of gay and lesbian people would be more difficult than they initially expected.

***

While building community and establishing gay and lesbian programming were some of the initial priorities of GASA, these concerns quickly became the least of the white gay community’s worries as the specter of AIDS rose to prominence in the early and mid-

1980s. While dissent and organizational bickering fraught GASA’s early community organizing work, GASA had a much more decisive response to the AIDS epidemic. As an organization, GASA made significant strides towards more effective treatment, better dissemination of knowledge concerning the disease, and increased responsiveness from the government.

When AIDS first struck the white gay community in South Africa, it struck a community that had very little information about the disease, and even less infrastructure to support community mobilization surrounding it. Moreover, because of racial cleavages that had been brought about by the apartheid regime, the disease would remain confined predominately to the white gay community for the first five years of the plague.201

In 1982, as GASA’s membership began to snowball, a South African Airways (SAA) steward named Ralph Kretzen fell ill with a serious bout of pneumonia. A gay man, he had traveled around the world during his career with SAA, and had the chance to experience gay subcultures in cities throughout North America and Western Europe.202 As he became

201 Gerald M. Oppenheimer and Ronald Bayer, Shattered Dreams? An Oral History of the South African AIDS Epidemic, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21. 202 Ibid, 22.

82 increasingly more ill, Kretzen sought medical attention, and in the later months of 1982, his somewhat bewildered doctors diagnosed him with AIDS, a new disease that had only been identified recently in the Western world. With his diagnosis, Kretzen and his partner—who had contracted the disease from Kretzen—became the first two documented cases of AIDS in South Africa.

Given that medical experts hardly understood the disease and that there were no treatments, both Kretzen and his partner died in intensive care units in Pretoria within months of their diagnoses.203 As the first victims of the disease in South African history, they both died horrendous and lonely deaths. Kretzen and his partner were abandoned by their friends, rejected by their church, and ostracized from their community.204 Following the announcement of his death, a media frenzy ensued in which headlines deplored the

“Gay Plague” that sweeping South Africa, and denounced SAA and Kretzen because Kretzen had continued working on flights after he contracted the disease. In an article entitled, “Gay

Plague: More Victims?” The Sunday Times declared “Ralph Kretzen, a self-confessed homosexual—still handled food on overseas flights.”205

Seemingly overnight, the AIDS crisis unleashed a new wave of homophobic paranoia across the country. Gay men were blamed for unleashing a gay plague that might spread across the country. As historian Marc Epprecht observed, “It was not an auspicious time to voluntarily draw attention to oneself as a potentially infectious, deviant population in the

203 Ibid, 22. 204 A Catholic, Kretzen called his priest to make his final confession and receive his last communion, but his priest never showed up. When Kretzen died days later, the few people that remained by his side couldn’t find an undertaker willing to remove his body or a Catholic Church that would hold his funeral services. See John Pegge, “Living With Loss,” in Defiant Desire, 303. 205 Mandisa Mbali,“Gay AIDS Activism in South Africa Prior to 1994,” In From Social Silence to Social Science: Same-Sex Sexuality, HIV & AIDS, and Gender in South Africa, edited by Vasu Reddy, Theo Sandfort, and Laetitia Rispel, (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2009), 86.

83 popular consciousness.”206 Given the homophobic responses of the South African government and media towards AIDS victims, GASA and the gay community more generally responded to the AIDS epidemic with initial defensiveness.

The February 1983 issue of Link/Skakel made this defensiveness imminently clear; on the front page, it featured a massive headline proclaiming “AIDS Panic is Over-

Stressed.”207 In reality, the article’s headline was somewhat misleading. While the article did claim, “AIDS hasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, reached epidemic proportions,” it focused most of its attention on steps that GASA had taken to understand the disease.

Rather than denying the seriousness of AIDS, the article went on to say that the gay men should not fall into depression, substance abuse, or suicidal ideation because of fear of

AIDS. GASA’s president, Pieter Bosman, encouraged GASA’s members to practice discretion in their sexual encounters and to avoid the use of recreational drugs and assured members that GASA had already begun to reach out to a group of doctors in Johannesburg that were working on AIDS treatment.208

Despite its best efforts, GASA’s understanding of the disease in the early 1980s was painfully limited, because the medical community itself understood very little about the disease at the time. In another article in the February 1983 issue of Link/Skakel, GASA claimed that other than gay men, “the general public does not appear to be at high risk,” a statement that would prove painfully false as the disease reached epidemic proportions in

206 Marc Epprecht. Heterosexual Africa?: The History of an Idea From the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS, (Scottsville, South Africa: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2008), 125. 207 “AIDS Panic is Over-Stressed,” Link/Skakel, February 1983. 208 Ibid.

84 the general population of the country in the 1990s.209 It also emphasized that there were not yet tests available to detect the presence of AIDS.

While GASA’s leadership took the threat of AIDS seriously in the early 1980s, the general gay community did not. In the early 1980s activists from Cape Town’s 6010 Group started going around to gay clubs and distributing pamphlets concerning HIV and AIDS.

John Pegge, an activist at the time, recalled being heckled by gay men at bars when he attempted to inform them about AIDS; many organizers were told by gay men, “Don’t come in here and spoil our fun.”210 Dennis Sifris, one of the first doctors to treat AIDS in South

Africa, recalled similar experiences. 211

The comics that were contained in Link/Skakel also reflected this cavalier attitude towards AIDS in the early years. One comic pictured gay men dancing in a bar with medical masks on their faces, and another comic featured two comic figures holding hands with the caption “Let’s get together and pool our viruses.”212 Many gay men even exhibited open hostility to those who were diagnosed with AIDS, holding the opinion that men diagnosed with AIDS were culpable for bringing the ‘American’ disease back to South Africa.213

209 “A Medical Doctor Gives Relevant Facts about AIDS,” Link/Skakel, February 1983. 210 John Pegge, “Living With Loss,” In Defiant Desire, 303. 211 One night, when Sifris went to a gay bar called Venue in Johannesburg to educate patrons about AIDS, the club owner allowed him to make an announcement about his work over the club’s stereo system. In his announcement, he told the club’s patrons about his AIDS work and encouraged men to sign up as volunteers: “I just said, “It’s a big problem, and we think it’s only happening in America but it’s happening here, and you’ve got to be aware. We’ve got a little stall outside, and we want volunteers, we want people to come up and see if they can volunteer their time to help us,’ No response. I think three people came.” See Gerald Oppenheimer and Ronald Bayer, Shattered Dreams? 26. 212 “Mof” Comic Strip, Link/Skakel, February 1983. 213 Gerald Oppenheimer and Ronald Bayer, Shattered Dreams? 23.

85

Figure 3: Comic from February 1983 issue of Link/Skakel (Caption Translation: Viruses? Who’s scared?)

In the face of widespread apathy and outright skepticism concerning the severity of

AIDS, a vanguard of doctors, activists, and organizations worked to provide vital clinical services for gay men infected by AIDS and to convince the gay community to take AIDS seriously. The activism of South African organizers never came close to the disruptive political demonstrations of the New York City-based group ACT-UP, and focused more on support services and awareness than on protest and intervention against the government.214

While most of GASA’s membership and political activities were based in

Johannesburg, GASA 6010 in Cape Town became the main organization behind early AIDS organizing in South Africa.215 As early as 1982, GASA 6010 had established a 24-hour helpline that helped to counsel men diagnosed with AIDS and had started an AIDS clinic for

214 Mandisa Mbali, “Gay AIDS Activism in South Africa Prior to 1994,” In Social Silence to Social Science, 85. 215Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 59.

86 gay men staffed by volunteers.216 By 1983, GASA National decided to establish a national

AIDS fund, and in 1984, GASA 6010 founded the AIDS Action Group.217218

In Johannesburg and Cape Town, a small group of committed doctors began doing their best to understand the disease and how to treat it, including Ruben Sher, Frank

Spracklen, Steven Miller and Dennis Sifris. In 1982, Ruben Sher traveled to the United

States and met with individuals from the Center for Disease Control in order to understand what advances had been made in treating and preventing the disease in the United

States.219 Steven Miller also traveled to the United States and saw the ways that gay communities were organizing to support those afflicted with AIDS. When he returned, he set out to establish similar support structures in Johannesburg.220 So he applied for a fundraising number from the government and attempted to register a new organization that would provide care to AIDS victims, but the government, who continued to view homosexuals as criminals, denied his application for non-profit status. After the rejection,

Miller reached out to several mental health agencies in Johannesburg and was able to raise funds through their accounts.221 By 1983, Sher and Miller began collecting blood samples from gay men, and in 1985, when the first viral antibody test became available in South

Africa, they were able to conclude that 13% of gay men in Johannesburg were already infected with AIDS.222

For gay men who were diagnosed during this period of denial, AIDS was a painful, drawn out, and grueling death sentence. Mainstream medical establishments, including

216 Henriette Gunkel, The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality, 33. 217 “Gasa to Start AIDS Fund,” Link/Skakel, July 1983. 218 Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa? 125. 219 Mandisa Mbali, “Gay AIDS Activism in South Africa Prior to 1994,” In Social Silence to Social Science, 85. 220 Gerald Oppenheimer and Ronald Bayer, Shattered Dreams? 26. 221 Ibid, 26. 222 Ibid, 27.

87 hospitals, universities, and The South African Medical Journal, largely ignored AIDS or treated it with revulsion.223 There are countless horror stories from this period of AIDS patients being denied care or being improperly diagnosed. AIDS patients would be treated as pariahs in hospitals around the country, and many doctors and nurses simply refused to treat patients who had been diagnosed as HIV positive.224

Amidst this horrific environment, the modest assistance and companionship that

GASA could offer those suffering with AIDS became vitally significant. From 1984 onwards, its efforts to combat AIDS and provide services became much more streamlined and effective. Link/Skakel and later Exit began including advertisements encouraging their members to “Fight AIDS,” and informing members “safe sex is great sex.”225 GASA even began to encourage its members to contact Members of Parliament in Cape Town to

“demand the money that will save lives,”—namely, funding for AIDS research and treatment.226 Over the next three years, GASA advocated against government censure of safe-sex educational materials, against publishing the names of those diagnosed with AIDS in newspapers, against the refusal of drugs for AIDS patients, and for the approval of anti- retroviral drugs, namely AZT.227

In 1985, as AIDS continued to spread and more cases developed, the government and the press began paying attention to AIDS. It continued to be referred to in popular

223 Marc, Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa? 115. 224 In the mid-1980s one gay man had attempted suicide—by jumping off of a building after learning that he was HIV positive—but his suicide attempt failed. An ambulance brought him to the hospital in excruciating pain, with bones sticking out of his body, and instead of treating him right away doctors at the hospital quibbled for hours before they could agree on who would treat him. This sort of neglect was unnervingly common at the time. See Gerald Oppenheimer and Ronald Bayer, Shattered Dreams? 34. 225 “Coping with AIDS: Expert Advises,” Link/Skakel, January/February 1985. 226 “Killer at Large,” Link/Skakel, January/February 1985. 227 See “Media Taken to Task,” Link/Skakel. March 1985, “No Anti-Aids Medicine in SA,” Exit, December 1986/January 1987, “Government’s Aids Pamphlet Condemned,” Exit, January 1987, “Outrage at Refusal of Drugs in Hospitals,” Exit, April/May 1988, and “Govt. Bans Safe Sex Book,” Exit, February/March 1988.

88 parlance as the ‘Gay Plague,” and throughout 1986, the Cape Times “took perverse delight in reporting the names, identifying particulars, and sensational smut” about men who were infected with AIDS.228

The pressure that doctors and gay organizations placed on the government to address AIDS effectively paid off in a small way in 1985, when the government established the AIDS Advisory Group. The group was ineffective and refused to have gay or black people as members because they represented members of a “high-risk” group. This effectively alienated those with the most expertise—most of whom were gay men—from participating in the government’s discussions on AIDS. In the eyes of Steven Miller, the

AIDS Advisory Group ended up becoming a “A cabal of grey-suited men, who told the minister [of health] all that she wanted to hear.”229

This culminated in a series of statements from the Department of Health that minimized the threat of AIDS. In 1985, Link/Skakel featured an interview with Jack Metz, the Chairperson of the AIDS Advisory Group, where he explained that the government did not prioritize AIDS because it did not pose nearly as serious a threat to the country as tuberculosis.230 In 1986, the Department of Health took a significant step forward by agreeing to pay for AIDS tests in high-risk populations including gay men.231 And yet, later that year, the Director General of the Department of Health shrugged off AIDS as something that did not concern the department, claiming that because “homosexuality is not accepted

228 John V. Pegge “Living With Loss in the Best Way We Know How: AIDS and Gay Men in Cape Town,” In Defiant Desire, edited by Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron, (New York. Routledge, 1995), 308. 229 Gerald M. Oppenheimer and Ronald Bayer, Shattered Dreams? An Oral History of the South African AIDS Epidemic, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 30. 230 Ironically enough, many of the tuberculosis cases that Metz mentioned may have actually been AIDS- related opportunistic infections. See “Govt. AIDS Chief Warns Against Dangerous Hysteria,” Link/Skakel, March 1985. 231 “HTLV III Antibody Tests Now Free,” Exit, January 1986.

89 by the majority of the population,” AIDS should be viewed as the gay community’s “own affair.”232

While the government continued to ignore AIDS and brush off the concerns of the gay community, the anti-apartheid struggle did the same, in some cases revealing a deep- seated homophobia lurking beneath the surface. In the 1980s, the liberation struggle and violent protest were growing in strength, and many anti-apartheid activists couldn’t “be bothered about white gay males whose disease was related to their homosexuality.”233 One

South African activist in exile in the 1980s went so far as to say that “It was their disease, not ours. We preferred to think that there was no homosexuality in Africa; it was a Western homosexual disease.”234This opinion would not change in any fundamental way until after the fall of the apartheid government.

***

The support and inclusivity GASA showed for South Africa’s first sufferers of AIDS did not extend as smoothly across the country’s deep divides of race. When the Gay

Association of South Africa came into being in the early 1980s, the gay community in South

Africa found itself at the epicenter of a significant shift in race relations across the country.

Before 1982, non-white people who moved into “white areas” were subject to prosecution, fines, jail, and eviction under the Group Areas Act. But in 1982, and Indian woman who was evicted under the act sued the government and won her case.235 Under the verdict, Judge

Richard Goldstone the government wanted to evict any other individuals under the Group

232 Karen Jochelson, “Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century South Africa,” in Histories of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Philip w. Setel, Milton Lewis, and Maryinez Lyons, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999). 233 Gerald Oppenheimer and Ronald Bayer, Shattered Dreams? 22. 234 Ibid, 22. 235 See S v. Govender 1982, in A.J. Christopher, The Atlas of Changing South Africa, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 132.

90 Areas Act, they would have to provide other accommodations. In accordance with this decision, the government promptly stopped policing the Group Areas Act.236 This led in turn to a “cautious influx of ‘illegals’” moving into high-rise flats in large urban centers, especially Hillbrow, which had become “a rather run-down white neighborhood with a bohemian reputation.”237 South Africans referred to the process of previously whites-only neighborhoods becoming integrated in the 1980s as “going gray”—meaning that the apartheid government took a less active stake in ensuring rigid racial separation. In

Hillbrow particularly, white landlords of high-rise buildings “were eager for black tenants to fill their half-empty buildings.”238 Throughout the early 1980s, what had seemed to be a stable racial hierarchy began to feel more tenuous for white South Africans, and for many black South Africans, certain walls of racial separation began to fall.

This was particularly true in the gay and lesbian community. As a community that already existed predominately on the margins of “proper” white society, the gay and lesbian community found refuge in neighborhoods and areas that were least policed by the apartheid state and were thus most conducive to racial mixing. This phenomenon was epitomized in Hillbrow, where a gay community began to thrive at around the same time as the neighborhood began to integrate. Accordingly, non-white people began to actively participate in what had been an almost exclusively white gay community in Hillbrow, and from the offset, racial tensions in the community began to rise.

During the early 1980s, white and non-white gay men primarily interacted in a social and sexual context—as opposed to the more typical interactions that existed

236 Nokwanda Sithole, “Hillbrow: A ‘Gray’ Area,” in Robert Schrire, Adapt or Die: The End of White Politics in South Africa, (London: Hurst & Co. 1992), 106. 237Ibid, 106. 238 Jill Wentzel, The Liberal Slideaway, 20.

