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African Identities
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Alternative Books in black and white: race and
homoeroticism in South African male nude
photography from the apartheid period
Theo Sonnekus
To cite this article: Theo Sonnekus (22 Mar 2024): Alternative Books in black and white: race
and homoeroticism in South African male nude photography from the apartheid period,
African Identities, DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2024.2331492
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2024.2331492
Published online: 22 Mar 2024.
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Alternative Books in black and white: race and homoeroticism
in South African male nude photography from the apartheid
period
Theo Sonnekus
SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South
Africa
ABSTRACT
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 dierent 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 publica-
tions according to the racial categories of the men depicted is
a particularly revealing iteration of selective homophobia and ‘o-
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 consu-
mer 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
Received 7 December 2023
Accepted 11 March 2024
KEYWORDS
Apartheid South Africa;
censorship; homoeroticism;
male nude photography;
queer archives and markets;
race and representation
Introduction
In this article, I explore a selection of photographs from the catalogue of Alternative Books
(AB), a historical South African publisher of luxury volumes of male nude photography
distributed via mail-order and aimed predominantly at white gay men, that suggest
interracial (that is, black
1
-white) homoeroticism, as well as sensuality between men of
colour (MOC). To my knowledge, no comparable images produced in the idiom of the
‘artistic’ male nude and consumed at the historical intersection of institutionalised racism
and homophobia exist or have been recognised in apartheid-era visual culture. Notably,
insofar as the GALA Queer Archive in Johannesburg – the only non-governmental
organisation in Africa with an ocial mandate to collect and preserve historical records
CONTACT Theo Sonnekus theosonnekus@gmail.com
AFRICAN IDENTITIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2024.2331492
© 2024 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
and other artefacts related to queer life on the continent – is concerned, such photo-
graphs are limited to their holdings of AB’s Images (Swann, 1982) and The Boys in Africa:
The Reverend Toop with the Sounds of Beethoven in the Bush Music Appreciation Society
(TBiA) (Kennedy, 1988). While research has appeared on the role of AB’s titles in negotiat-
ing the separation of gay identity from national (South African) identity (Sonnekus, 2022)
and their recovery of photographs of MOC from the ‘low-brow’ realm of pornography
(Sonnekus, 2023), no in-depth study exists on the historical signicance of the category of
images described at the outset of this article: at some point in their careers, such tableaux
were viewed against the backdrop of dictates enforced by the state and reproduced
within mainstream queer institutions that governed perceptions of same-sex desire along
the colour line, often painting homosexuality as stereotypically white. Thus, could they
have radically transgressed the limits of race and representation typical of homoerotic
commodities aimed at white gay men to evince, for some of their viewers, new or
historically disavowed possibilities, including coeval relationships between white men
and MOC? Such an exploration is, however, necessarily speculative: while most of the
titles published by AB were donated to GALA in 2020 (Brent, 1982–2012), information on
their historical reception by their target readership is not available – following the death
of the publisher, Thys Gree, in 2022, almost all ephemera related to AB, including
readers’ letters, were destroyed before the archive could negotiate their acquisition.
