Twenty years ago I knew of only one gay person. Apart, of course, from rare characters on the tv screen, who caused me great unease and consternation whenever they appeared during family viewing. They were always white tho - except that one time Sophie Ndaba’s husband lampooned an experience that wasn’t his to perform, of the black amab (assigned male at birth) fem in the hair salon. But at the time I didn’t know things like that. I just knew of this one guy.
The Eastern Cape queer community was thin in numbers - or rather, thin in number of people living full unhidden lives. I remember overhearing a conversation my mother was having with a friend of hers some time when I was in high school. They were talking about a mutual friend of theirs home they knew to be gay who had moved from Johannesburg back to her rural home in the Transkei somewhere. “Yhuuu!”, my mother’s friend exclaimed. “Uzotabaneka nabani ke apho?”. I don’t know if she knew how profound that question is. Having no one to tabaneka with I think is the loneliest experience.
A year later, in my first year at the University of Fort Hare, I came out to a friend, who also happened to be the first out lesbian I had ever met. There were two other guys on campus, she informed me. But they were rarely sighted on account of the fact that they were always in Port Elizabeth, where the social scene was less unwelcoming of queer bodies. Although, my friend didn’t appear to have this problem - but that’s maybe because she bested the dudes at basketball and they had mad respect for her or something.
Anyway, later she introduced me to that one guy I had known of. He was widely popular in Mdantsane where I grew up, having held the title of Mr Ciskei at some point in the 80s. He was possibly equally notorious for a number of reasons related to his sexuality. His house was like a French salon for those of us who ached to be among others like us, others who felt like us, people to tabaneka with.
We were a small clique of boys and men of varying ages, and as far as we knew, we were the only self-identifying gay men in town. We also knew all the lesbians. We spoke a local dialect of Gayle - the Cape gay slang - peppered with words borrowed from its Zulu equivalent, isiNgqumo. I never did become fluent in either - frankly, my isiNgqumo vocab is non-existent, I only know to recognise the language when it’s spoken in my presence. I know a bit of Gayle, just enough to know in which direction to “kala the vas beulah bag next to Alice”. [Translation: check the hot guy next to “Alice” - Alice is a place holder and can be anything really, depending on the context.]
Over the years this small clique grew and splintered and eventually dissipated as we got older and moved on. I joined the nomadic economic migrant hoards and left for the big city, coming back for iBig Dayz like the rest of them, to find that I knew fewer and fewer of the queer people I was meeting. Many of my friends from that period were felled by the HIV wave that seems to have peaked in the early 2000s.
Today I watch with a little envy as my social media timeline floods with young people from East London and elsewhere in the Eastern Cape, expressing their queerness openly, fearlessly. Expressing thoughts and desires that we only ever mentioned in the safety of the salon - hair or otherwise - or in Gayle when in mixed company. I feel an inescapable surge of pride every time a new video from Moshe drops on the interwebs.
We have also come a mighty long way from when I knew the names of every out black gay man in East London, and we still have a way to go. Killings of queer women and effeminate gay men in particular are still a fixture of our reality. But man what a time it is to be alive. To live in a time where the mood is decolonisation and everything in its way must fall, is to live in a time where we begin to decolonise the many varied queer experiences lived by millions of Africans also.
[This is the unedited version of a column that appeared in the Mail & Guardian of 11 March 2016 under the headline "Queer How Far We've Come". The edited published version does not differ significantly from this one.]
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