91 between their ‘straight’ counterparts via employment and business. While these contexts were multivalenced on an individual level, interracial encounters between white and black men were characterized by the racial and economic inequalities of the time, often to the point of being exploitative. While these inequities were not caused by GASA, GASA’s leadership would face an uphill battle to build bridges between white and black gay communities.

The pages of Link/Skakel and Exit documented the experiences of black gays and lesbians who attempted to interact with the dominant gay white subculture during the early and mid-1980s. In the June 1983 edition of Link/Skakel, the monthly “You and the

Law” segment focused its attention on the concerns that confronted gay men who attempted to rent apartments with their male partners or lovers. The column noted that white gay men who wanted to live together “probably won’t have much more trouble as a tenant than anybody else.”239 For interracial couples, the discussion was much more grim.

For interracial couples to live together in Hillbrow or other “urban areas,” the couple needed to have “a sympathetic landlord, a sympathetic area, sympathetic neighbours, and nerves of steel,” because the risk of “falling foul of the law is very great indeed.”240

Despite the fact that gay bars were less strictly segregated than ‘straight’ bars, they were nonetheless places where racism was common and oftentimes flagrant. Throughout the 1980s, the opinion pages of Link/Skakel and Exit are filled with different individuals

239 Michael, “You and the Law,” Link/Skakel, June 1983. 240 Another column from Link/Skakel in 1984 reflected on the challenges that faced those who “reach out across the colour divide.” Because interracial relationships were still criminalized at the time, Neels Deelman, the white author of the piece, claims that gay unions across racial lines faced unique challenges, but significantly fewer challenges than heterosexual interracial relationships. Deelman also pointed out that, given the policies of the apartheid state and its concern for policing white purity, the white man in any interracial relationship would “bare the brunt of white justice” if they were caught by the authorities. See Neels Deelman, “Questioning the Colour Taboo: Points on Reaching Out Across the Racial Divide,” Link/Skakel, December 1984.

92 complaining about instances of racist policies or actions on the part of gay bars in the area.

In February of 1984, the Butterfly Bar (the precursor to The Skyline) came under fire for only distributing tips to the white bar men, leaving the black barmen, “who serve us equally well and perform the same duties,” without a cent.241 Another letter in April of 1984 from a regular black patron similarly critiqued the Butterfly Bar because the management chased him out of the bar without explanation. The author of the letter begged the question, “Was it because my friends and I are coloured or what did we do wrong?”242

This tied to the larger problem that, within Hillbrow’s white gay community, non- white culture and traditions were not accepted or celebrated. Instead, the white gay community wanted to emulate Western European or American norms of gay identity. This created an alienating environment for any non-white queer people who still held a significant attachment to their cultural heritage. In a 1984 letter to the editor, one

Link/Skakel reader from Zimbabwe decried that many white queer people “have no notion of the African culture(s). They believe in the superiority of their culture and their race and accept blacks only when they renounce their cultural background.”243 Until the late 1980s, very little room existed for black queer people in between these polar opposites.

The racial politics of Hillbrow’s gay community placed GASA in a precarious position. GASA wanted to promote gay businesses because of the valuable community spaces they provided, but they faced immense criticism for doing so every time a racist incident occurred at a bar that they had advertised. Throughout the early 1980s, GASA did resolve this tension and the organization did not undertake any significant effort to address

241 “Whites Only Christmas,” Link/Skakel, February 1984. 242 “Chased Out,” Link/Skakel, April 1984. 243 Nic Mowe, “SA Gays Slated,” Link/Skakel, March 1984.

93 racial discrimination in gay clubs.244 The closest that GASA ever came to addressing racism in gay bars throughout the country was a statement made by the GASA President Pieter

Bosman in 1984:

Being in South Africa, it is difficult to draw the line between actual racial discrimination and living within the laws of the country. It does sometimes happen that some commercial venues, supported by Gasa and supporting Gasa, are accused of racism. This is an extremely awkward situation…How to overcome this with current legislation is a matter for which a solution is yet to be found.245

This atmosphere of inequality between white and non-white gay men also created an environment conducive to transactional sex and relationships. Black men who dated white men were often given places to stay in Hillbrow and were able to live a life closer to the urban center of Johannesburg. Many black gay men, as well as poorer Afrikaans men, made their living in Hillbrow as prostitutes—affectionately termed “rent boys” in the gay community. These relationships were complicated, and often blurred the threshold between prostitution and romantic attraction.246

But these relationships could also be very exploitative, and the lives of rent boys were not always stable. If a rent boy was forced to move out of another man’s apartment or if their relationship ended, he’d often end up homeless on the streets of Hillbrow where rape, assault, police violence, and other forms of exploitation were commonplace.

Ultimately, the white, wealthy men in these sorts of relationships held most of the power,

244 Brian Stackling, “Truckers a Colour-Bar Bar,” Exit, December 1986/January 1987. 245 Pieter Bosman, “Report from the President,” Link/Skakel, June/July 1984. 246 If a white gay man liked a particular rent boy, it was not uncommon for a black rent boy to move in with a white gay man. From there, a legitimate emotional bond could develop between the two and blossom into a romantic relationship. As one black rent boy recalled, “He used to do nice things for me, treat me nicely. We’d go out together, have supper, go to clubs, have drinks, have a joint together—we were like family, me and him.” See Matthew Krouse, “Two Sex-Workers,” In The Invisible Ghetto: Lesbian and Gay Writing from South Africa, edited by Matthew Krouse and Kim Berman, (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1995), 113.

94 and black or poor Afrikaans rent boys were fully dependent on their patronage to make ends meet.247

As with the racism experienced by non-white men in gay bars, GASA never stood up to address the concerns of rent boys. Not once did Link/Skakel mention the struggles faced by rent boys in Hillbrow. In the eyes of GASA’s organizers, rent boys were a blemish on the movement and were not included in GASA’s fight for liberation.

These interactions between wealthy white men and black rent boys, impacted the way that many white gay men saw their black counterparts. As historian and theorist

Henriette Gunkel has noted, “the black and white communities in the 1980s rarely overlapped. If they did meet these relationships were seldom egalitarian but instead based on advances of privileged white men along the racial and—closely linked—class divide.”248

Given the disparities experienced between white and non-white gay people in a social sense throughout the 1980s, it comes as no surprise that this sort of disparity became emblematic within the Gay Association of South Africa. As an organization, GASA practiced the policy of “non-racialism” dictated by its constitution. Because of the ‘non- racial’ clause of the GASA constitution, membership was technically open to anyone in

South Africa regardless of race or political affiliation. During a time in which South African law explicitly prohibited racial integration, GASA’s white founders surely saw the guarantee of a non-racial organization as a progressive provision that would protect them

247 As one rent boy from the time recalled, “You know, if you don’t go with somebody and you need money, and you’re hungry, it’s terrible because it seems like you’re losing the business…It’s quite tough—no money, tough time…So if a guy wants to pay me, he can be anything, but I will go with him. I’ve been with the white guys. Some they like to look at my body. Some they ask me I must suck them. Some they ask me I must fuck them. And some they ask me I must dance for them. I charge eighty rand.” From Matthew Krouse, “Two Sex- Workers,” In The Invisible Ghetto: Lesbian and Gay Writing from South Africa, edited by Matthew Krouse and Kim Berman, (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1995), 109. 248 Henriette Gunkel, Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality, 64.

95 from any allegations of racism. In fact, through committing to a non-racial, “colorblind” stance, the leadership of GASA had merely excused themselves from thinking critically about the role that race played in their organization.

In the beginning GASA’s leadership attempted to address concerns about the racial makeup of the organization. In the March 1983 issue of Link/Skakel, a message from the editorial board lamented GASA’s low black membership as “distressing,” stating that while

“we don’t keep statistics on the race of our members…very few blacks attend Gasa functions and we must therefore assume that the percentage is quite low.”249 They summarized their message by placing the onus for attendance on black members themselves, announcing, “we would like to see more black gays attending.”250

Because they placed the onus for attendance on black members, GASA’s leadership overlooked the structural factors that excluded non-white members from the organization.

This myopic engagement with race, lead to the de facto creation of two distinct organizations under one broadly-based umbrella: the central group of white members and a peripheral non-racial group composed mostly of non-white queer members. Both groups technically fell under the umbrella of GASA, but their organizational model and politics could not have been more different.

These racial tensions first arose in GASA with regards to the newsletters Link/Skakel and Exit, whose editorial perspectives predominately represented the viewpoints and perspectives of wealthy white gay men. The magazines rarely, if ever, covered news related

249 GASA’s failure to record data concerning the number of black members in the organization makes it much more difficult to assess GASA’s diversity in any numeric sense. In the future, it may be possible to go through GASA’s membership rosters and calculate the number of white versus non-white members during the 1980s. Such an analysis is outside of the scope and resources of this thesis, but is an important priority for future research. 250 “Black Gays,” Link/Skakel, March 1983.

96 to the liberation struggle and black men and women were rarely presented in photographs that ran in the magazine. White men, however, were frequently presented in the magazine as objects of erotic desire and as the normative standard of beauty to which all gay men should aspire. In general, the cultural representations that ran in the magazine “promoted norms of desire and standards of beauty based on distinctive racial [and class] hierarchies.”251

Figure 4: December 1984 Cover of Link/Skakel Moreover, as historian Gordon Isaacs has said, the magazine actively promoted the

“hedonistic value system,” of the dominant gay community in such a way as to make the gay movement “incapable of collectively contributing to homosexual liberation or societal

251 Henriette Gunkel, Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality, 68.

97 change.”252 A close relationship with capitalism and the tastes of the upper class can be readily seen in the first year of the publication. In Link/Skakel’s first issue published in May of 1982, a full-page advertisement ran for a trip to “Gay Swaziland: where the boys are,” enticing readers with “a weekend just for you,” and a luxury coach to and from

Johannesburg, all for the modest price of R170.00.253 In that same May edition, a full-page travel column discussed the best gay hotels in America.254

GASA’s R24.00 membership fee also discouraged black gays and lesbians from joining the organization. While the fee would be affordable for many white lesbians and gay men, it would have seemed astronomical for the average black person at the time.255 Given the South African context, where race and income disparity were intimately linked, charging a R24,00 membership fee ensured that few non-white people would ever join as formal members of the organization. More importantly, the fact that the high membership fee rarely came up for debate as a fundamental concern of the leadership is proof of just how ignorant the majority of GASA’s leaders were of the plight facing non-white South

Africans at the time.

Low black membership also had to do with geography and related issues of transportation. Throughout the early and mid-1980s, most non-white South Africans were made to live in township communities that were far from the urban center of Johannesburg

252 Gordon Isaacs and Brian McKendrick. Male Homosexuality in South Africa, 162. 253 “Gay Swaziland,” Link/Skakel, May 1982. 254 The text of the column read, “Looking forward to a truly Gay Vacation this year? A place where you can let your hairpins drop along with you beach towel, bikini briefs and buns? Anticipating easy access to others of your own kind? A tribal meeting ground where Gay play is the order of the day?” See “Gay American Vacation,” Link/Skakel, May 1982. 255 In 1978, average yearly wages for black workers hovered just around R1,000, meaning that GASA’s R24 membership fee would comprise a whopping 2.4% of an average black South African’s income. White South Africans made R6,000 per year, meaning that a GASA membership fee would only cost around 0.4% of yearly wages. Given that this economic data also comes from the apartheid government’s own reporting, black wages are probably artificially increased, making the disparity even greater. See Republic of South Africa, South African Statistics 1978, (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1978), 7.3.

98 where so much of gay life took place. For non-white South Africans, this made attending meetings or social events significantly more difficult. In order to attend GASA meetings, most of which were scheduled after business hours at night, non-white South Africans would have to brave Johannesburg’s informal transportation system of mini-bus taxis, or perhaps take a train to get home to a township.256 At night, all of these modes of transportation became much more infrequent and significantly more dangerous. Because of the challenges associated with transportation, oftentimes only non-white members with access to a car, or the car of a friend, would be able to attend night meetings of GASA.

The language of the newsletter itself also caused concern. As the name suggested,

GASA published Link/Skakel in both English and Afrikaans, the two official languages of the apartheid government. While this did not represent an official endorsement of apartheid, it was a much more political decision than originally meets the eye. When the 1976 Student

Uprisings took place, students were not simply protesting apartheid; they were protesting the Bantu Education Act, legislation that mandated that all black children had to be instructed in Afrikaans. Accordingly, by the 1980s, the choice to publish anything in

Afrikaans would have been seen by many as an implied statement against the black community. One Link/Skakel reader named Ian Barnard attempted to call attention to this fact in a letter to the editor published in the April 1983 edition of Link/Skakel.

Afrikaans is one of the least spoken languages in South Africa, yet the Gasa newspaper has an Afrikaans title, includes articles in Afrikaans, and even has the date in Afrikaans on every page! Either Gasa must publish through the medium of English only (which is accepted as an international language and is also advocated

256 William L. Leap, “Strangers on a Train, Sexual Citizenship and the Politics of Public Transportation in Apartheid Cape Town,” in Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, eds. Arnaldo Cruz- Malave and Martin F. Manalansan IV, (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 225.

99 as sole official language of South Africa by the ANC), or it must use Zulu, Sotho, Xhosa and Twsana before it uses Afrikaans.257

Instead of taking Barnard’s critique seriously, the GASA-affiliated editors of Link/Skakel responded by saying that GASA, “will not concern itself with political issues,” and utilized the non-political clause of GASA’s constitution to defend the publication’s continued used of

Afrikaans.258

This philosophy became the modus operandi for GASA. Over the course of GASA’s history, non-white members, liberal members, and even the international community would constantly call upon the organization to take stances concerning the apartheid government’s actions and policies. Each time that individuals or groups would call on GASA to act, its leadership would stand behind the ‘non-political’ clause outlined in its constitution and claim that GASA could neither do nor say anything against the apartheid government. In doing so, GASA thought of itself as acting in a neutral, non-political way.

By the end of 1982, when P.W. Botha began to undertake his suite of reforms,

GASA’s position had been made clear to the gay and lesbian community: GASA would never stand against the policies of the apartheid government unless they specifically targeted queer people.259 In effect, this forced non-white queer South Africans to choose between their struggle as a non-white people and their identity as members of the gay and lesbian community. Given GASA’s low black membership, it seems that many non-white queer people chose the former over the latter.

257 Ian Barnard, “Black Reluctance Due to Language Policy,” Link/Skakel, April 1983. 258 During its early years, GASA was composed of 73% English speakers and 27% Afrikaans speakers. See “Who’s Who,” Link/Skakel, September 1982, and Editor’s Response, “Black Reluctance Due to Language Policy,” Link/Skakel, April 1983. 259 Ann Smith, “Where Was I in the Eighties?” In Sex and Politics in South Africa, 61.

100 ***

Despite the many structural and political factors that discouraged black South

Africans from joining GASA, there were some black members of GASA during the early years. By far, the most notable black member of GASA during its initial stages was Simon

Nkoli. During his time as a member of GASA, Nkoli’s experience epitomizes the bifurcated existence that GASA’s racist policies imposed on non-white members. For Nkoli, who had aggressively organized for the rights of black students since 1976 and had served as a regional secretary of the Congress of South African Students (COSAS), the white gay community created a painful split in his life between his identity as an anti-apartheid activist and his work as a gay activist.260 According to historian Henriette Gunkel, GASA

“separated his sexual politics from his overall political position,” constantly making him choose between his struggle as a black man and his struggle as a gay man.261

So when Nkoli joined GASA as one of the organization’s first black members in 1983, he immediately noticed that black members were not treated with the same respect nor given the same privileges as white members. After a new member joined GASA, they were given a membership card—which was bright pink—that allowed them to get discounts at local gay clubs in Johannesburg. Nkoli realized the segregation of the organization when he first attempted to use his pink GASA card. He recalled:

I tried Mandy’s [a Johannesburg gay club] and they said ‘no blacks’. The Dungeon. ‘No blacks.’ I showed them their ad in Link/Skakel: ‘All GASA members welcome at a discount.’ ‘I’m a member of GASA,’ I’d say. ‘Yes,’ they’d reply, ‘but you’re black. What if the police come?’ The only place I managed to get in was somewhere in Jeppe

260 See Simon Nkoli, “This Strange Feeling,” In The Invisible Ghetto: Lesbian and Gay Writing from South Africa, edited by Matthew Krouse and Kim Berman, (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1995), 19, and Simon Nkoli, “Wardrobes: Coming Out as a Black Gay Activist in South Africa,” In Defiant Desire, edited by Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron, (New York: Routledge, 1995), 253. 261 Henriette Gunkel, Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality, 66.