2
By contrast, considerably more tangible, albeit qualitatively dierent, discursive informa-
tion on AB’s titles exists in the form of censorship reports held by the Cape Town Archives
Repository (CAR), produced in South Africa in the late twentieth century: in the period that
AB was active (1981–1991), their titles were almost universally proscribed by the censors
based on their perceived obscenity, which implied the endorsement of homosexuality and
subsequent moral degradation of the (white) nation. Such documents provide valuable
insights into an institution that, compared to GALA’s mission in the present, sought to
discipline or thwart, rather than excavate or memorialise, representations of (and possibi-
lities for) queer pleasure in apartheid South Africa. Thus, while they cannot compensate for
the dearth of historical information on AB’s intended audiences, their treatment of the
intersection between race and homoeroticism reveals something yet unexplored about the
complicity of censorship in eacing modes of same-sex desire that did not adhere to the
white norm: why, for example, in their assessment of Images (Film and Publication Board,
1983) and TBiA (Film and Publication Board, 1989), and on the rare occasion that they
singled out particularly ‘objectionable’ (in other words, homoerotic) images, did the censors
consistently refer to representations of white men exclusively when comparable photo-
graphs of MOC or black-white pairings that appeared alongside them were no more or less
suggestive? The central aim of this article, therefore, is to compare the implications of the
presence of such photographs in an archive that anticipates a historical minority readership
(GALA) to their absence in another (the CAR), where, more precisely, they were stricken from
the ocial record. José Esteban Muñoz (1996) oers a compelling vantage point in this
regard, suggesting that ‘queerness has . . . existed as [something] meant to be interacted
with by those within its epistemological sphere . . . while evaporating at the touch of those
who would eliminate queer possibility’ (p. 6).
In terms of erasure, I propose that the censorship discourses discussed here historically
emerged from but also fed into the (racialised) sexual politics of apartheid, and specically
a ‘bifurcated understanding’ of male same-sex attraction or practices (Elder, 1994, p. 58),
2T. SONNEKUS
which were either visibly policed, publicly scorned, and obsessively recognised as non-
normative, in the case of white men, or strategically silenced and considered situational
rather than intelligible in terms of queer desire, intimacy, or aection, in notable instances
involving MOC, especially African (black) men. Read against the grain, rather than taken at
face value, the reports produced on Images and TBiA, and other titles by AB, are ultimately
valuable in terms of the unsaid – that, insofar as institutionalised perceptions of male
homosexuality under apartheid were concerned, queer interracial desire, as well as
homoeroticism between MOC, was conditional or exceptional, and impossible in the
extreme. To this end, I discuss a selection of photographs from AB’s titles, similar in
their thematics or composition – typically involving some form of physical intimacy
between the models, often appearing in pairs – but with signicant dierences in terms
of the racial identities of the subjects involved, to argue that, from the point of view of the
censors, images that did not trade on sheer whiteness implied a lack of homoerotic intent
and, therefore, held no aective value (what they likely would have referred to as ‘prurient
interest’) for their intended audiences.
Contemplating the reception of AB’s titles not by homophobic outsiders but by queer
insiders may, then, precisely ‘reanimate [such] suppressed histories of sentiment’ (Latimer,
2013, p. 34). However, suggesting that the titles discussed in this article were once
coveted also means negotiating critically with competing traditions in the analysis of
eroticised photographs of MOC or black-white interracialism intended for white con-
sumption: some have considered them necessarily exploitative and fetishistic (see, for
example, Nixon, 2019), while others have refused such catch-all approaches by position-
ing cross-cultural homoerotic images as signicant interventions into ‘an apartheid of
information’ (White, 1995, p. 133). In reading selected photographs from Images and TBiA,
and by anticipating a diverse rather than homogenous white gay readership of these
titles, I make a case for the latter: if Muñoz’s (1996) epistemological sphere is taken as
encompassing the broader cultural economies in which AB’s titles initially circulated, then
any unequivocal claim to racism with regards to these titles overlooks signicant ‘context-
bound’ relations between ‘authors, readers, and texts’ (Mercer, 1994, p. 189), or forms of
knowledge historically consumed beyond the immediate experience of viewing the
depictions of camaraderie and aection discussed here. While there is a tendency in
queer studies to approach commercial media that target sexual minorities with open
hostility (Johnson, 2021), considering, as in the instance above, their habitual failure to
speak to diversity, a libertarian view of the queer market in social or cultural histories –
what Deirdre McCloskey (2007) hailed as a ‘new turn’ in the discipline (p. 83) – could
present stimulating alternatives: in this case, that some homoerotic commodities distrib-
uted in apartheid South Africa were remarkably, albeit imperfectly, anti-racist.
