Queering the dorp
Tonight's author, like many of us in the room, grew up in a world rigidly divided along race lines. Under apartheid, it was enormously important to cross the racial lines to find ways of knowing each other, other than those prescribed by apartheid. Political resistance offered such an opportunity and the 1980s in particular, when our author was an undergraduate student, were marked by inspiring political connections across racial lines.
While after 1994, the legislation enforcing segregation was removed, racial divisions proved resolute, as they yet are today. Wherever a spirit of community breaches those divisions it is to be treasured. Our gathering tonight is one such occasion, a tiny, valuable instance. Behind it lies a much larger instance, made of many elements, the circumstances and encounters so beautifully set down in the book whose launch we celebrate tonight, How to be a Real Gay.
It is Graeme's gift to his readers, and to those with whom he breached those divisions, that we are able to share their experiences of what it is to navigate the racially-charged terrain of post-apartheid homosexuality in South Africa, as captured in the notions of homosexuality as 'a white thing', as 'unAfrican'.
To engage these issues, our author plunges us deep into small-town South Africa. The explicative power of this move is perhaps best captured by the poet, WB Yeats: 'In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge.' The passage then goes on to make other points but ends enigmatically in speaking of the small town: 'we can write but one line that is certain, "Here are ghosts."'
For Yeats was concerned with spectral presence; and the challenge of the ongoing presence of the dead and of ancestors, and of archive itself, are some of the threads that are woven into Graeme's deeply thoughtful engagement with the challenges of contemporary gay identity in this setting, in this place at the tip of the African continent, at one end of the power-laden axis of North-South relations.
But I get ahead of myself, and for us to follow these threads, and to appreciate the brilliance of the argument that this book essays we must join Graeme, soon to be christened 'Thembi, the country girl with city style', and the other Ermelo ladies, as Graeme explains, those gays who self consciously perform their femininity, often in hyperbolic ways. We follow their stories: flamboyant, vulnerable, respected and abused. Graeme's ethnography takes us into hair salons - 'saloons' as they are called in the small town - beauty pageants, white weddings and traditional African nuptials, funerals, activist workshops, hospitals and churches...
In the panel discussion earlier we heard a great deal about the rejection of homosexuality; Graeme's study augments that information with a close-up examination of what is accepted, and in what ways. As the book unfolds we explore the success of gay hairstylists in the burgeoning black hairstyling industry, considering their popularity, their flair, their symbolic allure, the meaning of their occupation of a liminal gender position and the edge they enjoy over female stylists, who endanger their clients' hair if they handle it while menstruating.
We attend workshops in Ermelo on how to be a 'real gay' and get acquainted with our constitutional rights. Here the locally self evident wisdom of 'ladies' enters into dialogue with the lexicon of lesbian and gay identity politics, and the notions of a modern gay identity which underpin the provision of sexual orientation in the constitution. We explore how the role of traditional healers, or sangomas, allows gays to insert themselves into culture and tradition in a way that involves quintessentially African ideas of health and well-being as related to the state of the ancestors, and the correct orders of things past and present. We see all of this in a time of transition, of shifting forms of self-understanding and social organization amongst gays, involving not a seamless shift to a modern, global gay identity, but, as Graeme puts it, bricolage and syncretism. And we get a grip on the particular economics of being gay, of the marketing of gay style and skills, accessing donor funding, asserting a right to state employment and so on.
The depiction of the multiple facets of contemporary gay life in the South African countryside is rich and compelling, and it is beautifully rendered. The events, occasions and strategies described are poignant, sometimes painful, often exhilarating, and extraordinarily inventive. In these descriptions, Graeme's origins as a literary scholar shine through.
The taking care that is the hallmark of Graeme's scholarship is evident throughout. So too is the activist commitment that motivates this enquiry, its deep concern with the challenge presented by the strident claim that homosexuality is antithetical to an African identity.
Yet finally, for me at least, the book is most powerful for the analysis that it presents. An analysis that is carefully positioned with the international scholarship on the issues it addresses, making crucial contributions. The analysis is threaded throughout, it accumulates incrementally and at every point the argument builds up in careful formulations, addressing the full complexity of the situations encountered and analysed. It is a book-length argument full of nuance. I cannot begin to do it justice in this short speech.
I only share with you some of the elements that stand out for me.
The first is that the work reveals many instances where same-sex relationships and gender self-fashioning are recognised and accepted in the most local of settings, in forms with long, changing histories of their own.
The second is the extent to which the gay modernity that is the subject of this book, performed stylishly and with reference to constitutional rights, is also lived with reference to tradition. There is not a seamless transition to what many see as the international modern model. As Graeme notes, the strong dichotomy between masculine and feminine, ladies and their gents, was a distinction almost obsessively asserted by the local gays whose lives animate these pages. Performing as ladies, gays situate themselves within the existing gender order. They do not threaten hegemonic masculinity or undermine patriarchy. In part this is about the understanding amongst ladies and gents that difference and inequality is an essential component of erotic charge and sexual passion. But, and as with the work of the gender-liminal sangoma, it is also about keeping in place an order of things with roots deeply and historically African.
And this brings me back to Yeats and the ghosts: in a world where the health and well-being of ancestors is fundamentally linked to the health and well-being of the living, the order of things can not be readily disturbed, it must be navigated with due care. Historically, this was done in ways that reconciled the needs of the ancestors with sexual orientation. How to be a Real Gay offers us unique insights into how that reconciliation takes place today, in the indisputably modern setting of a South African small town, and among the quintessentially fashionable stylists, beauty queens and local celebrities who are heroes of this account.