101 Street: I was the only black person there and I felt so intimidated that I never went back.262

After only a year of membership in GASA, Nkoli along with his partner Roy

Shepherd, decided that they needed to create an alternative space for GASA’s black membership. To address the significant needs of the black gay community that went unmet by GASA, Nkoli publicly announced a meeting of black gay men in the black Sunday newspaper City Press. In the article that ran on a Sunday in May of 1984, Nkoli urged black gay men to get in touch with him for more information. He received so many responses from the article that he called a special meeting less than a week later, which 82 people attended.

In later reflections about the meeting, Nkoli remembered that the meeting had a fundamentally different tone from the apolitical tone that characterized GASA. People were talking actively about mobilization, protest, and direct political action—a discourse that would be unheard of at a white GASA meeting. After the meeting ended, most of the attendants had agreed to join the organization and meet the second Saturday of every month. Through something as simple as an article in the local paper, the Saturday Group— by many accounts the first black gay African political organization in the world—had been formed. As Nkoli would later recall, “The Saturday Group was very much concerned about mostly the black gays who doesn’t [sic] come out of the closet. This group was trying to form a black gay group in Soweto and elsewhere in the country.”263

As a mobilizing and advocacy organization, the Saturday Group was very successful early on. Under Nkoli’s leadership, the Saturday Group worked to create the first gay

262 Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 52. 263 Simon Nkoli, “I Did Not Ask Publicity—Nkoli,” Exit, June 1986.

102 shebeen—the name given to bars in the townships—in Orlando West at Lee’s Place, and they held their first fundraiser, a “merry mix” attended by over 200 people.264 They also began advertising the organization in Exit as “a non-racial interest group within the Gay

Association of South Africa,” where “gays of all races, sexes, ages and creeds are welcome.”265

Their success on a local level did not mean that they were liked or appreciated by the larger GASA structure, and as a branch of GASA, the group ran into tension very quickly.

Tension mostly arose when the Saturday Group began meeting at the office that GASA rented in the Hillbrow. For the members of the Saturday Group, the GASA office represented the main community gathering space that they had—there were very few other gay institutions for black South Africans at the time—and they used the space with all the exuberance of a newfound gay community: cooking food, drinking beer, and making too much noise altogether.

The white members of GASA, who were used to making noise in the multiple whites- only gay bars that they frequented, had a hard time understanding why the black members of the Saturday Group were behaving this way, and they discussed limiting the access that the Saturday Group could have to the office. 266 After hearing word of the discussion, most of the black members of GASA—who were still new to the organization—immediately left in outrage, and in May of 1984, Nkoli formally established The Saturday Group as an independent organization meant to provide counseling and support to the black

264 “Lively Soweto Visit for Saturday Group,” Link/Skakel, September 1984. 265 “Saturday Group,” Link/Skakel, August 1984. 266 One GASA executive member remembered: “The white GASA members were mad as hell: these black kids would come in, drink all the booze, light fires in the middle of the office to cook their food, make a noise, and leave a helluva mess! I have to say that the grievances against this new group of members were legitimate. But perhaps they could have been more sensitively dealt with…we should have been more accommodating.” See Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 53.

103 community, although Nkoli made sure to note that it was non-racial and had white members as well. Following this tension, Nkoli announced that the Saturday Group would get its own office as opposed to sharing an office with GASA, although these plans never materialized.267

By the end of 1984, the Saturday Group proved to be so successful that another

Saturday Group launched in Pretoria “modeled on the same non-racist principles as its

Johannesburg counterpart.”268 Yet despite this proliferation of “non-racial” gay groups intended for black South Africans, some members were dubious of what this meant for

GASA. If the Saturday Group was a “non-racial” organization meant for people of color and their allies, what did that mean about GASA? Was GASA truly non-racial in its own right, or was it truly intended to be “whites-only”? Julia Nichol pointed out this contradiction in a letter to the editor that appeared in the May 1985 issue of Link/Skakel: ““I have always believed that Gasa is a non-racial organization. If this is so, why on earth is it necessary to advertise specific meetings as being ‘for black and white’?”269

From 1982 to 1984, GASA enjoyed a fervent period of growth, expansion and optimism. By the middle of 1984, many of GASA’s leaders considered the organization a well-established entity with a bright future ahead of it. Through a rapid recruitment campaign, GASA fostered the creation of a national network of local gay and lesbian organization, and through the establishment of the Saturday Group, the organization found a way to mitigate the complicated racial politics of the 1980s and work with the black community. Despite the relative calm of the early 1980s, a storm was approaching on the

267 “Sat. Group Gets Own Office,” Link/Skakel, September 1984. 268 “N Tvl Gays Form Non-Racial Group,” Link/Skakel, September 1984. 269 Julia Nichol, “Racist Accusation,” Link/Skakel, April/May 1985.

104 horizon. Over the coming year, the mounting criticisms of GASA and its underpinning racial politics would combine with escalating violence and black resistance across the country to create a perfect storm. This combination of polarizing factors proved to be too great of a burden for the organization to handle. Moreover, in the increasingly turbulent and polarized years from 1984 onwards, the middle ground on which GASA managed to stand would fall out from under the organization. With the middle ground gone, GASA no longer had the option of being neutral. In the coming years, GASA’s leaders would be forced to choose a side in the struggle against apartheid, and the survival of the organization depended upon making the right choice.

105 Chapter 3

On Shifting Ground: Turbulent Politics and the End of Gay Reform

“The failure of gay politics in the 1980s was that it was overtaken by the march of black liberation in those same years and that it was unable—or unwilling—to align itself in any way with that march.”

-Mark Gevisser, A Different Fight for Freedom270

During its first two years of existence, GASA members were swept up in the thrill of community organizing for the first time. Through 1984, it seemed that aggressive community organizing, cosmetic solutions, and a degree of segregation within the structure of the organization could surmount the political, racial, and social differences that existed between GASA’s members. But as the 1980s unfolded, political tensions mounted throughout the country, and with them GASA’s honeymoon would soon come to an end.

The unraveling of GASA began in 1984, when the apartheid government arrested

Simon Nkoli for his anti-apartheid organizing. Following his imprisonment, GASA could no longer duck the question of politics, and by refusing to stand by Nkoli during his imprisonment, GASA alienated many members of the gay and lesbian community in South

Africa. Their failure to stand behind Nkoli also had implications for GASA’s reception in the international gay and lesbian community during the 1980s. When the world’s focus honed in on apartheid, GASA was found wanting. Its failure to defend a black, gay, UDF member brought international approbations. Domestically, GASA found its work drowned out in the

270 Mark Gevisser, “A Different Fight for Freedom,” in Defiant Desire, eds. Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron (New York. Routledge, 1995), 48.

106 midst of an increasingly violent anti-apartheid struggle and an increasingly repressive and militarized apartheid state. In the context of domestic and international pressures, internal division overwhelmed the organization as it began to fall apart. Rather than cohering in the face of pressure, GASA quickly became caught in multiple fights over national governance, budgetary concerns, and structural issues within the organization.

GASA’s downfall came about due to a combination of factors, the most important of which being the shifting role of gay reform. In the early 1980s, the gay and lesbian movement could avoid the question of anti-apartheid politics altogether, instead focusing on the rapid expansion of GASA and AIDS-related services. But as the 1980s progressed,

“neutrality” towards the apartheid state ceased to be an option: GASA’s leadership could no longer avoid the question of apartheid. And when push came to shove, GASA’s predominately white organizers defaulted to the organization’s roots in a gay reform ideology, deciding not to challenge the authority of the apartheid state and to “stay out of politics.” But in the late 1980s, neutrality towards apartheid stopped being a viable political position. On every front, the country had been profoundly cleft between those who stood up vehemently against apartheid and those who refused to challenge the status quo.

These pressures came to a head during the whites-only election of 1987, when a segment of the gay and lesbian community ended up campaigning on behalf of pro- apartheid politicians because those politicians had, unexpectedly enough, embraced gay rights. In a certain sense, it was both incredible and surprising that the pressure of a small group of mobilized gay voters could convince members of the National Party to openly endorse gay rights. But when a large portion of the white gay community chose to openly endorse National Party candidates in return, many members of the gay community who

107 were opposed to apartheid decided that they could no longer participate in a single-issue gay movement. In many senses, the open embrace of pro-apartheid politicians by a significant number of GASA members rang the death-knell for organization.

Through refusing to challenge apartheid, GASA placed itself solidly on the wrong side of shifting national and international opinion, and the still-tender coalition that it had brought together surrounding gay politics quickly unraveled. At the end of the day, gay identity ceased to be enough to hold gay and lesbian people together. In the face of the apartheid state, queer people of color and their anti-apartheid allies could no longer justify working within a coalition that understood the apartheid state as legitimate. In the end, the benefits of building a gay and lesbian community were vastly outweighed by the costs of working with gay and lesbian people who continued to support racial domination in South

Africa. By the late 1980s, these problems would bring an end to both GASA and gay reform politics.

***

By the mid-1980s, South Africa had fallen into turmoil. On September 3, 1984—the same day as Nkoli’s arrest—P.W. Botha inaugurated his ‘reform’ government, and the tri- cameral parliament composed of whites, coloureds, and Indians came to power.271

Following the UDF’s campaign against Botha’s reforms, black communities around the country erupted in violence, protest, and demonstration, and with it “the longest and most widespread period of sustained black protest against white rule in South Africa’s history

271 Tom Lodge and Bill Nasson, All, Here, and Now: Black Politics In South Africa in the 1980s, (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1991), 65.

108 had begun.”272 Angry mobs burned down government buildings and businesses, and “a massive upsurge of black liberationist activity swept through the townships” in response, which the police countered with heightened repression and deployment of the South

African Defense Force into township communities.273

Later that month, the exiled ANC leadership in Lusaka, Zambia fanned the flames of revolt by urging black people to foster a people’s war and make the country

“ungovernable” by the apartheid state.274 By 1984, the ANC and the UDF had given up on peaceful resistance to apartheid and had instead turned to violence. As the ANC later stated in 1985: “The time has passed for arguing over whether violence is the only way left for us: the question today is how to embark on this revolutionary violence.”275 Due to the scope of unrest in the country, South Africa was at war with itself by the end of 1984 and the government declared a state of emergency on July 21, 1985.276

During the state of emergency, townships were in utter chaos. The apartheid state imposed a curfew from between 10pm and 4am; youth suspected in any way of supporting the liberation struggle were detained indefinitely; forty percent of detainees were under the age of twenty-one; “community guards” were given munitions haphazardly and as a result killed innocent people; and apartheid police roaming streets in the townships made physical violence the norm.277

272 Jeremy Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front, (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2000), 122. 273 Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 48. 274 Jill Wentzel, The Liberal Slideaway. (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1995), 35. 275 Ibid, 35. 276 Tom Lodge and Bill Nasson, All, Here, and Now, 78. 277 Philip Van Rynveld, “State of Emergency—The Method Behind the Madness,” Sash 29, no. 3 (November 1986): 30.

109 By the end of 1984, the anti-apartheid struggle ceased to be a peaceful struggle, and any middle ground that had existed between the liberation struggle and the apartheid government dropped out. Politics had taken on an absolute sensibility: you either support the armed struggle or you supported the apartheid government. This for-us-or-against-us mentality unduly burdened white progressive organizations, which now found themselves forced either to embrace the armed struggle, divestment, and international economic sanctions, or to be seen as pro-apartheid. One organization that struggled with this dichotomy was Black Sash, a white women’s movement that had been organizing against apartheid since the 1950s. As an organization, Black Sash remained absolutely committed to ending apartheid, as evidenced by the fact that many of their members were in prison for the anti-apartheid organizing.278 But they were split when it came to using violent tactics. Black Sash’s indecision—even as an explicitly anti-apartheid organization— concerning the violent tactics of the liberation struggle is telling of just how fragmented

South African society had become in the late 1980s. 279

South Africa’s white gay rights movement was forced to contend with the same divided backdrop, and the turbulent times had a profound impact on gay and lesbian communities. As South African gay historian and psychologist Gordon Isaacs notes, “any gay organization must be influenced by the structure of the parent society,” and the South

278 “Still Detained,” Sash 29, no. 3, (November 1986): 12. 279In their newsletter Sash, the debate about the role of violence arose a prominent theme throughout the late 1980s. As one Sash reader explained, “Today, however, we are caught between two ruthlessly cruel and terrifying evils,”—the evil of apartheid on one hand and the evil of violent struggle in the townships on the other. A “Statement on Violence” issued by the Black Sash National Conference in February of 1987, summed up Black Sash’s stance as an organization. They condemned violence, but insinuated that they were not in a place to judge those who chose to use violence: “We live in a time when the struggle against the institutionalized violence of apartheid is rendering the townships ungovernable and bringing the country to the brink of civil war. During war, violence breeds violence, and there are atrocities on both sides; winning a ‘war of liberation’ does not necessarily result in a just peace.” See Barbara Waite, “An Open Letter,” Sash 29, no. 4, (February 1987): 28, and “The Black Sash Statement on Violence,” Sash 29, no. 4, (February 1987): 30.

110 African gay community was no exception to this rule, particularly in the 1980s.280 The deep divisions that existed between white and non-white South Africans in the 1980s were part of the very structure of the Gay Association of South Africa. While many within GASA attempted to bridge the gap between white and non-white people, “The homosexual collective in South Africa had no monolithic status with which to counteract the fragmentary nature of society.”281

***

In the context of constant surveillance by the security police, GASA struggled to maintain confidentiality for its members. Through maintaining a mostly white membership and refusing to challenge the racism of the apartheid regime, GASA’s leadership was able to ensure that the apartheid police never launched a significant investigation of the organization. This is why the founders of GASA were very clear to emphasize that GASA sought to provide a “non-militant, non-political answer to gay needs,” with some GASA leaders going so far as to call the political sphere “a minefield.”282 Avoiding anti-apartheid politics remained one of the only ways that GASA’s leadership could ensure that the organization remained confidential in the mid-1980s.

The challenges of managing a national, non-political organization in such a highly politicized context made it difficult not only for GASA to address apartheid, but also for

GASA to confront anti-gay policies that were imposed by the government or anti-gay actions that were undertaken by government officials. Ultimately, GASA’s commitment to being a non-political organization ensured that the leadership of the organization could not

280 Gordon Isaacs and Brian McKendrick, Male Homosexuality in South Africa: Identity Formation, Culture, and Crisis, (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1992), 142. 281 Ibid, 142. 282 Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 51.

111 act in a decisive way in the face of government persecution. As one GASA member put it, “If we started waving banners, we would only increase the animosity towards us.”283

However vocal their commitment to being an apolitical organization, it would have been more accurate to describe GASA not as apolitical, but as selectively political.

Throughout this period, GASA primarily served as a watchdog group, not an in-the-streets advocacy organization. From 1982 until 1984, GASA released media statements that condemned anti-gay actions of the apartheid government, but the statements themselves were rarely assertive and were undergirded by an accommodating tone. Ann Smith, another founding member of GASA explained: “We saw that in this country, political protests were immediately banned, and if we were banned, not only would we discredit the gay movement, but we would not be around to provide vital services to gay people.”284 This fear of being banned made GASA inert as a political advocacy group.

GASA first demonstrated its inability to effectively intervene in the political arena in

May of 1983, when the South African Railways Police discharged a number of employees, including women, who were found to be “homosexuals.”285 This action was particularly egregious and legally indefensible, given that South African law did not criminalize homosexuality among women. Many of GASA’s members, including those who were employed by the government, turned to GASA for some sort of reaction, hoping that they would take a strong stance against the dismissals of gay and lesbian public employees.