On becoming ‘ocially’ queer: sexual apartheid and censorship
For most of the twentieth century, the apartheid state disciplined South African sexualities
according to the Immorality Act, which perpetuated colonial anti-miscegenation attitudes
and, from 1927 and in various iterations, compiled a litany of illicit behaviours, outlawing
sexual relations between white people and POC and – following a controversial amend-
ment of the Act in the late 1960s – between men (Carolin, 2017). What is perhaps evident
in the banning of (heterosexual) interracial sex and marriage, decreed by the Prohibition
AFRICAN IDENTITIES 3
of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 (Sherman & Steyn, 2009), but not male same-sex practices
is that ‘sexuality [came] to discipline race identication and, similarly, race classication
[came to shape] sexual relations’ (Ratele, 2009a, p. 294). The implication is that depending
on the nature of the perceived transgression and the persons involved, the main perpe-
trator (and the severity of their punishment) was overdetermined along racial lines, not
only by the regime in a top-down fashion but also by (and in) discrete racial or ethnic
communities and their leadership structures.
3
Insofar as homosexuality was concerned, white men bore the brunt of the ‘selective
use of homophobia’ in apartheid South Africa (Serrano-Amaya, 2018, p. 57). For instance,
while it is true that charges of sodomy were brought against white men and MOC during
National Party rule, it is notable that the conviction rate for cases involving white men was
disproportionately higher (Serrano-Amaya, 2018), suggesting that state bureaucrats
placed the onus for ‘spreading’ homosexuality on transgressive white men, which also
accounts for the hypervigilance of vice squads in urban areas in particular – that is, where
mostly white people lived (Gevisser, 1994). Stamping out the supposed transference of
homosexuality between white men had been prioritised to the extent that, when autho-
rities revisited the Immorality Act and initially drafted anti-gay legislation in 1968, they
never once mentioned MOC or lesbians in general, and eectively skimmed over the
possibility of interracial same-sex desire (Retief, 1994). The zeal with which apartheid
ideologues pursued white homosexuality is ultimately best understood as a salient
expression of a Christian nationalist orthodoxy that sought to ‘keep the white nation
sexually and morally pure so that it had the strength to resist the black communist
onslaught’ (Retief, 1994, p. 100): in other words, non-reproductive (in this context,
queer) sex was not only considered anathema to nation-building but, since gay men
were typically perceived as lacking masculinity and, for that matter, military prowess,
white homosexuality supposedly also rendered the state vulnerable to anti-apartheid
movements.
Discourses on (and the actual regulation of) homosexual behaviour amongst some
MOC were intended to meet the same ends but operated via disavowal and wilful
ignorance rather than outright ostracisation. For example, the history of same-sex
practices amongst African migrant labourers in mining compounds on the outskirts
of ‘white’ cities during apartheid, including their interpretation by the state, has
received considerable scholarly attention (Moodie (1988) and Niehaus (2002) are
notable in this regard). Glen Elder (1994) suggests that such interactions were ‘seen
by many as a “necessary evil”’ (p. 59) – one that ostensibly kept African men sexually
satiated in a homosocial environment (and, therefore, complacent) to streamline the
exploitation of their labour in the interests of white capital, and to guard against their
mythical pursuit (and rape) of white women, including the wives and daughters of
white mining ocials. Thus, what emerged in one context and under certain circum-
stances as a ‘white problem’ (Gevisser, 1994, p. 34) was considered a ‘necessity’ in
another, itself racially circumscribed, implying something of an essentialised dierence
between the capacities of white men and, in this case, African men to create and
sustain aectionate or erotic and meaningful relationships with other men.
