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South African Gay Pages and the politics of whiteness
Abstract
In this article, I use Gay Pages as a local archive of cultural meaning to think about the relationship between race, sexuality, and identity in a post-apartheid context. Through an analysis of the quarterly magazine series, I focus on how an invisible and unacknowledged whiteness marks privileged ways of both speaking and being heard. I argue that whiteness continues to function as the custodian of the normative in much of South Africa’s public discourse – a post-apartheid racial politics with implications that exceed this particular cultural text. I focus on editions of the magazine published between 2012 and 2016 in order to identify the continuities in normative racial and gendered power. The analysis extends beyond a consideration of the magazine’s erasure of non-white bodies and takes the form of a close reading of the assumptions and racial histories that underpin a number of articles and editorials. My analysis of the magazine centres on several key themes including the interplay between local ideas and transnational cultural flows; the production and circulation of an assimilationist aesthetic; revisionist histories of the past; and representations of pride marches.
... Such studies maintain that the assimilation of queer people by the mainstream requires adherence to dominant heteronormative ideals, such as middle-class propriety, masculinity, whiteness, and monogamy (Chasin, 2000;Puar, 2006;Sender, 2001;Valocchi, 1999). This framework has also been deployed to argue that the contemporary (and only) South African gay men's lifestyle magazine, Gay Pages, follows a similar trajectory (Carolin, 2019;Scott, 2022). However, no historical study on the South African gay press has explored the interface between visual culture and assimilationist politics to suggest that this trend was already salient in the late apartheid period. ...
In this article, I consider a selection of photographs of a man of color from a luxury book of male nudes, Images (1982), aimed at white gay men and published in South Africa by Alternative Books (AB) in the late apartheid period. Given the exclusive association of assimilable homosexuality with whiteness in the national gay press and other homoerotic commodities available in South Africa at the same historical juncture, I propose that these photographs, which interrupted longstanding, racist homoerotic iconographies, elicited experiences of ambivalence (and thus critical reflection) amongst their historical audiences. To this end, I analyze the editorial and commercial content of the newspapers Link/Skakel and Exit for the period that AB was active (1981-1991), anticipating an overlap of readership between these papers and the publisher's titles. More precisely, I discuss the prevalence of the figure of the "good homosexual" and representations of classical (that is, white) male beauty in these papers to plot how apartheid logic was broadly reproduced (and same-sex desire disciplined according to such dictates) in mainstream South African gay movements, institutions, and print cultures during this time, but, notably, not in Images.
7de Laan uses primarily Afrikaans and English, with indigenous languages used instantly; My Desire is dubbed from Hindi to English only. The chapter aims to demonstrate how using English and Afrikaans in 7de Laan and dubbing Hindi into English in My Desire promote ideologies of Colonial-Apartheid linguistic order. The chapter argues that the use of Afrikaans in 7de Laan and English dubbing in My Desire are primarily homogenous. When indigenous languages are excluded in 7de Laan and dubbing in My Desire, it is not just about 7de Laan being an Afrikaans soap opera or My Desire promoting English over indigenous languages. This is also about creating an environment where the Colonial-Apartheid linguistic order can be established and sold to viewers. It is about rejecting the post-Apartheid notion of the Rainbow Nation.
Representations of black-white homoeroticism and sensuality between men of colour in apartheid-era male nude photography aimed at white gay men, which, in South Africa, were exclusive to selected titles published by Alternative Books (AB) (1981-1991), are remarkable yet neglected in queer African studies. In this article, I explore how sexual apartheid was respectively maintained and transgressed in the historical reception of such photographs by two radically different readerships: that is, by censors involved in pro-scribing homoerotic commodities, and by AB's intended audiences. Drawing from historical censorship reports on AB's titles, I propose that the inconsistent treatment of photographs from these publications according to the racial categories of the men depicted is a particularly revealing iteration of selective homophobia and 'offi-cial' perceptions of homosexuality during apartheid. Considering, then, that AB's titles anticipated a historical minority readership comprised of queer insiders rather than homophobic outsiders, I make the case for a corrective by 'outing' the queer and anti-racist potential of such diverse homoerotic images, which rendered intelligible possibilities for intimacy repressed elsewhere in consumer markets that catered to predominantly white gay audiences and that were, in a sense, complicit with the state's whitewashing of male homosexual identity and desire. ARTICLE HISTORY
Drawing from a content analysis of early issues of the gay newspapers,
Link/Skakel and Exit, I map the force with which the masculinization
of gay culture, the Butch Shift, entered the white gay
imaginary in South Africa in the 1980s via transnational
exchanges with comparable print and visual cultures from the
Global North (especially the United States) and related processes
of indigenization. Along with other relevant editorial and commercial
content, selected advertising images for South African gay
leisure spaces invested in macho iconographies are discussed as
prominent sites for shifting white gay male identity away from
effeminacy and toward hypermasculinity in this period. The sissyphobia
(or anti-effeminacy attitudes), misogyny, and race politics
that informed such discourses are also addressed, along with
some polemics against the Butch Shift that appeared in Link/
Skakel and Exit at the same historical juncture.