Instead, GASA opted merely to send a letter of protest to the General Director of the South

African Transport Services and make statements to the press. The Star merely quoted GASA

283 Rand Daily Mail, November 8, 1982, in Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” 51. 284 Weekly Mail, October 18, 1990, in Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” 52. 285 “A Reason for Caution,” Link/Skakel, May 1983.

112 as saying, “Lesbianism is not illegal. The dismissal or forced resignations of women because of lesbianism is a flagrant case of discrimination against women.”286 In a subsequent issue of Link/Skakel, GASA leadership defended its actions by arguing “An organization which has only over a thousand members is highly vulnerable to official censure. Had Gasa made representations on a political level, we may well have been annihilated.”287

GASA also demonstrated this tendency towards political inaction when it attempted to publish its newsletter publicly in 1984. Under the apartheid government, all magazines that were made publicly available were subject to the censure of the Publications Control

Board, which had the ability to ban individuals from continuing to publish content that it deemed ‘undesirable’ or political in nature. In April and May of 1984, GASA began publishing Link/Skakel publicly and made it available for purchase at a few select venues.

They also submitted the magazine to the Publications Review Board for review, and in

August of 1984, the Publications Review Board declared Link/Skakel an ‘undesirable’ publication because it was “calculated to promote homosexuality which, in the view of

South African citizens, is an offensive and immoral form of sexual activity…This publication would exceed the tolerance of the average decent minded citizen.”288

This was a huge blow for GASA; they were permitted to continue distributing the magazine privately and free of charge via mail, but they would never be able to distribute their magazine publicly. GASA’s did not response to this verdict in any fiery way. They held no protest, no petition, not even a visit to the Directorate of Publications in Cape Town to discuss the banning. Instead, Link/Skakel’s editor Henk Botha simply stated, “It is a great

286 The Star, April 4, 1983, in Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” 51. 287 “A Reason for Caution,” Link/Skakel, May 1983. 288 “Future L/S Ban Unlikely If Not on Sale—Legal Opinion,” Link/Skakel, August 1984.

113 pity that Gasa doesn’t have the money to appeal the ruling. It could have turned out to be a big victory if a court of law should set aside the ‘banning’—something which is not improbable as it might seem.”289 Botha’s response demonstrates not only an unwillingness to seriously challenge the state on matters of critical importance to the gay and lesbian community but also a reverence for the apartheid court system—a system notorious for ignoring basic rights to due process.

GASA demonstrated its inability to politically mobilize around gay and lesbian issues for a final time in 1985, when the government called for an investigation of the

Immorality Act of 1957 and the subsequent amendments of 1968. The President’s Council, an advisory body to State President P. W. Botha, was tasked with examining whether the provisions of the Immorality Act were “comprehensive and effective enough to deal with the matters referred to therein and related matters?”290 In essence, the government wanted to find out if the current prohibitions on homosexual conduct were sufficiently stringent.291

The announcement that the government would be conducting another investigation into the criminalization of homosexuality sent tremors through GASA and the gay community more generally. By July of 1985, GASA had already shepherded the preparation of an 18-page memorandum that called for the decriminalization of homosexuality and submitted it to the President’s Council.292 This memorandum was one of sixteen that the

President’s Council received during that month. Five memoranda, submitted by the Baptist

Church, the Dutch Reform Church, the Association of Law Societies, the South African

289 Ibid. 290 “Strong Effort to Reform Law,” Exit, July 1985. 291 Kevan Botha and Edwin Cameron, “South Africa,” in Sociolegal Control of Homosexuality: a Multi-nation Comparison, eds. Donald J. West and Richard Green (New York: Plenum Press, 1997), 25. 292 “Strong Effort to Reform Law,” Exit, July 1985.

114 Police, and the Department of Justice called for the continued criminalization of homosexuality. Eleven other memoranda were submitted by gay organizations and individuals in favor of decriminalization.293 While GASA had numbers on their side, the political weight of their memorandum paled in comparison to those of the church and the government.

For many gay South Africans, the 1985 deliberations of the President’s Council were hauntingly reminiscent of the 1968 deliberations of the President’s Special Committee. As

Exit’s editorial board lamented, further criminalizing homosexuality would take “South

Africa literally—and this is not a figure of speech—back to pre-Victorian times.”294 And so, by August of 1985, GASA made the decision to revive the Law Reform Fund and set the ambitious fundraising goal of R100,000 to employ legal services and prepare oral testimonies for the President’s Committee. Kevan Botha, a member of the GASA executive committee, coordinated the nationwide plan for the Law Reform Fund. In order to meet their fundraising goal, he called for 150 volunteers who would individually approach 3,000 donors by the end of the year.295 Of the R100,000 figure, 37% would be used for legal fees,

30% would be used for research, including public opinion polls, 24% would be used to cover the expense of preparing witnesses and flying them to Cape Town to testify before the President’s Council, and the remaining 9% would be used for printing costs.296

The campaign did not immediately succeed, and it did not galvanize the kind of popular support given to the 1968 Law Reform effort. By January of 1986, the Law Reform

Fund had only raised R10,000 of its R100,000 goal. Given the limited success of the LRF,

293 “Law Reform: Now is the Time for Effort,” Exit, August 1985. 294 “Back to the Dark Ages?” Exit, August 1985. 295 “Nationwide Money Plan for Law Reform,” Exit, September 1985. 296 “How the Money Will Be Spent,” Exit, January 1986.

115 GASA began distributing brochures and running ads that featured a (white) man behind bars with the by-line “Out of the Closet Into a Cell?” in order to encourage more donations.297

Figure 5: Advertisement for Law Reform, Exit, January 1986

In addition to increased advertising, GASA and the LRF steering committee increased their fundraising efforts, coordinating a major fundraising festival called “Shaft 8” and holding a fundraising dinner with Johannesburg’s elite gay and lesbian community that raised

R37,000 in one night.298 By May of 1986, the Law Reform Fund had raised R50,453 across the country.299

And yet, for all the effort put into the Law Reform Fund, the President’s Council hearings concerning the criminalization of homosexuality never materialized. By August of

1986, the President’s Council had tabled the matter, and formal hearings were never conducted.300 Instead, the President’s Council simply authored a report without holding

297 Advertisement, Exit, January 1986. 298 See “Book for ‘Shaft 8’,” Exit, February 1986, and “R42,000 in One Night,” Exit, May 1986. 299 “Fund Halfway,” Exit, May 1986. 300 “Let Us Close Ranks,” Exit, August/September 1986.

116 formal hearings, issuing the Report on the Committee of Social Affairs on the Youth of South

Africa in 1987. The report outlined various “challenges” confronting South African youth and identified homosexuality as a “Social Deviation”.301 Under the subheading

“promiscuity,” the report stated:

Homosexuality in men and in women is a serious social deviation and is irreconcilable with normal marriage…The fact that homosexuality is increasingly regarded as normal by the community is cause for concern. Since the discovery that the dreaded disease Aids occurs mainly among homosexuals the lenient attitude towards this acquired behavioural pattern has once again come under the searchlight in an effort to counter this disease.302

This came as a crushing blow for GASA and the organizers of Law Reform. After months of work and countless donations, the report condemned homosexuality as a “social deviation,” and retrenched the government’s criminalization of male homosexual conduct.

Furthermore, following the President’s Council’s investigation, Parliament raised the age of consent for lesbian sex from the normal age of sixteen to the age of nineteen.303

For GASA, the failure of the reincarnated Law Reform Fund became a significant nail in the coffin of reformist gay organizing. Despite the great effort of many of GASA’s members to fight the criminalization of homosexuality, they were not able to gain a legitimate or powerful voice in the eyes of the apartheid government, a government that paradoxically challenged their identity as a gay community and protected their many privileges as white citizens.

***

301 Glen Elder, “Of Moffies, Kaffirs, and Perverts: Male Homosexuality and the Discourse of Moral Order in the Apartheid State,” In Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, edited by David Bell and Gill Valentine, (New York: Routledge, 1995), 64. 302 Republic of South Africa President’s Council, Report of the Committee for Social Affairs on the Youth of South Africa, (Cape Town: Government Printer, 1987), 48. 303 Kevan Botha and Edwin Cameron, “South Africa,” in Sociolegal Control of Homosexuality, 26.

117 On September 3rd, 1984, a mere three months after the Saturday Group’s first meeting, the police arrested and detained Nkoli as part of a mass protest. The protest— coordinated by an affiliate of the United Democratic Front (UDF), the Vaal Civic

Association—was organized in response to the unfair electoral politics and rent increases that were imposed on the Sebokeng township community, where Nkoli lived at the time.304

That Monday, about 11,000 people joined in on the march and a violent clash between the police and the community ensued, leading to widespread looting, destruction of government property, and the deaths of five people—four of them city councilors. 305 On

September 23rd, 1984, the police arrested Nkoli along with 21 other UDF/Vaal Civic

Association leaders who were implicated in the uprising.306 Following his detention the fledgling Saturday Group essentially collapsed.307 While Nkoli’s arrest did not garner much attention at first, it would go on to test the true inclusivity of both the anti-apartheid struggle and the gay rights movement.

Initially, security forces detained Nkoli in Pretoria Prison for nearly a year, an experience that he wrote about in a memoir three years before his death in 1998.308 In the memoir, he recalls being very worried about how his sexual orientation would affect his prison experience, his relationship with his fellow prisoners, his treatment by the police, and ultimately his trial. His fears were validated when, during his initial interrogation, his

304 The town council had already voted to increase rent in the area on two separate occasions, and in August the town council voted for yet another rent increase of R5.90 per month set to take effect on September 1st. See Patrick MacEntee, The “Treason” Trials at Pietermaritzburg and Delmas, (New York: United Nations Centre Against Apartheid, October 1986), 12. 305 Kim Bolan, “Apartheid Fighter Recalls Torture of Prison Hymns,” Vancouver Sun, August 23, 1989, A8. 306 Simon Nkoli, “Wardrobes: Coming Out as a Black Gay Activist in South Africa,” In Defiant Desire, edited by Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron, (New York: Routledge, 1995), 253. 307 Simon Nkoli, “I Did Not Ask Publicity—Nkoli,” Exit, June 1986. 308Ibid, 251.

118 interrogators confronted him about his sexual orientation. He remembered the police said,

“You say you’re fighting for the people, but you’re a moffie. Do you really think the ANC and the SACP would be mad enough to take a moffie on?” On another occasion, the police brought in a baton and told him to go fuck himself with it.309 They even threatened to allow other prisoners to rape Nkoli.310 On October 18th, after a month of interrogation, the

Pretoria Supreme Court refused to grant bail for any of the accused—citing the instability of the country as the justification for detention.

During his first few months in prison, Nkoli wasn’t just worried about how the police would use his sexual orientation against him; he also became very concerned about how his fellow prisoners—all leaders in the UDF—would react. Given his past experience with Congress of South African Students (COSAS)—in which fellow leaders almost ousted him from the leadership because of his sexuality—he had become acutely aware of how vehement homophobia could be within the anti-apartheid struggle.311 At the time, anti- apartheid activists saw homosexuality among political prisoners as a betrayal of the liberation struggle, and informal communal “courts” were often set up in prisons whereby inmates could punish comrades found to be engaging in homosexual conduct.312

Accordingly, when he got to prison, Nkoli began planning exactly how he would come out to his co-accused, but before he could even try, something happened that forced

309 Nkoli, “Wardrobes,” in Defiant Desire, 253. 310 Among the torture, harassment, and trauma of interrogation, Nkoli remembers one scene vividly: “During further torture and interrogation at Square, one policeman, who had seen snaps of white men in my photo album, became particularly angry. ‘Why do you like fucking white men?’ he asked. ‘What have they done to you? Why don’t you have sex with your own people?’ “ See Nkoli, “Wardrobes,” in Defiant Desire, 253. 311 Ibid, 253. 312 As theorist Brenna Munro has noted, during the heyday of the anti-apartheid struggle, “To be a good comrade is to resist homosexuality, to engage in homosexuality is to betray the political group.” Brenna Munro, South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 29.

119 him to speak up: one prisoner caught another one of the accused having an affair with a white prison warder. The other prisoners discovered the affair when the prison warder in charge of Nkoli’s block found a love-letter that had been written between two of the men.

The letter quickly made its way to Terror Lekota and Moss Chikane, the leaders of the accused, and they called a meeting of the group in the largest cell, Cell 47.

When Nkoli arrived at Cell 47 for the meeting, he initially thought the meeting was about him, because he heard Lekota furiously spouting about being arrested with homosexuals. Nkoli thought to himself “God what have I done?”313 Lekota started the meeting by saying, “Comrades, I’ve got this love letter. It’s disgusting.” and Nkoli realized that the meeting was not about him. Lekota went on to read the letter and identify the author, who the other prisoners then began to accost.

Before he knew what he was doing, Nkoli stood up—interrupting Lekota—and said,

“What about me?” The room spiraled into confusion, and Lekota was dumbstruck. Nkoli remembered one man saying, “We should have our own trial. I’m not going to stand accused with a homosexual man…What will they think when we have a homosexual man with us?” Hearing that, Nkoli had taken enough. He rose in front of the room and said “I think I should leave this meeting now…You’re not [just] talking about the person who committed this act. You’re actually talking about homosexual men and I am one.”314

The room went silent in shock. For the next few weeks, the revelation about Nkoli’s identity as a gay man became the main topic of conversation among the prisoners. At first, many of the co-accused wanted to ask for separate trials because they thought that Nkoli’s

313 Nkoli, “Wardrobes,” in Defiant Desire, 254. 314 Ibid, 254.

120 presence would interfere with the rest of the proceedings.315 The lawyers who were to defend the accused were consulted on the issue and they were firm: there would be only one trial. If the other accused still insisted on separate trials, their attorneys threatened to leave the case. Perhaps the most supportive lawyer of them all was George Bizos.316 While

Nkoli faced constant degradation from many of his co-accused, Bizos provided much- needed support for Nkoli.

Though homophobia persisted among many of the accused, Nkoli had some supporters. Perhaps Nkoli’s most important supporter among the accused was Jacob

Hlanyane, a member of the Vaal Civic Association and a married man with two children.

Before Nkoli came out, he and Hlanyane had been very close: “I’d eat with him, read with him, go to medicals together with him. I had just assumed that he knew about me.”317

On June 11, 1985 after nine months in prison, the state charged Nkoli with treason and murder along with the other 21 leaders. The group trial began on January 20th, 1986 in a remote town about 70 kilometers east of Johannesburg and southeast of Pretoria called

Delmas. According to a report from the UN Centre Against Apartheid, Delmas was chosen

“because of its remoteness, so as to prevent any show of community support for the defendants.”318 Eventually and somewhat miraculously, Nkoli’s identity began to be normalized among the co-defendants. Whether they accepted Nkoli out of genuine transformation or because of political expediency is difficult to determine, but at the end of

315 Henriette Gunkel, Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality, 66. 316 George Bizos also served as one of ’s attorneys during the Rivonia Trial, where Mandela was sentenced to a long period of imprisonment. 317 Other prisoners who were particularly supportive included Popo Molefe, the General Secretary of the UDF, Moss Chikane, a ranking member of the UDF, and Thomas Manthata, a field worker with the South African Council of Churches. Nkoli, “Wardrobes,” in Defiant Desire, 255. 318 Patrick MacEntee, The “Treason” Trials at Pietermaritzburg and Delmas, 13.

121 the day the “Delmas 22”—as the group of 22 political prisoners had come to be known— learned to embrace Nkoli as one of their own.