Disparaging and pathologising as they might have been, perceptions of white homo-
sexuality approximated what could be considered a gay identity, an internal sensibility
that shaped male same-sex desire – including the objectication of masculinity and
4T. SONNEKUS
recognition of homosexual ‘tendencies’ in others – while African homosexuality was
not articulated on agentic terms but rather ascribed to an absence of heterosexual
options (Elder, 1994), which was not necessarily the case: ‘there were also those
[African men] who [had] “found themselves” [on the mines], and who remained in
town, living homosexual lives, rather than returning to either wives or the possibility of
marriage in their rural areas’ (Gevisser, 1994, p. 18).
There also existed signicant overlap between the state’s xation on white homosexu-
ality, their denial of queer African identity, and the perception held in, for example, certain
quarters of African nationalist and anti-apartheid movements that homosexuality was ‘un-
African’ – a pernicious but erroneous notion introduced to the continent via colonial
expansion and that still holds sway and informs discriminatory social attitudes and
legislation (and exacerbated violence against queer Africans) in some nation-states on
the continent (Carolin, 2018; Epprecht, 2004; Wahab, 2016). The circumstances leading up
to and surrounding the treason trial of the anti-apartheid and AIDS activist Simon Nkoli,
an African gay man, are exemplary in this regard. Nkoli (1994) recalls that some of his co-
accused objected to being trialled alongside a gay man, fearing that they would be
lumped into the same category, but also that during his initial interrogation, ‘the police
kept on saying, “You say you’re ghting for the people. But you’re a moe [faggot]. Do
you really think the [African National Congress and South African Communist Party]
would be mad enough to take a moe on?”’ (pp. 253–254). I argue that this oers
some evidence of an entrenched disbelief amongst apartheid’s agents that – in this
context, a militarised or ‘struggling’ and, therefore, apparently authentic – African mas-
culinity could be reconciled with same-sex desire, which I propose can also be gleaned
from historical censorship discourses produced on AB’s titles, not by emphasising
instances of overt incredulity (which do not exist) but by considering their omissions
and inconsistencies.
For the purposes of this article, it suces to say that each successive step in the
development of state censorship in South Africa gave government bodies such as the
Publications Control Board (PCB) and Publications Appeal Board (PAB) increasing and, by
the mid-1970s, total autonomy over decisions regarding what was dangerous and inap-
propriate for South Africans to produce and consume: they homed in on and banned, for
example, a slew of political literature and ‘pornography’, in the strictest sense, anything to
do with sex or sexuality, including ‘lesbian feminist theoretical tracts [and] anthologies of
gay history’ (Retief, 1994, p. 104), which were respectively deemed invigorating to seditious
movements and harmful to the moral bre of the nation (Sonderling, 1996; Stemmet, 2005).
Since censorship discourses were by no means politically neutral or operated outside of
apartheid logic, this also meant that what was considered permissible versus undesirable,
what could motivate some to political action or ‘immoral’ behaviour or was created with
such eects in mind, varied signicantly according to the racial categories into which their
authors, publishers, and audiences could be organised (Human, 2020; Rivers, 2007). Hence,
I must point out that Gree, a white gay man, made explicit that vice squads – who raided
AB’s premises in Cape Town on more than one occasion in the 1980s – as well as the
censorship board ‘knew about him’ (personal communication, 20 September 2020): that is,
knew not only about his role as a key distributor of male nude photography in late
apartheid South Africa but also that his publications rarely reached beyond a white gay
readership and that Gree himself was homosexual.