This article explores the singular case of Alternative Books (AB), a South African publisher of homoerotic photography active in the late apartheid period. While AB's titles broadly engaged established Western aesthetic traditions of the male nude (salient in gay print cultures of the twentieth century), their erotic scenes frequently played out against national landmarks and symbols, suggesting a distinct mode of vernacular homoerotic photography. Given the widespread disenfranchisement of gay men during apartheid, this study considers the affective and political potential of such images for reconciling same-sex desire with national identity, albeit for a limited (that is, predominantly white) historical audience. First, to plot the history of social homophobia and anti-gay legislation in apartheid South Africa, this study considers censorship discourse a compelling barometer of the state's attitude towards male homosexuality during this time. Second, via comparison with contemporaneous homoerotic commodities distributed in apartheid South Africa, accessed from the GALA Queer Archive, this article suggests that AB's visual language uniquely challenged heteronormative associations with the South African landscape to open the nation to queer possibilities.
Post-apartheid South African Young Adult (YA) fiction, like other literary genres, has the power to frame historical discourses of the apartheid era in significant ways. In the case of much post-apartheid YA fiction, this has tended to both reproduce black stereotypes and allow for a particular reconstruction of that historical period (Sibanda 2012). In this article, through a discussion of two post-apartheid YA novels, The World Beneath (Warman 2013) and Cape Town (Hammond 2012), I explore the ways in which these novels have either appropriated the black voice or silenced that voice altogether. The paper also focuses on how these novels engage in a rehistoricisation of white complicity in apartheid policies through the reconfiguration of the role of whiteness in the struggle while simultaneously constructing a non-racialised anti- apartheid communalism to substantiate the revision of apartheid history through a white lens. The third aspect of the paper deals with ways in which apartheid history in these novels is either misrepresented or factually incorrect, thus providing the implied reader with a distorted or factually erroneous history of the country and the resistance movement.
This article considers some of the ways in which black gay men are marginalised within the queer community and have limited ‘visibility’ in mainstream queer visual culture. The formation of a minority within a minority (or the ‘other’ Other) is ultimately what the article sets out to expose. Thus, we argue that images of black gay men are far less ubiquitous than, for example, those of white, male and middle-class gay men. In order to illustrate this, a purposive sample from the South African gay men's lifestyle magazine Gay Pages is considered and critiqued. We argue that the visual mode of Gay Pages gives the impression of promoting a hegemonic gay male identity. This identity appears to be ‘natural’, but is in fact one-sided and stereotypical, as are most cultural constructions and representations. The narrow and limited representation of gay men endorses an exclusive, homogenous and inaccurate portrait of the queer constituency (in the minds of heterosexual and gay South Africans alike) and suggests the question that leads this investigation: If ‘belonging’ is articulated through the consumption of queer culture, what then of those queers who do not fit the ‘mould’ standardised by mainstream gay print media? This exploration of queer visual media deals not only with that which is frequently represented (white homomasculinity), but also, more significantly, with that which is not (black homomasculinity).