At around the same time, Nkoli’s situation and the case of the Delmas 22 started gaining traction internationally. Nkoli first received international attention from the

Scottish Homosexual Rights Group (SHRG)—a gay and lesbian advocacy organization. In the 28th issue of Gay Scotland, the newsletter of SHRG, a brief article appeared about Nkoli’s detention.319 In the winter of 1985, this article made its way onto the desk of Tim

McCaskell, the “multi-lingual and well-traveled” international news editor for Canada’s leading gay and lesbian journal The Body Politic.320 Through the Body Politic Tim McCaskell authored a series of reports on Nkoli in early 1986.321

Enough people in Canada were inspired by what they read about Nkoli that they formed a group called the Simon Nkoli Anti-Apartheid Committee (SNAAC). In the words of

McCaskell, SNAAC sought to provide “Simon with emotional and material support. Prison was very hard. We corresponded regularly, arranged for subscriptions to LGBT magazines, publicized his case, and sent him the news clippings to let him know that people around the world were supporting him.”322 Furthermore, SNAAC focused intently on working against homophobia in the anti-apartheid movement and working against racism in the gay liberation movement. To do this, they participated in pickets of the ANC and did their best

319 Brian Dempsey “Scottish Homosexual Rights Group in South Africa,” LGBT History Scotland, http://homepage.ntlworld.com/hamamelis/RIP-ISPrivate/Miscellaneous/BrianDemspey/ SHRG%20on%20South%20africa%20for%20Deeg.html (accessed April 7, 2014). 320 “Inventory of the Records of The Body Politic,” The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, http://www.clga.ca/Material/Records/inven/tbp/news.htm (accessed April 7, 2014). 321 McCaskell remembered, “Anti-apartheid activism was a major current in progressive organizing in Toronto in the mid 80’s, so the story immediately piqued my interest. I contacted the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of South African Colonies and…[they were] able to put me in touch with someone who was in contact with...Simon Nkoli.” See Tim McCaskell, “Queers Against Apartheid,” Canadian Dimension, Jul/Aug 2010, 4. 322 Ibid, 15.

122 to ensure that mainstream media throughout Canada and the world featured Simon’s Case.

SNAAC did not have to do this work alone; the anti-apartheid movements in Britain,

Sweden and Holland also took up Nkoli’s cause. 323 In a sense, it was “the confluence of his

[Nkoli’s] open homosexuality and his imprisonment as a soldier against apartheid made him immensely appealing,” as a cause celebre for many gay and lesbian activists organizations around the world.324

Other than the materials and letters that Nkoli received from SNAAC, Nkoli received letters from anti-apartheid organizations and gay organizations across Europe and from many other places throughout the world, including over 150 Christmas cards in 1986.325

A month later, in January of 1987, the Second National March on Washington for Gay and

Lesbian Rights made the freedom of Nkoli a specific demand of their platform.326 Both to

Nkoli and to the other UDF leaders in jail with him, the outpouring of international support for Nkoli not only affirmed the cause of ending apartheid; it also affirmed a widespread sense of support for the gay and lesbian community. In a way, international support legitimized Nkoli as a gay man in the eyes of his peers who were standing trial with him.

Moreover, Nkoli transformed the discourse that his co-accused used to conceptualize homosexuality. Prior to his coming out, most of his co-accused thought of homosexuality as something to be punished, but through his openness, Nkoli “shifted the discussion from sodomy to identity, from punishment to personal codification.”327 Given that many of his co-accused went on to be substantial leaders in the post-apartheid government, Nkoli’s

323 Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 56. 324 Ibid, 56. 325 Nkoli, “Wardrobes,” in Defiant Desire, 255. 326 Stephanie Poggi, “A Letter from South Africa: Black Gay Activist Simon Nkoli Tells His Story,” Gay Community News, September 19, 1987, 9. 327 Brenna Munro, South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come, 52.

123 engagement with his sexuality during the course of the trial would later take on substantial significance in the new South Africa. 328

***

All of the international attention given to Nkoli’s case did not bode well for GASA. In a time when GASA began vigorously pursuing affiliation and recognition for their organization within the international gay and lesbian community, Nkoli’s case proved to be a troubling thorn in GASA’s side. Internally, GASA remained incredibly divided concerning whether or not to support Nkoli in his struggles against the apartheid state, and this internal tension would soon be placed on the international stage. Fortunately or unfortunately, during this period of racial tension within the gay rights movement in South

Africa and given the increased international attention placed on South Africa in the 1980s,

GASA did not have the luxury of going through these growing pains outside of the public eye.

In 1983, GASA made the decision to apply for membership in the International

Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA).329 For GASA, membership in ILGA meant that the organization would receive “international recognition of the part it plays in the struggle for gay civil rights in South Africa,” and would represent the opportunity to make “a meaningful contribution to the gay struggle worldwide.”330 GASA’s leadership saw membership in ILGA as an important step in establishing credibility for their organization,

328 Many of Nkoli’s Co-Trialists, such as Terror Lekota and Moss Chikane, would go on to become important leaders in the new South African government in the late 1990s. 329 At the time, it was simply known as the International Gay Association. The name of the organization changed to the International Gay and Lesbian Association in 1986. For the sake of consistency and recognition, the organization’s current name is used throughout this paper. 330 “What is the IGA?” Link/Skakel, September 1984.

124 and as the first African organization to apply for membership in ILGA, GASA assumed that

ILGA would be enthusiastic to have them.

And in some ways, they were right. At the 1983 ILGA World Conference held in

Vienna, a distinct sense of excitement floated in the air when it was announced that GASA had applied for membership. The entry of GASA into ILGA represented the first time that an

African LGBT organization had been admitted into ILGA’s ranks—a status that brought

ILGA one step closer to realizing the global aspirations of the organization.

But as ILGA considered the new group, Ian Christie of the Scottish Homosexual

Rights Group (SHRG) took the floor of the conference and began to relay a story about a black gay man he met from Soweto—presumptively Simon Nkoli—who had brought up serious concerns about the inclusiveness of GASA. In concluding his speech, Christie motioned that ILGA should not admit GASA before questions of racial inclusiveness had been adequately addressed, citing the UN resolution against apartheid as an international precedent that must be followed. This unleashed an impassioned conversation about race and inclusivity on the conference floor, the likes of which ILGA had never seen. Due to time constraints of the conference and the need for more information, ILGA decided to table the question until the 1984 Conference in Helsinki.331

The decision to postpone GASA’s membership at first disoriented GASA’s leaders, who had no clear understanding of what they needed to do in order to prove that they were worthy of membership. They realized that there were concerns raised at the conference about GASA’s racial inclusiveness, but they viewed the “non-racial” clause of their

331 Jens Rydström, “Solidarity—with whom?: The International Gay & Lesbian Rights Movement and Apartheid,” in Sex and Politics in South Africa, eds. Neville Hoad, Karen Martin, and Graeme Reid, (Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2005), 34.

125 constitution as sufficient proof of racial inclusivity. GASA President Pieter Bosman’s annual report that appeared in the June/July 1984 issue of Link/Skakel expressed this viewpoint.

In the report, Bosman states “We still have no clear directive of exactly what we are required to do in order to be accepted.”332

The next July—only two months after black members walked out of GASA to form the Saturday Group—ILGA once again took up the issue of GASA’s membership at its 1984

Helsinki Conference.333 That year, GASA sent Pieter Bosman to represent GASA at the conference.334 According to later accounts of the conference, Bosman’s “rational insight into gay issues in South Africa was a major factor in influencing the decision in Gasa’s favour,” in addition to lobbying efforts that had been undertaken by GASA’s International

Secretary Ann Smith.335 After Pieter made his remarks about GASA and its practices, ILGA voted to allow GASA to join as a full member, but adopted a statement against apartheid and in support of the boycott of South African goods to allay any sense that ILGA supported apartheid. 336

GASA celebrated membership in ILGA as a historic moment, and for a while, it seemed that the organization had successfully allayed all fears of racism and accusations of being pro-apartheid. Accordingly, at the 1985 ILGA Conference in Toronto, very little was said about South Africa. The conference had some discussion of apartheid and a small anti- apartheid committee formed, but the committee never seemed to have any influence. And even though he had already been in jail for nine months, no one at the ILGA conference

332 Pieter Bosman, “Report from the President,” Link/Skakel, Jun/July 1984. 333 David Paternotte, Alex Cosials Apellaniz, and David Tong, “ILGA: 1978-2008, A Chronology,” International Lesbian and Gay Association, http://ilga.org/ilga/en/article/mG6UVpR17x (accessed April 7, 2014). 334 “Overwhelming Yes Vote: International Body Welcomes SA Gays,” Link/Skakel, August 1984. 335 Ibid. 336 “IGA Meeting Condemns Global Discrimination,” Link/Skakel, August 1984.

126 even mentioned Simon Nkoli’s name. For the moment, it seemed that GASA was in ILGA to stay.

But that all began to shift in 1986, when two critical activists undertook regular correspondence with Simon Nkoli: Ian Christie of the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group and Jon Voss of ILGA’s Informational Secretariat in Stockholm. Voss was a long time member of the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights— commonly known as RFSL—and advocated prolifically on Nkoli’s behalf. Voss’s letters from

Nkoli and other prominent South African activists comprise a significant historical record of Nkoli’s detention, the South African gay movement’s struggle with racism, and the anti- apartheid movement’s struggle with homophobia.

Voss’ correspondence with Nkoli started in January 1986 as the Delmas trial began, and the beginning of Voss’ letters mark the formal beginning of ILGA’s investigation into the Nkoli affair. On January 20th, Voss sent letters both to Nkoli’s mother Elizabeth and to the South African Embassy in Stockholm requesting more information about Nkoli’s case.337 Also, on February 3rd, Voss wrote to the ANC office in Stockholm asking for a meeting to discuss how the international gay and lesbian community could become more involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, and what the organization’s opinion was on gay and lesbian rights. The letter went unanswered.338

In that same month, Ian Christie launched a separate attack on GASA. In 1985, a

South African team had been organized by GASA and other organizations to represent

South Africa at the 1986 International in San Francisco.339 During a time in

337 Jon Voss to Elizabeth Nkoli, January 20, 1986, in Jens Rydström, “Solidarity—With Whom?” 36. 338 Jon Voss to ANC Stockholm Office, February 3, 1986, in Jens Rydström, “Solidarity—with whom?” 42. 339 “Call for Boycott of Gay Games,” Exit, January 1986.

127 which South African sports teams were being excluded from the Olympics and from most professional athletic competitions, this represented an interesting departure from international norms. Through the SHRG, Ian Christie called for a boycott of the

International Gay Games unless they banned South Africa from participating. In their call for a boycott, the SHRG noted, “the [gay] games are in breach of a United Nations resolution on apartheid which calls for a worldwide boycott of all cultural and athletic contacts with

South Africa.”340 They went on to mention Nkoli’s detention as further reason to boycott the games: “a leading gay activist is currently being held in a South African jail for his opposition to apartheid…the South African Gay Association of doing nothing to help him.”341

By March of that year, Nkoli’s trial and GASA’s reaction to it had become the central concern of the international gay and lesbian community, and GASA received pressure on all sides to clarify their position. That month, Voss added to that pressure, writing to GASA and asking them why they had not supported Nkoli. In response to this pressure GASA felt the need to publicly clarify their position. In the March 1986 issue of Exit, GASA stated that

Nkoli, “who is being held on charges of treason, terrorism, five of murder, promoting the aims of the ANC, and a number of alternative charges with 21 other people,” would not receive any support from GASA, despite being a member, due to the fact that he was not being detained, “because of his gay activities.”342

In that same issue of Exit, Nkoli responded to the attention he’d received via a letter from prison that he published through Rev. Don Dowie. In his letter, Nkoli refuted the

340 Ibid. 341 Ibid. 342 “Gasa on Nkoli,” Exit, March 1986.

128 separation of his work into gay and non-gay activism: “I don’t fight for the rights of blacks because I am black or for the rights of gays because I am gay, but I do both because I am human and it is my right to be accepted as human.”343 And while he condemned GASA for its lack of black representation and membership, he strongly asserted that he did not “want to be used as political ammunition,” at the international level, stressing that GASA’s problems with race had to be sorted out locally. “It will be difficult but we can do it, given goodwill,” wrote Nkoli, “It is not my desire that this problem should be discussed at an IGA conference. That is not the place or the way to do it.”344

GASA’s leadership struggled immensely with the issue. Many of the leaders in GASA felt that apartheid was an unjust system that deserved to be abolished, but their more conservative membership and their constitution, which explicitly forbade “political” work, kept their hands tied. Ann Smith, GASA’s International Secretary at the time, best articulated this tension in a letter that she wrote to Exit. She noted that “Gasa walks the tight-rope balanced between the dictates of its members and those of a general liberal position,” and acknowledged that “Simon is in prison for his attempts to fight apartheid—a most invidious system of discrimination and one which must be abhorred by all thinking people.”345 But she could not, in her capacity as a GASA officer, defy the organization’s constitution: “Personally, I believe that we should be fighting discrimination in all its manifestations, but Gasa’s members think otherwise.”346

Despite Nkoli’s objections to the issue being dealt with on an international level, and the complicated responses of many of GASA’s leaders, the pressure for ILGA to expel GASA

343 Father Don Dowie. “I’m not Political Ammunition, I want Human Rights—Nkoli,” Exit, March 1986. 344 Ibid. 345 Ann Smith, “Simon Part of Greater Problem,” Exit, March 1986. 346 Ibid.

129 continued to increase. During this period, Voss maintained regular correspondence with

Nkoli, and he kept Nkoli abreast of the developments at ILGA. In multiple letters, Nkoli urged Voss and ILGA not to expel GASA. On April 10, Nkoli wrote “I really feel bad if ILGA is going to expel GASA…GASA has been doing so much to bring change in the life of the oppressed gays.”347 And again in May of 1986, Nkoli published yet another editorial in Exit, specifying that he did not “wish to be used as an escaped-goat [sic] to disaffiliate Gasa from

ILGA.”348

Also, as international awareness of the Delmas trial increased in the LGBT community, LGBT organizations across the world offered financial support for the Delmas

22. The response that Voss received when he shared this news with Nkoli spoke volumes about how far the anti-apartheid struggle was from truly embracing the gay rights movement; Nkoli wrote, “Out of 22 of us, only six people would like to get financial help from you, but five of them would not want that people should know [who] they are getting financial support from.” Nkoli went on to express his resentment that his co-accused would not publicly acknowledge getting support from a gay and lesbian organization, proclaiming,

“that I cannot tolerate.”349

That any of the Delmas 22 would decline financial support is remarkable. Most of the individuals on trial were not wealthy, had dependent families, and—having been in prison unable to work for almost two years—were sorely in need of income. Luckily, through the intervention of Caroline Heaton-Nicholls, one of the attorney’s on the case,

347 Simon Nkoli to Jon Voss, April 10, 1986, in Jens Rydström, “Solidarity—With Whom?” 37. 348 Given that English was not Nkoli’s first language, Nkoli may have meant to say “scapegoat,” but misunderstood the idiom, instead writing “escaped-goat.” Simon Nkoli, “Expelling Gasa will Affect Me— Nkoli,” Exit, May 1986. 349 Simon Nkoli to Jon Voss, April 26, 1986, Jens Rydström, “Solidarity—With Whom?” 41.

130 many of the Delmas 22 were convinced to take the funding from LGBT organizations, saying in a letter to Jon Voss, “Money is money, an offer is an offer, and gays must not be denied credit for it.”350

In the months leading up to ILGA’s July 1986 world conference in Copenhagen, the

SHRG filed a resolution to suspend GASA from ILGA for a two-year period. In their resolution, SHRC cited GASA’s unresponsiveness to ILGA’s inquires—particularly concerning their lack of support for Nkoli—as the justification for their expulsion. GASA got word of the resolution and sent Kevan Botha to the conference that year in defense of the organization. At the conference, organizers held a special session to discuss the resolution and decide whether or not to present it before the plenary session of the general body for a vote. Botha himself chaired the session.

During the session, Botha argued that GASA was against apartheid, as the organization’s signature on the 1984 ILGA statement against apartheid indicated, and that communication problems were the reason why GASA had not responded to ILGA’s inquiry concerning Nkoli. He further asserted that GASA as a non-racial organization, citing their

“multiracial work in sport, in its committees, in the advice bureau, and in law reform campaigns.” But the most compelling argument for the retention of GASA in ILGA was by far the fact that Nkoli himself did not advocate for the expulsion of GASA.

Before he went to Copenhagen, Botha had contacted Nkoli’s attorney Caroline

Heaton-Nicholls multiple times to ensure that Nkoli supported GASA’s membership in

ILGA.351 Nkoli said that he did, and this would come back to haunt him. Primarily because of Nkoli’s own advocacy on behalf of GASA, and also because of Botha’s testimony and

350Priscilla Jana to Jon Voss, May 20, 1986, in Jens Rydström, “Solidarity—With Whom?” 41. 351 Caroline Heaton-Nicholls to Kevan Botha, September 9, 1986, in Hoad et al, Sex and Politics in SA, 158.