AFRICAN IDENTITIES 5
The intersection between censorship and broader homophobic discourses in South
Africa in the twentieth century has been established in part: for example, the notion that
(white) male homosexuality was a virulent condition was signicantly recast in selected
reports produced on AB’s titles to suggest that not only actual same-sex practices but also
the exchange, consumption and ownership, or even casual viewing of homoerotic photo-
graphs threatened to ‘turn’ people gay (Sonnekus, 2022). However, no sustained critique
has appeared on the reiteration and maintenance of the white/queer versus black/straight
binary in these or any such documents. A possible explanation and starting point is that the
nudity of the MOC in Images and TBiA was overlooked following a racist and ultimately
primitivist logic: that instead of compromising their ‘dignity’ – which in the vocabulary of
apartheid-era censorship, even in its nascent forms, typically anticipated a white subject
(Sanders, 2006) – the availability of their bodies for scrutiny was perceived as natural rather
than contrived, meaning that the photographs were not necessarily created with titillation
in mind and, therefore, pornographic. A similar trend can be observed in the censorship of
depictions of female nudity on music album covers during apartheid: the breasts of white
women and western women of colour had to be obscured for the sake of modesty, while
comparable images of (South) African women were not subject to such restrictions and
‘never declared undesirable’, with the censors claiming that, rather than motivated by
racism, such decisions accommodated the supposed indierence towards nudity amongst
some indigenous audiences (Drewett, 2008, p. 125).
The implication is that the censors ‘read through the eyes of an imagined yet thought
of as a realistic reader’ (Matteau, 2012, p. 87), which, by the 1980s, following pressure from
South African intelligentsia to reform the PCB and PAB, also meant that publications
deemed to possess some academic or artistic merit and that targeted discerning or likely
rather than everyday consumers (and were, therefore, more widely distributed) could
theoretically evade charges of undesirability, which most of AB’s titles did not. Historical
censorship discourse ultimately reveals more about the censors themselves and their
perceptions – in this case, of what a homogenised white gay audience would or would not
have found erotic – than about modes of reception on the ground: considering that they
were predominantly white and male and aligned with a conservative Christian nationalist
tradition (Stemmet, 2005), the thoroughness with which they critiqued photographs of
nude white men from AB’s titles but ignored images of black-white interracialism and
MOC, in general, speaks to the specic anxieties of the political elite that such representa-
tions were (like the ‘gay menace’ itself) internal and exclusive to the category of white
masculinity and, therefore, objectied them, the ‘architects and practitioners’ of apartheid
(Elder, 1994, p. 62). A passage from the report on Photographs of Guys (PoG) (Senekal,
1983), which featured white models exclusively and was declared undesirable in 1984
following Gree’s unsuccessful appeal to the PAB, for example, attempted to thwart but
nonetheless exposed their hierarchical thinking and narcissistic concerns about maintain-
ing reverence for white heteropatriarchy:
The tradition which celebrates the female form is one of long standing and the photogra-
pher’s various objectives have become reasonably well established. The photographer’s
interest in the male nude is comparatively recent and the nature of his intention is yet to
be determined . . . we could be accused of male chauvinism in thinking that, unless it is
superbly treated, the study of the male nude is open to the possibility of homosexual interest.
(Film and Publication Board, 1984)
6T. SONNEKUS
It is then worth revisiting and re-evaluating my earlier suggestion that the censors read
Images and TBiA with a primitivist slant to propose that if representations of MOC or
interracial aection in this context were not ocially undesirable, then they were, by
implication, also not homoerotic. Taken together and traced as far back as the rst
instance that a publication by AB appeared before the PCB in 1982 (Film and
Publication Board, 1982), the reports on the publisher’s titles were consistent in that to
be thought vulnerable to ‘homosexual interest’ – phrased in another instance as ‘lust
provoking [sic] to homosexual males’ (Film and Publication Board, 1989) – individual
photographs had to include one or a combination of the following elements: the ‘exces-
sive exposure [of] the nude male genitalia’ (Film and Publication Board, 1985), that is, full
frontal nudity, and ‘suggestive poses’ (Film and Publication Board, 1984), including, in the
case of duos and groups, any form of touch, even nude male bodies in close proximity.
However, they were remarkably inconsistent in that scenes which technically met such
criteria but included (or featured only) MOC were never once singled out and discussed at
length as similarly available to queer interpretations.