This article surveys the interdisciplinary field of whiteness studies and outlines an emerging 'third wave' of research in this international and interdisciplinary field. This article begins by locating the origins of whiteness studies in the work of W.E.B. DuBois, who provided the intellectual foundations for this body of scholarship. We then identify three characteristics that distinguish this 'third wave' of research from earlier studies. This new wave of research utilizes: 1) innovative research methodologies including analyses of 'racial consciousness biographies', music and visual media; 2) an analysis of the recuperation of white innocence and reconstitution of white supremacy in neo-apartheid, post-imperial and post-Civil Rights contexts; and 3) analyses of white identity formation among members of racial and ethnic minorities.
This article investigates the anomaly in apartheid history of the ruling National Party's (NP) fielding a ‘pro-gay rights’ candidate in the Hillbrow constituency during the 1987 whites-only election in South Africa. The NP was aided in its Hillbrow campaign by the gay magazine Exit, which encouraged its readership to ‘vote gay’ in the election and published a list of candidates who were favourable to gay rights in South Africa. The Hillbrow campaign is intelligible when the intersections between race and sexuality are analysed and the discourses wielded by the NP and Exit are spatially and historically situated. The Hillbrow/Exit gay rights campaign articulated discourses about the reform of apartheid in white self-interest and conflated white minority and gay minority rights, thereby contributing to the NP's justification for apartheid. The NP candidate's defeat of the incumbent Progressive Federal Party (PFP) MP for Hillbrow, Alf Widman, was trumpeted by Exit as a powerful victory and advance for gay rights in South Africa, but the result provoked a sharp backlash among many white gay men and lesbian women who organised to openly identify with the liberation movement. The Exit/Hillbrow campaign problematises the singular assumptions that are often made about race and sexuality in apartheid South Africa, and illustrates how political, social and economic crisis can provoke reconfigurations of identities vis-à-vis the status quo.
This article highlights the role of sexual orientation in the social transmutation of space, thereby illustrating how certain landscapes, generally characterised by heteronormativity, are queered by cultural phenomena such as the Pink Loerie Mardi Gras (PLMG) in Knysna. It is, however, not the intent of this article to describe the processes of producing queer space in a ‘celebratory’ tone only, but also to investigate the manner in which hierarchies of race, class, gender and especially sexual orientation are sometimes re-asserted in relation to such spatial practices. The power-laden binaries initially disrupted by the queering of space can, in fact, revert when the PLMG is employed as a mechanism that attempts to control, discipline or even normalise queer bodies. It seems that capitalist role-players (such as corporate sponsors and other stakeholders in the tourism industry) seek to manage the PLMG in terms of ‘how much’ space it occupies and who is represented (and therefore included or excluded from this space). This leads one to critique the supposed ‘Otherness’ of the PLMG, because if it is influenced by prejudiced ideologies of consumerism and cosmopolitanism that ultimately operate in favour of heteronormativity and what it considers to be ‘different enough’, then to what extent can the festival legitimately or freely call itself ‘queer’?
The Color of Sex reveals what happens when race and sexuality meet, when white desire encounters its own ambivalence. As Stokes argues, whiteness and heterosexuality exist in anxious relation to one another. Mutually invested in “the normal,” they support each other in their desperate insistence on the cultural logic of exclusion. At the same time, however, they threaten one another in their attempt to create and sustain a white future, since reproducing whiteness necessarily involves the risk of contamination. Charting the curious movements of this “white heterosexuality,” The Color of Sex inaugurates a new moment in our ongoing attempt to understand the frenzied interplay of race and sexuality in America.
Bringing together new articles and essays from the controversial Berkeley conference of the same name, The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness presents a diverse range of inquiry into the nature of whiteness. Representing academics, independent scholars, community organizers, and antiracist activists, the contributors are all leaders in the "second wave" of whiteness studies who collectively aim to combat the historical legacies of white supremacy and to inform those who seek to understand the changing nature of white identity, both in the United states and abroad.With essays devoted to theories of racial domination, comparative global racisms, and transnational white identity, the geographical reach of the volume is significant and broad. Dalton Conley writes on "How I Learned to Be White", Allan Berube discusses the intersection of gay identity and whiteness, and Mab Segrest describes the spiritual price white people pay for living in a system of white supremacy. Other pieces examine the utility of whiteness as a critical term for social analysis and contextualize different attempts at antiracist activism. In the introduction, the editors not only raise provocative questions about the intellectual, social, and political goals of those interested in the study of whiteness but assess several of the topic's major recurrent themes: the visibility (or lack thereof) of whiteness; the "emptiness" of whiteness as a category of identification; and conceptions of whiteness as a structural privilege, a harbinger of violence, or an institutionalization of European imperialism.