131 defense of GASA, the conference session decided not to pass along the resolution urging the suspension of the organization.352 Instead, they agreed to send a letter of support from

ILGA to Nkoli, to send a letter against the government’s actions to the then-president P.W.

Botha, and to circulate a petition at the conference supporting the Delmas 22.353 However, despite Simon’s support of GASA, when the petition supporting the Delmas 22 began circulating, Botha refused to sign on behalf of GASA..

Following the vote to keep GASA in ILGA, Exit celebrated the victory and lauded

Kevan Botha as a hero. The headlines range from jubilant—“Victory for SA,” “A Bouquet

After the Vote,” “Gasa Has Stopped Distortion,” “ILGA Vote Was Triumph”—to the downright vindictive headline, “ILGA Gets Dressing Down.”354 In startlingly nationalist tones, one article claimed that Botha had “defended his country and his organization,” by keeping GASA in ILGA.355 Interestingly, the article neglected to mention Nkoli’s support for

GASA, which by many accounts was the only reason why GASA had remained in ILGA.356

Furthermore, later in the article, Botha is quoted as saying that he “cautioned the ILGA about aligning itself automatically with support for Simon Nkoli,” because, “Amongst other charges, five of murder put the case in a different category.”357 In essence, Botha perpetuated the apartheid state’s propagandist assertion that Nkoli was responsible for murder.

One month later, in the August/September issue of Exit, the former GASA chairman

James Willett-Clarke lauded Botha and GASA for repelling international scorn for South

352 “Victory for SA,” Exit, July/August 1986. 353 “A Bouquet After the Vote,” Exit, July/August 1986. 354 See Exit, July/August 1986. 355 “A Bouquet After the Vote,” Exit, July/August 1986. 356 Caroline Heaton-Nicholls to Kevan Botha, September 9, 1986, in Hoad et al, Sex and Politics in SA, 158. 357 Ibid, p. 3.

132 Africa. His mix of gay pride and South African nationalism reeked of gay liberation and racist oppression: “The despised ‘moffies’ have succeeded in staying in a world organization where the respectable straights failed to achieve this so often.”358

Voss, Nkoli, and Caroline Heaton-Nicholls were infuriated by the fallout. Responding to Willet-Clarke’s letter in Exit Voss wrote angrily to Don Dowie that, “If GASA sees itself as representative of SA—the we shall with joy throw them out of ILGA. SA today is an embarrassment to all humankind—and saying that ‘gays have succeeded where respectable straights failed’ is an insult, both to ILGA and to all blacks in SA.”359

Botha’s accusation that Nkoli was accused of murder particularly enraged Heaton-

Nicholls, Nkoli’s attorney, who felt that Botha had manipulated Nkoli to endorse GASA’s membership in ILGA. She took the issue up with Botha directly. In a fiery six-page letter she publicly accused Botha of manipulating and slandering Simon.

“The only reasonable inference to be drawn from your conduct is that you deliberately sought to manipulate Simon Nkoli and his legal advisers, notwithstanding the fact that Simon had been in detention without being convicted of any charges for nearly two years now, but that at the same time you were content to smear him in your effort to keep GASA in the ILGA…Your deliberate suppression of your true design until you had artfully procured Simon’s endorsement of the anti- expulsion stance constitutes despicable and disingenuous conduct.”360

After a flurry of scorn both internationally and nationally and as a gesture to save face, Botha sent a letter to ILGA on behalf of GASA, apologizing to Nkoli the following

October, a month after he received the letter from Nkoli’s attorney. In his letter, he asserted that he had left the ILGA conference with a different outlook and, in a flourish of doublespeak and deliberately vague language, promise that he was “enthused to motivate a

358 “ILGA Vote Was Triumph,” Exit, August/September 1986. 359 Jon Voss to Don Dowie, November 1, 1986, in Jens Rydström, “Solidarity—With Whom?” 38. 360 Caroline Heaton-Nicholls to Kevan Botha, September 9, 1986, in Jens Rydström, “Solidarity—With Whom?” 43.

133 direction for the association in terms of which we could build on the existing foundations we have laid and thereby achieve a far greater identity with the human rights movement.”361 Further, he defended the false accusations that he had made concerning

Nkoli, asserting that his comments were made “in the context that there has been no international suggestion that the trial is conducted unfairly,” and that “ILGA should not pre- empt the decision of the court.”362

While GASA published a public apology in the October/September issue of Exit,

Nkoli himself remained profoundly hurt and angered by GASA’s statements about his trial and participation in the anti-apartheid struggle.363 On August 2nd, Nkoli wrote to his then- lover, Roy Shepard, saying “I have the right to refuse any support…in protest of GASA’s thinking that I am charged on irrelevant issues, what is gay related matters they wanted me to be arrested, sodomy, loitering, public indecent, or what? I am absolute mad to read about me being arrested on “irrelevant” issues to gay related matters.”364 And again on November

2nd Nkoli wrote to Jon Voss, “I am absolutely difficult now for GASA. I don’t want to be used by them to further their own propaganda. They have never supported me…”365

Botha would go on to see the error of his ways, commenting that, “the murder charges against them seem ludicrous…the State has been unable to prove that any of the 22 trialists perpetrated the murders,” but it would be many years before Nkoli and Botha could fully reconcile. 366 As a result of the scandal, Nkoli would never organize on behalf of

GASA again.

361 Kevan Botha to David Murphy, ILGA, October 21, 1986, in Jens Rydström, “Solidarity—With Whom?” 39. 362 Ibid, 38. 363 “Apology for Nkoli,” Exit, September/October 1986. 364 Simon Nkoli to Roy Shepherd, August 2, 1986, in Hoad et al. Sex and Politics in SA, 157. 365 Simon Nkoli to Jon Voss, November 2, 1986, in Jens Rydström, “Solidarity—With Whom?” 39. 366 “Nkoli Trial Remanded,” Exit, October/November 1986.

134 Through its refusal to support Nkoli during his time of greatest need, most progressive gay and lesbian organizers labeled GASA as an organization of the past and an irrelevant supporter of the apartheid government. Ultimately, GASA’s ideology of gay reformism had failed because it continued to support the legitimacy of the apartheid government—a government that was no longer seen as credible in the eyes of the international community.

***

While the Simon Nkoli affair led to most progressive gay and lesbian organizers abandoning the work of gay reform organizers, the whites-only parliamentary elections of

1987 were the final nail in the coffin. During the course of the 1987 elections, gay reformists rose up one final time in support of reforming the apartheid state from within.

In their quest to gain gay rights under apartheid, gay reformists chose to demonstrate their political power by voting for the continuation of apartheid in an election where black South

Africans did not have a vote.

In January of 1987, P.W. Botha surprised the country by declaring that the whites- only elections for the white House of Assembly would be held in May of 1987, two years ahead of schedule. While his reasons for doing so were unclear, his announcement triggered a barrage of campaigning and political organizing throughout white communities across the country.367 The main parties vying for votes were Botha’s own National Party, the Progressive Federal Party—a party that represented the left wing of white politics—the

Conservative Party, and the Herstigte Nasionale Party—the two parties on the right wing of white politics. A fierce campaign ensued, with all parties trying to convince voters that they

367 Robert Schrire, Adapt or Die: The End of White Politics in South Africa, (London: Hurst & Co. 1992), 97.

135 would be the best party to lead South Africa into the future. Given the conflicting pressures of widespread violence domestically and significant international economic pressure to end apartheid, each party had to walk a fine line between guaranteeing the security of white dominance in South Africa and fostering enough reform to appease the international community’s demands. Given this complex set of circumstances, the National Party came out on top. Through espousing a motto of “Reform—Yes! Surrender—No!” the National

Party brilliantly balanced these two competing tensions.368

Liberal white organizations were caught between a different set of competing tensions. For white organizations like the Black Sash, the question of whether to participate in the elections loomed overhead. If they participated in the elections, progressive organizations feared that they would further legitimize the apartheid government’s power but they also feared that, if they did not participate, they would allow more conservative interests to take power. Progressive organizations found themselves trapped in a double bind and had trouble finding a way forward. Ultimately, most organizations took a noncommittal stance.369

Black Sash was not the only organization that had trouble deciding whether or not to participate in whites-only elections. In 1983, when P.W. Botha proposed a referendum on his constitutional reforms, even the UDF had distinct trouble advising white voters on what to do. Leadership split on the issue, with some leaders opposing any participation,

368 Robert Schrire, Adapt or Die, 99. 369 For example, the Black Sash issued the following statement at its National Conference in 1987, which in effect told members nothing about the organization’s official stance: “The black sash will not prescribe to those of its members who are eligible to vote: they will base their decision on the policies and past records of the candidates concerned. During the next weeks we shall continue to work with other organizations who share our commitment to full and equal suffrage, and to democracy and non-racialism in a reunited South Africa.” Margaret Nash, Editor, Reform, Repression, Resistance: Black Sash National Conference 1987, (Cape Town: Black Sash, 1987), 14.

136 and other prominent leaders such as Terror Lekota concluding, ““if they do not vote then perhaps the result would go in favour of Botha.”370

When the elections were announced, the white gay community faced a similar conundrum: to participate or not to participate? Because of its weakened status, GASA did not provide any useful guidance on the issue. In the void left by GASA, Exit newspaper—the then-largest independent gay and lesbian publication in the country that had evolved from

GASA’s newsletter Link/Skakel in 1985—began to take on increasing national prominence and served as a touchstone for directing national gay and lesbian efforts.

In the case of the May 1987 election, Exit’s actions as the new leader within the gay community would prove to be devastating. While GASA’s leadership could be conservative at times, it remained fairly progressive when compared to Exit’s editorial board, which

“defined politics as white.”371 Indeed, progressive queer organizers of the time reviled Exit so intensely that, when the Johannesburg-based Weekly Mail cited Exit as South Africa’s politicized gay newspaper, activists from the Gay Action Group—a small, short-lived organization based in Cape Town—responded with outrage, declaring the designation, “so far off the mark as to lead past outrage to hilarity. Exit is an elitist, sexist paper designed for the large conservative white gay male community.”372 So, as Exit’s influence continued to increase on a national level in 1986 and 1987, the voices and opinions of conservative white gays began to receive increased visibility and prominence.

Nowhere did conservative voices have more power than during the May 6th, 1987 parliamentary elections. In the months leading up to the election, Exit’s editor Dawid

370 Jeremy Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front, 95. 371 Gerry Davidson and Ron Nerio. “Exit: Gay Publishing in South Africa,” In Defiant Desire, edited by Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron, (New York. Routledge, 1995), 228. 372Ibid, 229.

137 Moolman orchestrated a robust campaign to encourage gay people to participate in the election and parliamentary candidates to come out in favor of gay rights.373

Word of Exit’s campaign first materialized in January of 1987, when the front-page headline boomed “Election: Vote Gay.”374 The article following the headline highlighted that the coming election was “particularly important to gay voters...Never before has the power of the community been tested at the polls. Now is the time to do so.” At the campaign’s outset, it was plagued with an underlying hypocrisy. In its rhetoric, Exit’s Vote Gay campaign emphasized that white gay South Africans needed to exercise their right to vote, because it was the only way of influencing the current government to take gays and lesbians seriously. But Exit made this call during a time in which the majority of South

Africa’s black citizens were denied the right to vote and progressive organizations were calling on white South Africans to boycott the upcoming elections. In the eyes of many progressives, voting in the elections validated the continuation of apartheid and the systematic disenfranchisement of the majority of the country’s citizens. For gay progressives, the idea of casting a vote when so many others were not given the opportunity represented a grave hypocrisy that could not be tolerated.

For the most part, Exit brushed off these considerations, and supported the elections unequivocally. Instead of calling for boycotts of the elections, Exit characterized those who chose not to vote as “apathetic enough not to even bother to go to the polling booth to execute their democratic right.”375 The newspaper paternalistically argued that white

373 Davidson, Gerry and Ron Nerio. “Exit: Gay Publishing in South Africa,” In Defiant Desire, 228. 374 “Election: Vote Gay,” Exit, January 1987. 375 “Consider Your Vote,” Exit, January 1987.

138 citizens who could vote had a duty to cast their votes “on behalf of those who cannot.”376

For the most part, Exit dismissed the idea that boycotting the elections could be an effective means of resistance and implicitly condemned those who chose to stay home as wasteful and naïve.377 Thus, Exit upheld the long-held gay reformist belief that participating in the apartheid system was the only way to change it, and countless white gay men and lesbians around the country adopted Exit’s strategy.

Over the next four months, Exit sent a survey to every candidate running for parliament across the country asking them their opinions on gay rights. While most candidates neglected to respond to the survey, a number of candidates in prominent urban areas publicly disclosed their opinions about gay rights. Furthermore, as local candidates deferred judgment to national party leaders, the questionnaires compelled the national leadership of each political party to begin defining a stance on how the government should treat gay men and lesbians.

Out of the four white political parties of the time—the National Party (NP) and the

Progressive Federal Party (PFP), as well as the less influential Conservative Party (CP) and

Herstigte Nasionale Party (HNP)—both the CP and the HNP flatly rejected any support for gay rights. In separate letters to Exit, both Jaap Marais, the leader of the HNP, and Dr.

Andries Treurnicht, the leader of the CP, said that they would oppose “any bill in

Parliament aimed at a better deal for gay people in the country.”378 Following their

376 Ibid. 377 In another article, Moolman wrote, “A number of these voters refuse to participate because they believe non-collaboration within the system is a means of valid protest. Whilst it is their indisputable right to do so, we believe that we have an opportunity now that must not be wasted.” See “Consider Your Vote,” Exit, January 1987. 378 “HNP, CP Say No,” Exit, April/May 1987.

139 rejection, Exit went on to specify “all candidates of both parties…are disqualified from deserving the support of gay voters in the coming election.”379

By February, it seemed that Exit’s strategy began to work. In the February issue of

Exit, Margaret Fourie, a PFP candidate from the Johannesburg neighborhood of Westdene, told Exit, “I am absolutely and definitely for gay rights. Everybody should have the chance of living their lives in the way that they want to, provided they don not [sic] infringe on other people’s rights. The days of witchhunts must please be over.”380 This became a particularly sweet victory for Exit because Fourie’s opponent was none other than Pik

Botha, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. If Exit could effectively leverage Fourie’s support, they believed that they could prompt Botha, a prominent national leader, to declare his support for gay rights. To this effect, Exit noted that in the most recent 1981 election, Pik

Botha only won by about 4,609 votes. According to Exit, “total gay voters in the constituency could be between 2,000 and 3,000,” meaning that gay voters could put a significant dent in Botha’s majority if he did not express support for gay rights.381

Exit’s overarching philosophy that support for gay rights could be separated from support for apartheid became increasingly problematic as the Vote Gay campaign continued. The campaign’s efforts came to a fever pitch in April, when National Party candidates Leon De Beer of Hillbrow and Hein Kruger of Yeoville—two historically gay areas of Johannesburg—stated that they were in support of gay causes.382 For both De Beer and Kruger, this was a bold move that stood in stark contrast to the conservative, pro-

379 What is particularly interesting about Exit’s stance towards the CP and the HNP—both of which were right-wing and rabidly racist—is that both parties were only disqualified when they rejected gay rights. According to Exit’s philosophy, dogged support for apartheid did not disqualify a party from receiving the “Gay Vote.” See “HNP, CP Say No,” Exit, April/May 1987. 380 “Vote Gay, Says Prog,” Exit, February/March 1987. 381 Ibid. 382 “Key Nats Say Yes,” Exit, April/May 1987.

140 apartheid politics of the National Party at the time. For Kruger, support for gay rights did not turn the tide in his favor, because his Progressive opponent, Harry Schwartz, also supported gay rights and “unhesitatingly pledged his full and strong support to the point of promising his assistance with legislation providing rights to gay people.”383 Accordingly, in the Yeoville race, gay voters were told by Exit that they could vote for whomever they chose.

But in Hillbrow, historically one of the most progressive districts in Johannesburg, the story took a very different turn. Leon De Beer’s progressive opponent, PFP candidate

Alf Widman, refused to commit himself to gay rights without consulting party leadership, and ultimately expressed his support only in a private capacity. This left Exit with a difficult decision: should they support Widman, a progressive candidate who stood more strongly against apartheid but refused to stand for gay rights, or De Beer, a conservative candidate who despite his party’s staunch support for apartheid, stood strongly for the rights of the gay community? That Exit chose to support de Beer is telling; ultimately, when push came to shove, the conservative gay community chose to support furthering apartheid if it meant that gay rights would be protected. In fact, according to Mark Gevisser, many white gay men in Hillbrow wanted stricter apartheid regulations in the neighborhood and hoped that de Beer would slow the pace of integration in Hillbrow.384

As the election approached, Exit saw Hillbrow as the most important race in the country for gay people. In the May/June issue Exit ran an article titled “Hillbrow Can Be Key for Rights,” that urged all gay and lesbian people in Hillbrow to vote for De Beer. Given that most people saw Hillbrow as a stronghold for the Progressive Party, a National Party

383 Ibid. 384 Mark Gevisser, “Different Fight,” in Defiant Desire, 62.

141 victory for De Beer, “would be the biggest statement of gay power the country could possibly see.”385 In that same issue, De Beer himself ran an add telling readers, “There is only one choice in Hillbrow, vote Leon de Beer. He needs our vote.”386

Figure 6: Leon De Beer 1987 Election Advertisement in May/June issue of Exit Magazine

Exit’s electioneering paid off, and Exit named the election a “Gay Victory.”387As a result of Exit’s efforts, sixteen representatives were elected to Parliament who had publicly acknowledged their support for gay rights, including seven members of the Progressive

Party, eight members of the National Party, and one independent.388 Additionally, voters elected Leon de Beer as the representative of Hillbrow, an upset that garnered national attention, and in Westdene, Pik Botha’s margin of victory decreased from 72% in the previous election to 57%. In the wake of the election, Exit called the election “a victory for gay people on all sides,” and heralded the election of De Beer in Hillbrow, because “gay voters there proved that they can sway power, even to a candidate like Leon de Beer who

385 “Hillbrow Can Be Key for Rights,” Exit, May/June 1987. 386 Advertisement, Exit, May/June 1987. 387 “Election Was Gay Victory,” Exit, June/July 1987. 388 Ibid.

142 represents an unpopular and repressive party, if he comes out strongly enough in favour of gay rights.”389 According to Exit, the Progressive party would have maintained six seats if they had come out more aggressively for gay rights. In the eyes of Dawid Moolman and

Exit’s conservative staff, they had won a major victory for gay rights in the country.

In the end, the election represented a landslide for the incumbent National Party, swaying the country’s leadership away from reform and towards a more highly securitized state. Progressives across the country lamented the election results as a step backward for

South Africa.390 Overall, the National Party increased its parliamentary representation from

117 seats to 123. The Conservative Party increased its representation to 22 seats and replaced the Progressive Federal Party as the official opposition party in Parliament. In general, the right wing more than doubled its support, which increased from 254,000 votes to 600,000 votes overall.391

Despite Exit’s enthusiastic support of the National Party, many progressive members of the gay community joined progressive groups in their lamentation concerning the election results. At a time when the National Party supported racist policies and increasingly drastic police interventions in township communities, many progressive gay men and lesbians saw the election as a myopic failure of the gay community. Julia Nicol, a prominent lesbian activist in Cape Town, condemned those who had voted in favor of the

National Party: “For gay people to cast a vote in favour of the racist repression of 24 million

389 Ibid. 390 Black Sash called the election: “...A severe blow to all who hoped that the transition to a new and representative system of government could take place through the existing parliamentary structures. We are all shaken at the extent to which the white electorate is manipulated and duped by the National Party government’s control of TV, radio, and much of the press.” See Mary Burton, “6 May Election,” Sash 30, no. 1, (May 1987): 10. 391 Chris Alden, Apartheid’s Last Stand, (London: MacMillan, 1996), 127.

143 people in order to advance what they regard as their on best interests, is a moral outrage.”392 The University of the Witwatersrand Gay Movement in Johannesburg harshly condemned Exit and attacked Moolman directly for his pro-apartheid stance.393

Edwin Cameron, a prominent lawyer at the time and future judge on the Constitutional

Court, also threw his weight against the election of De Beer and condemned Exit for their support:

It is a matter for shame to me and to many readers of your publication that in an active and ostentatious way you promoted the candidature of Leon de Beer as the National Party candidate in the Hillbrow constituency…Exit’s line on De Beer’s candidature in Hillbrow was a debasement of the gay cause and a profanation of its responsibilities to the South African gay community as a whole.394

For many activists in the gay and lesbian community, Exit’s Vote Gay campaign marked a breaking point in the movement. For progressive gay and lesbian activists, working within overwhelmingly white and male gay organizations was no longer an option.

The white gay community’s support for a National Party candidate broke the single-issue coalition that GASA had spent years building. As protests and violence continued to ravage the country, and as South Africa became increasingly isolated by the international community, complacency in the face of pro-apartheid politics and organizations could no longer be maintained.

***

392 Julia Nicol, “Outrage,” Exit, June/July 1987. 393 In a letter to Exit, the Wits Gay Movement stated, “Moolman, in his narcissistic glee, overlooks the fact that 25 million South Africans are denied the right to vote. Among those people are many who are gay—do Moolman’s ‘gay rights’ mean white gay rights? Furthermore, to subordinate all other human rights issues to that of white gay rights is morally indefensible. In his arrogance, Moolman claims to speak for the entire gay community. We take great exception to this.” See Wits Gay Movement, “WGM Stand Clear,” Exit, June/July 1987. 394 Edwin Cameron, “Cameron Writes,” Exit, July/August 1987.

144 During the course of the May 1987 elections, the apartheid government continued to hold Simon Nkoli in custody. One month following the elections, after initially being threatened with a separate trial, Nkoli was allowed to testify, and he had a great deal of anxiety about serving as a witness. 395 Before taking the witness stand, Nkoli had discussed over and over what he should do if confronted about his sexuality. Some of the co-accused thought that he simply shouldn’t bring the subject up, but he ultimately decided that, while he wouldn’t bring it up, he would answer to his sexual orientation if asked: “If the prosecutor asked me, ‘Mr. Nkoli, are you a homosexual?’ I would have answered, ‘Yes, my

Lord.’…I am what I am and I will remain what I am till the end of the day.”396

Simon Nkoli testified on June 24, 1987.397 In total, Nkoli testified for only about seven hours—a very short period of time by the standards of the Delmas trial.398 During the seven hours, attorneys asked Nkoli about what kind of freedom he wanted, whether or not he supported Nelson Mandela, and whether or not he supported the ANC. Notably absent from the trial were any mentions of the actual charges—he was charged with murder for allegedly throwing a large rock at someone, although there were no witnesses to corroborate this fabricated charge.399

In late June, with the question of Nkoli’s guilt still in the air, the 1987 ILGA world conference opened in Cologne. For months leading up to the conference, various

395 Later Nkoli would recall that, “The thought of going into the witness box gave me nightmares months before I was to go in there.” Stephanie Poggi, “A letter from SA,” Gay Community News. 396 Ibid. 397 “Nkoli in Box,” Exit, July/August 1987. 398 One of Nkoli’s co-accused, Popo Molefe, testified for over eleven days. 399 While the prosecutor never brought up Nkoli’s sexual orientation during the course of the trial, Nkoli brought it up himself: “I needed to prove that I wasn’t at a meeting, and so I told the truth, which was that at that time I had been at a GASA event. Only then did the prosecutor start up on my homosexuality, but the judge angrily intervened, saying that he was not interested about who was gay and who was not, and that the prosecutor’s line of questioning did not prove whether I had conspired. I was acquitted, in no small part, I think, due to my gay alibi!” Simon Nkoli, “Wardrobes,” in Defiant Desire, 255.

145 international organizations had continued to campaign for GASA’s expulsion from ILGA.400

At the opening of the conference, it became clear that the ILGA’s frustrations with GASA had come to a head, and there were two proposals on the table. The first, proposed by gay and lesbian groups from Japan, Catalonia, and Basque, called for the complete expulsion of

GASA from ILGA. The second, supported by three Scandinavian gay and lesbian organizations, called for the suspension of GASA’s membership while ILGA completed a formal investigation.

Before ILGA had a chance to vote on the issue of GASA’s expulsion, ILGA leadership made an important announcement at the opening of the July 1st plenary session: Simon

Nkoli had been released on bail after over three years of detention.401 The conference erupted in continuous applause. Jon Voss remembered it as an extremely emotional moment: “Alfred and I cried and a lot of us felt like something important had happened. Not just for Simon and Roy [Nkoli’s partner], but also for the gay community as a whole.”402

Following the announcement, the conference voted to send Nkoli a letter of congratulations and to suspend GASA’s membership while ILGA conducted an investigation.

Ultimately, the investigation would never come to pass. GASA had been in decline as an organization for the past few years, and on July 26th, 1987 GASA’s leadership announced that, except for a small branch in Cape Town, GASA would disband. According to pamphlets published at the time, Botha had been “claimed by burnout.”403 Seeing that GASA was no longer a viable organization, ILGA saw no need to move forward with the investigation.

400 See “Scots Attack SA Again,” Exit, January 1987, and “Now Scots Want Gasa Kicked Out—Again,” Exit, April/May 1987. 401“Bail for Nkoli,” Exit, August 1987. 402Jon Voss to Glen Shelton, July 9, 1987, in Jens Rydström, “Solidarity—With Whom?” 40. 403“LAGO News,” August 28, 1987, in Jens Rydström, “Solidarity—With Whom?” 43.

146 Two major factors precipitated GASA’s fade into obscurity. First, following GASA’s abandonment of Simon Nkoli, most progressive gay and lesbian organizers decided that they would no longer work with the organization. Secondly, as unity among the gay and lesbian community began to break down, internal dissension and disagreement ripped through GASA’s membership. By 1987, GASA’s national structure was in disarray and localized gay and lesbian groups were somewhat fragmented in their political approach.

As early as 1985, editorials had begun to appear in Exit that called for the dissolution of GASA and a focus on local organizing. In September of 1985, one editorial entitled “GASA Should Go,” passionately argued that GASA “has served its purpose in its present form. It has no function any longer, and should be replaced by an alliance of independent organisations.”404 These calls were repeated often in Exit until, after months of arguing, GASA agreed to change to “a national secretariat over locally autonomous umbrella groups.”405 From there, GASA continued to deteriorate, until leaders renamed the organization altogether. For a brief stint in the summer of 1987, GASA leadership rebranded the organization as the Gay Alliance, and they marketed the alliance to community leaders as “a new Gay Alliance across the country, with no top-heavy bureaucracy and new structure for working groups,” but substantively, GASA had disappeared.406 The final death knell of GASA came in November 1987, when the Cape

Town branch of GASA, GASA 6010, officially resigned from the organization.407 With the

Cape Town branch gone, GASA could no longer claim any sort of national authority, and following 1987, mentions of GASA all but disappear.

404 “Gasa Should Go,” Exit, September 1985. 405 “Constitution Opens Doors for Other Groups,” Exit, October/November 1986. 406 “Gay Alliance Formed,” Exit, August 1987. 407 “6010 Out of Gasa,” Exit, November 1987.

147 Conclusion

GASA’s Legacy and the Rise of Gay Liberation

Characterizing the legacy of GASA is a complicated and somewhat problematic task.

On the one hand, the organization’s reformist politics failed both the gay and lesbian community and particularly gay and lesbian people of color. But on the other hand, GASA’s tenacity, verve, and vigor as an organization provided the activation energy for a sweeping set of progressive gay and lesbian organizing to occur. In many ways, GASA’s failure was a necessary step towards the South African gay and lesbian community reconciling with racial justice. In the final equation, GASA’s work and the resulting scandals became catalysts for the South African Gay Liberation Movement, one of the most forceful and compelling gay and lesbian movements in history.

Some of GASA’s legacy was inadvertent. By the end of the 1980s, Nkoli’s trial had exposed a deep divide within the gay rights movement and the leading gay organizations of the time. Through their advocacy, Nkoli’s supporters and ILGA were able to highlight the shortcomings of single-issue, reform-oriented organizing under the apartheid government.

But through spurning the international community to ask what the gay rights movement was doing to fight apartheid, GASA inadvertently catalyzed the reciprocal question: what was the anti-apartheid movement doing to work for gay rights?

Peter Tatchell, a London reporter who worked for the magazine Capital Gay, first posed this question in a significant way. Tatchell had heard rumors about the homophobia that pervaded the ANC, and it worried him greatly: “My worry was that unless leading

148 members of the ANC were confronted over their homophobia, a post-apartheid, ANC-ruled

South Africa might pursue the same kind of anti-gay policies that were common in other revolutionary states, such as Cuba, the Soviet Union, and China.” After meeting with a few

ANC leaders in private, his fears about the ANC’s homophobia were confirmed. Given the strong role that the international progressive community played in supporting the ANC,

Tatchell realized that the only way to make a change in ANC attitudes towards gays and lesbians was to challenge the organization publicly.408

In August of 1987, Tatchell got his chance when ANC Executive member Ruth

Mompati visited London for South African Women’s Day and granted him an interview. He mostly asked her about the struggle for women’s rights in South Africa, but towards the end of the interview, he slipped in a question about the ANC’s view of gays and lesbians.

Tatchell found Mompati’s reaction horrifying. Espousing a common viewpoint of activists within the ANC, she told Tatchell, “I hope that in a liberated South Africa people will live a normal life. I emphasize the word normal…tell me, are lesbian and gays normal? No, it is not normal.” She went on to leverage the classic claim that South African gays and lesbians were all white, and thus faced no real discrimination: “I cannot even begin to understand why people want lesbian and gay rights. The gays have no problems. They have nice houses and plenty to eat. I don’t see them suffering. No one is persecuting them.” 409

In the interest of being fair to the ANC, and wishing to avoid taking Mompati’s remarks as necessarily representative of the organization, Tatchell placed a call to the

London office of the ANC and spoke to the ANC’s chief representative in Britain, Solly Smith.

In a chilling depiction of majoritarian rule, Smith told Tatchell, “We cannot be diverted

408 Peter Tatchell, “The moment the ANC embraced gay rights,” in Hoad et al. Sex and Politics in SA, 141. 409 Peter Tatchell, “The moment the ANC embraced gay rights,” in Sex and Politics in SA, 142.

149 from our struggle by these issues [gay rights]. We believe in the majority being equal.

These people [lesbians and gays] are in the minority. The majority must rule.”

Furthermore, Smith refused to comment when asked if the ANC would repeal the current anti-sodomy laws that criminalized homosexuality in South Africa.410

Convinced that the ANC’s homophobia was as deep-rooted as he had feared, Tatchell went on to publish an article in Capital Gay entitled “ANC dashes hopes for gay rights in

SA.” Tatchell’s article released a deluge of public criticism and protest against the ANC.

Tatchell himself wrote a letter to , future President of South Africa and then

Director of Information for the ANC in exile. In his letter from October 12th, Tatchell asserted “The fight against apartheid and the fight for lesbian and gay rights are part of the same fight for human rights.” Along with his letter, Tatchell sent copies of the articles he had written about apartheid activists—prominently including an exposé on Simon Nkoli.411

After over a month of deliberations, Mbeki responded to Tatchell with a historic letter. In his letter, Mbeki stated that, “The ANC is indeed very firmly committed to removing all forms of discrimination and oppression in a liberated South Africa…that commitment must surely extend to the protection of gay rights.”412 In part because of the interest that GASA piqued in the international gay and lesbian community, the ANC had spoken out favorably towards gay rights.

GASA’s legacy would also be carried on in the form of HIV/AIDS services and advocacy across the country. Even after GASA’s collapse, localized AIDS-related work that was started by GASA continued in gay communities across the country throughout the

410 Ibid, 143. 411 Peter Tatchell, “The moment the ANC embraced gay rights,” in Sex and Politics in SA, 144. 412 Thabo Mbeki to Peter Tatchell, November 24, 1987, in Hoad et al. Sex and Politics in SA, 149.