This essay examines gay journalism as gay liberation literature to model a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies towards a historical examination of North-South interactions in theorizing sexual rights activism. The primary archive used is Link/Skakel, the official newsletter of the Gay Association of South Africa (GASA), which soon became a mainstream gay newspaper called Exit. I first describe debates around the term Afropolitanism to describe how the development of a gay and lesbian subculture in Johannesburg was influenced by models of gay consumerism and activism in the North. Next, I examine the controversial legal reforms initiated by GASA without challenging racial discrimination and segregation, reflecting a consumption based identity politics. The direction of comparison from North-South and the exclusivist racial and gendered assumptions were challenged by a ‘queer Afropolitanism’ connecting racial and sexual liberation, articulated first by lesbians in GASA and later, the Gays and Lesbians of Witwatersrand (GLOW). In conclusion, I indicate how the transformation of the Johannesburg based gay liberation movement reflecting sexual, racial, and geographical diversity is not reflected in its associated publications, which degenerate into tabloid style journalism.
This essay presents a critical commentary on the state of gay male politics and community life. Reflecting upon experiences that were overtly political as well as personal, Berube investigates how race gets constructed, seemingly without intentionality but with profound consequences. The whiteness of “gay male” as a social category has significant implications for how the agenda of a movement gets set, what kind of successes and limitations a movement has, and who reaps the benefits from a politics of sexual identity. Here, Berube also encourages the exploration of the many ways that homosexuality is shaped by race, class, and gender. He also shares that whenever he gets to the social category “gay man,” students' response is always the same: “white and well-to-do.”
The Mr Gay South Africa competition is a nation-wide event aimed at increasing LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex) visibility in South Africa. The success of the 2009–2010 crowned winner on the international gay pageant stage has drawn attention to this newly-instated annual event. This paper analyses online queer press sources to offer a reading of what the pageant represents in relation to the role that the media plays and a historical contextualisation of queer visibility in South Africa. It argues that the pageant, although geared toward achieving positive visibility, propagates an assimilationist strategy that ensures the perpetuation of gay identity – as representative for all queer identity – as based on an essentialised and commercialised transnational understanding of homosexuality. The paper ultimately concludes that online representations of the pageant resist the potentially positive development of sexual visibility in South Africa.
What happens when people in societies stratified by race refuse to accept the privileges inherent in whiteness? What difference does it make when whites act in a manner that contradicts their designated racial identity? Out of Whiteness considers these questions and argues passionately for an imaginative and radical politics against all forms of racism. Vron Ware and Les Back look at key points in recent American and British culture where the "color line" has been blurred. Through probing accounts of racial masquerades in popular literature, the growth of the white power music scene on the Internet, the meteoric rise of big band jazz during the Second World War, and the pivotal role of white session players in crafting rhythm and blues classics by black artists, Ware and Back upset the idea of race as a symbol of inherent human attributes. Their book gives us a timely reckoning of the forces that continue to make people "white," and reveals to us the polyglot potential of identities and cultures.
- Rasmussen B.
Black Men as Pink Consumers? A Critical Reading of Race, Sexuality, and the Construction of the Pink Economy in South African Queer Consumer Media
- K Disemelo
Exit: Gay Publishing in South Africa
- G Davidson
- R Nerio
Melville: Associated Business Network
- Gay Pages
A Different Fight for Freedom: A History of South African Lesbian and Gay Organisation - The 1950s to the 1990s
- M Gevisser
Introduction: Defiant Desire
- M Gevisser
- E Cameron
After Noah’s Arc: Where Do We Go From Here?
- M Johnson
New York: HBO Films, Plan B Entertainment, Blumhouse Productions
- R Murphy
Single Gay Dad-To-Be: One Man’s Journey to Become a Father
- J Viljoen
Me Fail English?! That’s Unpossible
- R Bowers
Negotiating Gay Masculinities
- V Reddy
Black Looks: Race and Representation
- B Hooks
Solidarity - With Whom? the International Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement and Apartheid
- J Rydström