150 1980s. In 1987, GASA 6010 participated in the International AIDS Candlelight Memorial, which they held at St. George’s Cathedral in the center of Cape Town, and by 1989, GASA

6010 opened a house/hospice where people living with AIDS could live if they could no longer afford their rent—a house that Bishop would visit later that year to minister to the patients.413

By the 1990s, the face of AIDS in South Africa began to shift. The focus of AIDS prevention and research moved away from white gay men and had begun ravaging black communities across the country. 414 While the epidemic had ‘shifted’ away from the gay community in the 1990s, GASA’s work creating resources and challenging the government to consider AIDS more deliberately continued to have an influence on the fate of the disease. While GASA’s work could do nothing to overcome the AIDS that would later come under the Presidencies of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, it laid a foundation upon which the imminently successful Treatment Action Campaign and other AIDS advocacy organizations could later rest when AIDS spiraled into a truly national pandemic.

Perhaps the most important part of GASA’s legacy was carried on through Simon

Nkoli. After his release, Nkoli did not necessarily have an easy road in front of him. On bail, the state regulated his life, requiring him to report to the police twice a day, appear in court once a day, and forfeit both the right to travel and the right to attend political meetings.

Furthermore, he had a great deal of difficulty gaining employment, but thankfully a

413 John Pegge, “Living With Loss,” In Defiant Desire, 307. 414 In 1989, only 98 cases of AIDS had been reported to the AIDS Advisory Group, and 81% of those were among gay men. By 1995, there were over 8,784 cases of AIDS reported, most in black communities. See Mandisa Mbali,“Gay AIDS Activism in South Africa Prior to 1994,” In From Social Silence to Social Science: Same-Sex Sexuality, HIV & AIDS, and Gender in South Africa, edited by Vasu Reddy, Theo Sandfort, and Laetitia Rispel, (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2009), 85, and Karen Jochelson, “Sexually Transmitted Diseases,” in Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 233.

151 Canadian support group—the Simon Nkoli Anti-Apartheid Committee—helped to pay his rent.415

When he was released, Nkoli emerged onto a gay political landscape that had undergone a considerable shift since he was arrested—a shift that, in many ways, he was responsible for. As GASA diminished in importance, a new wave of progressive gay and lesbian organizing began to sweep the country. This new wave of organizing had a very different set of priorities than its predecessor. While the refusal to oppose apartheid had characterized GASA, opposition to the apartheid state served as the foundation for the new wave of gay and lesbian organizing; and where GASA had failed to meet the needs of its black members, post-GASA organizing made serving the black community a central priority.

The new wave of gay organizing began a year before Nkoli was released, when

Alfred Machela—a gay black man also living in Soweto—founded the Rand Gay

Organization (RGO). For the first time since the fizzling out of the Saturday Group, a gay and lesbian organization that catered to the needs of black gays and lesbians came to prominence. By August of 1986, RGO already had 268 members, of which 37 were white.416

When Machela founded RGO, GASA reacted with some defensiveness, seeing RGO as a rival organization. In an article announcing the founding of RGO, Machela did not seem concerned about a rivalry, and emphasized “We are now looking to the future, and are working well together.”417

415 Tim McCaskell, “Queers Against Apartheid,” Canadian Dimension, Jul/Aug 2010, 5. 416 “RGO Growing Fast,” Exit, July/August 1986. 417 Ibid.

152 While still in prison, Nkoli became aware of the Machela’s organizing work. In a letter that he wrote to Gay Community News reporter Stephanie Poggi, he reflected on the change that RGO represented: “Let me tell you without hesitation, GASA is doing nothing except that I heard that they are losing members. Kevan Botha…is nowhere to be seen. I also believe that the RGO has about 600 members. That is great—and much better than the

Saturday Group.”418

By April of 1987, the progressive gay rights movement in South Africa seemed to gain significant momentum with the creation of the Congress of Pink Democrats (CPD).419

The CPD represented a coalition of South African gay organizations that were supportive of both the gay community and the liberation struggle. After formation, the CPD made a statement to the press saying, “The CPD has formed to bring lesbian and gay issues into the progressive movement. We unequivocally express support for Simon Nkoli…Simon’s actions represent the principles of the CPD—notably that all oppressions are related and that all oppressed people must fight together to free all human potential.”420 At the first meeting of the CPD, Kevan Botha and GASA’s leadership declined to join the coalition, of which activist Glen Shelton satirically remarked; “I must give credit to Kevan for his remarkable handling of the situation and a genuine acknowledgement that GASA was actually racist, sexist, and collaborationist.” 421

418 Stephanie Poggi, “A Letter from South Africa: Black Gay Activist Simon Nkoli Tells His Story,” Gay Community News, September 19, 1987, 9. 419 The name was most likely a reference to the South African Congress of Democrats, a white, anti-apartheid organization that was banned by the apartheid government in 1962, See“New Pink Congress Formed,” Exit, May/June 1987. 420 Tim McCaskell, “After three years of detention in S. African jail: Nkoli to testify in Treason Trial,” Gay Community News, June 27, 1987, 1. 421 Glen Shelton to Jon Voss, April 9, 1987, in Jens Rydström, “Solidarity—With Whom?” 42.

153 When Nkoli left prison, the progressive gay movement needed new blood and new vitality—two things that Nkoli could aptly provide. By most reports, the CPD struggled to survive, and while RGO had enjoyed initial success, it had become a top-heavy organization reliant on Machela. When Machela left South Africa later in 1987, RGO quickly fell apart.

Accordingly, in April of 1988, Nkoli founded what would go on to become one of the most influential gay and lesbian organizations in South African history: the Gay and Lesbian

Organization of the Witwatersrand (GLOW).422 GLOW represented a truly non-racial, anti- apartheid LGBT organization that catered to the diverse needs of a multiracial gay community. As an organization, GLOW argued for the inclusion of the gay and lesbian movement into the broader liberation struggle. 423

GLOW went on to serve as a pivotal organization throughout the transition to the new South African government, and the organization made great strides in ensuring that gay and lesbian identities were no longer seen as isolated to the white community. Through mobilizing gay and lesbian people of color, GLOW ensured that the face of gay rights in the new South Africa was multiracial. GLOW accomplished this in multiple ways; most notably by planning the first gay and lesbian Pride March in 1990, which established the gay rights movement as a part of the broader liberation struggle. The 1990 Pride March also served to elevate black gay and lesbian activists, such as Bev Ditsie, into the limelight. Through gaining greater mobilization and support for the black gay community, GLOW kept the gay and lesbian struggle relevant to changing South African politics.

422 Paul Mokgethi, “Because I’m Gay and I Believe,” in Hoad et al. Sex and Politics in SA, 65. 423 Nkoli was quoted as saying, “The charge has been leveled against gay and lesbian organizations that we are divise [sic] in the struggle for a future democratic, non-racial SA. The same charges were made against the women’s movement when it first appeared. That movement is now accepted as part of society…Unless we make the gay cause an issue it is likely to remain invisiblised [sic] and the new culture is likely to be as homophobic as the current one.” See “Glow Formed in JHB/Soweto,” Exit, April/May 1988.

154 When the gay rights movement set its sights on the new South African constitution, the visibility of black gay and lesbian leaders became vitally important. From 1994-1996, the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality—which was headed by none other than

GASA’s Kevan Botha—undertook a fervent lobbying campaign to ensure that gays and lesbians would have their rights constitutionally protected in the new South Africa.

Ultimately, the coalition succeeded in their goal and the South African Constitution became the first in the world to include “sexual orientation” as a category for non-discrimination.

This victory in South Africa’s gay rights movement fundamentally relied on figures such as

Simon Nkoli and Cecil Williams—gay men who were involved in the anti-apartheid struggle—for validity.424 Because gay rights advocates could claim that gay and lesbian people fought against apartheid, they were entitled to ask for protection and equality under the new South African constitution.

***

In hindsight, it is easy to characterize the Gay Association of South Africa and the gay reform movement as myopic. Given contemporary knowledge of South African politics and history, the gay reform movement’s insular focus on gay rights seems out of context and out of touch with the community surrounding them. On the verge of liberation from apartheid, any organization that refused to renounce the apartheid government is an easy

424 Cecil Williams is perhaps best known for his relationship to Nelson Mandela and his involvement in the ANC. In 1960, Williams accompanied Nelson Mandela around the country while he organized the beginnings of Umkhonto We Sizwe, the underground militant wing of the ANC. So when the police arrested Mandela in Pietermaritzburg some months later, they found Williams in the car with him and placed him under house arrest. This involvement has earned Williams the title of “The Man Who Drove With Mandela,” and he is contemporaneously considered an icon of the gay rights movement in South Africa. See “Cecil Williams,” South African History Online, accessed, May 1, 2012, http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/cecil-williams, The Man Who Drove with Mandela, dir. by Greta Schiller (1999; Beulah Films, Amazon), and Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, (Boston: Little and Brown, 1994), 273.

155 historical target for scorn and dismissal. From our current vantage point in the 21st century, it seems as if GASA was always destined to fail.

But such an analysis is in itself shortsighted and overly simplistic. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, single-issue politics was the norm for gay organizing worldwide. Pioneering gay organizations in the United States, Canada, England, the

Netherlands, and many other places put their differences aside in order to build a cohesive struggle for gay and lesbian rights. Everywhere that gay communities came together, there were differences to reconcile, but in most places around the world, these differences were surmountable. In 1951, when Harry Hay founded the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles— the first organization dedicated to gay rights in the United States—he was able to successfully bring together a group of predominately white gay men to advocate on behalf of their own rights.425 Yet again in 1964, when the Campaign for Homosexual Equality was formed in the United Kingdom, a group of majority-white gays and lesbians were able to build a national network of gay and lesbian community organizations. In 1980, when the

Human Rights Campaign was founded in Washington, DC, a group of predominately white gay men were able to come together in order to influence government policy and decisions.426 And over sixty years after the founding of the Mattachine Society, when the pivotal marriage equality cases Windsor v. US and Perry v. Schwarzenegger were argued before the US Supreme Court in 2013, a group of white attorneys and white plaintiffs were able to successfully sue in court for increased rights for same-sex couples.

425 Vern L. Bullough, Homosexuality: A History from Ancient Greece to Gay Liberation, (New York: Meridian, 1979), 15.

426 William Naphy, Born to Be Gay: A History of Homosexuality, (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing, 2004), 55.

156 For over fifty years, single-issue gay organizing worked well in a Western context.

When gay organizers came together in the Western world, they could come together only as gay people. Given that these movements germinated in majority-white contexts, they were not made to confront racial justice as a central part of their work. When the

Mattachine Society was founded, they were never substantially challenged to consider racial justice or to more effectively include people of color in their coalition. Neither was the Campaign for Homosexual Equality made to comment about the anti-colonial movements sweeping the world at the time of its formation. Even through today, accusations of racism that have been levied against the gay rights movement in the United

States have never been able to disarm its political power.

Throughout the 1980s, GASA’s organizers were simply trying to implement models of gay organizing that they had learned from successful and thriving gay rights movements in North America and Western Europe. But in the context of 1980s South Africa, GASA could not get away with the single-issue framework that it had learned from its peers.

Given South Africa’s heterogeneous population and swelling tide of black resistance, a single-issue framework simply couldn’t cut it.

So how then do we judge GASA’s legacy? Do we dismiss them as an embarrassing blemish in South Africa’s past? Do we write off their racial exclusion as understandable given their context? Do we condemn them for their inability to see beyond a single-issue framework? More importantly, how should we then judge other single-issue gay rights movements? Do we also condemn movements in the United States as equally racist, myopic, and shortsighted because they refused to challenge the vast racial injustices around them?

157 In many ways, the story of GASA calls for a retelling of gay history altogether. GASA did not exist in a vacuum, and its shortfalls as an organization were common across many gay rights organizations around the world. In the case of South Africa’s gay reform movement, the politics of race, class, and privilege are unavoidable in historical analysis.

But in homogenous contexts where intersectional politics can be more easily ignored, it is equally incumbent on historians to consider the shortcomings and limitations of single- issue gay organizing.

Before social movements can run, they must learn to walk. In the tempestuous political terrain of the 1970s and 1980s, when violence and political polarization characterized everyday life, South Africa’s gay and lesbian movement had difficulty finding its footing. As the movement began to take its first steps, the ground continually shifted beneath them, rumbling with increased police presence, economic sanctions, violent resistance, and international pressure. In order to march forward as a community, South

Africa’s gay and lesbian movement needed ground on which to stand, and by the end of the

1980s, gay organizers had realized that the apartheid system could never be stable ground.

For the white gay and lesbian organizers who put so much of their time and energy into organizing the Gay Association of South Africa, this was a difficult truth to acknowledge.

But the failure of GASA’s attempt to move forward brought with it valuable lessons for

South Africa’s gay and lesbian community. Emerging from the 1980s, gay and lesbian movements in South Africa would no longer rest on a single-issue, Western framework of reform. Instead, they worked with the anti-apartheid struggle, and through doing so, found higher ground on which to walk.

158 Postlude

Author’s Field Note:

August 9, 2013

In some ways, it’s a miracle that the sign for the Skyline Bar is still hanging on the building. In Hillbrow, so much has become dilapidated, old, broken, shattered. Trash is left in the gutters, the concrete basins of street garbage cans are cracked, and the art deco bank building across the street is now home to Nando’s—a national fast-food chain. From what it was, Hillbrow has certainly been transformed; but the question remains to be answered if it is for better or for worse.

Currently, Hillbrow stands as the center of the African Diaspora. Bordering

Constitution Hill and the site of the Constitutional Court, it is possible to take a tour around the continent in the span of a few blocks. Walk for four blocks and you’ll see Nigeria, turn right and there’s Chad, five more blocks south and you’re in Kenya. Buildings towering above, refugee and migrant families are stacked thirty or forty stories high across the area. At a street level, there are no white people to be seen except for the occasional elderly woman with artificially dyed hair who, for one reason or another, refused to ever move out.

The buildings themselves encapsulate Hillbrow’s radical transformation from cosmopolitan hub to diasporic blight. From the balconies of the thirtieth story, laundry is hung up to dry, threatening to whip away to the streets below in a strong breeze. Perhaps each second or third window is shattered, warped, or simply gone. Grids of broken windows, hundreds of feet high, loom above the street. The neighborhood itself is bustling with minibus

159 taxis, street vendors, and hair salons flanked by pictures of Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Kanye

West. Throughout the neighborhood, a blend of Kwaito and American hip-hop blares from shops, from cars, and from apartments above.

And yet, if you know where to look, remnants of Hillbrow’s queer past begin to peer through. It’s not a past that is known or embraced by those who currently live in Hillbrow; rather, in the frenetic transformation of the neighborhood, it is a past that no one bothered to erase. Most buildings in Hillbrow haven’t seen any renovations in years, and so signs have been left intact, entrances unchanged, and spaces stilted. Walking along Pretoria Street away from Constitution Hill, it is possible to hearken back to a different time in South African history. The sign for “Connections,” a men-only gay bar that started in the 1980s, still hangs in front of what is now a predominately straight black club. Further down the street, at the corner of Pretoria and Twist, you’ll find the Golden Reef Hotel, home of the Skyline Bar.

To casual passers-by, there is nothing special about this particular street corner. And yet, as I stand on the cracked sidewalk, a different story emerges. When Simon Nkoli died of

AIDS in 1998, they named this street corner after him. Banners six stories high were unfurled down the balconies of the Golden Reef Hotel in his honor, and a swarming crowd of thousands of queer South Africans cheered in jubilation. But the sign bearing his name has since been stolen, and the city has never bothered to replace it.

In its place, only a barren post remains.

160 Bibliography

Newspapers and Magazines

Capital Gay (London): 1987 Canadian Dimension (Winnipeg): 2010 Drum Magazine (Johannesburg): 1959-76 Exit (Johannesburg): 1985-88 Gay Community News (Boston): 1987 Golden City Post (Johannesburg): 1967-68 Link/Skakel (Johannesburg): 1982-85 Sash (Cape Town): 1986-87 Sunday Express (Johannesburg): 1967 The Rand Daily Mail (Johannesburg): 1966 The Star (Johannesburg): 1966 The Vancouver Sun (Vancouver): 1989

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