For instance, an image from PoG depicts two nude white men sitting back-to-back,
their nudity partially obscured, arms entwined, pulling away from one another, their sts
clenched, straining against the tension. Later, the same models are shown playfully
sparring, backlit, resisting so-called ‘excessive exposure’ (Figure 1). In both cases, the
censors claimed to have seen through an elaborate ruse on the part of the photographer
and publisher – a strategy common in gay visual cultures of the twentieth century (see, for
example, Aletti, 2007) – to conceal their homoerotic intentions by appealing to (hetero-
sexual) masculinity or healthy male competition, their suspicions conrmed by the solo
image of a reclining nude white man (his penis clearly visible in this instance) that appears
towards the end of the same title (Figure 2) (Film and Publication Board, 1984). A pair of
photographs from Images are compositionally similar to the two images of same-sex
intimacy mentioned above, but, in this case, one of the models is white, the other a MOC
(Figures 3 and 4) – they, however, were never mentioned, even in passing (Film and
Publication Board, 1983). Such oversights are also notable in that there was a tendency
amongst the censors, as in the example from PoG above, to seek out evidence of
‘contamination’ by pointing out homoerotic provocations in other photographs from
the publication under immediate review: in Images, the MOC featured in the tableaux
reproduced here reappears elsewhere several times, photographed alone and in consid-
erably more revealing (that is, full frontal) orientations (see, for example, Figure 5).
Signicant cross-referencing also occurred between dierent reports on AB’s titles to
occasionally assert that a precedent had been set for undesirability: in their assessment of
TBiA, the censors declared the publication obscene, explicitly citing the document pro-
duced on PoG several years earlier as instructive in their decision (Film and Publication
Board, 1989). This connection is plain in that the two accounts were meticulous in the
same manner, with the censors going to some lengths to list and scrutinise individual
pages (in unpaginated titles) that included photographs they deemed categorically
obscene. However, the conspicuous dierence between these two publications, that
one features MOC but the other, PoG, does not, is telling in that only images in which
MOC were absent were itemised in the case of TBiA. A section from this document, for
example, reads: ‘Aggravating are the photographs which suggest homosexuality [on]
pp. 65 (Figure 6), 66, 69, 70, 73’ (Film and Publication Board, 1989). Not incorporated
AFRICAN IDENTITIES 7
here, for instance, was an image of two nude MOC (Figure 7), a close-up detail of a tableau
on the verso page that shows a diverse group of models bathing in a river, carefully
applying mud to one another’s bodies (Figure 8), visible here on the bicep and shoulder of
the gure on the left. Nor did they seize upon the numerous images of black-white
interracialism from the publication, including a scene in which a white model binds the
injured leg of his companion, both in violation of full frontal nudity (Figure 9).
It could be said that what the censors understood correctly was that homoeroti-
cism is something that happens in the interaction between the reader and the
photograph. Yet, what they never acknowledged but put into practice was an
approach that insisted on racial symmetry in the viewer-image dynamic (and within
the image itself, considering, for example, Figures 1 and 6) for this process to occur.
Thus, they constantly reinforced the notion salient elsewhere in the ideologies of
sexual apartheid that queer identities and desires – and, in this case, the consump-
tion of representations of beautiful male bodies to perform such identities and
desires – were, quite literally, in the case of the censorship reports reviewed here,
ineable in instances where the boundaries of whiteness were crossed. The
Figure 1. Marius Senekal, black-and-white photograph from Photographs of Guys (Senekal, 1983).
Reproduced courtesy of Alternative Books.
8T. SONNEKUS
following section of this article, therefore, oers a corrective to such silences by
‘outing’ the queer and anti-racist potential of the category of photographs from AB’s
titles historically disavowed by apartheid bureaucrats: indeed, ‘[t]o be out, in com-
mon gay parlance, is precisely to be no longer out; to be out is to be nally outside
of exteriority and all the exclusions and deprivations such outsiderhood imposes. Or,
put another way, to be out is really to be in – inside the realm of the visible, the
speakable, the culturally intelligible’ (Fuss, 1991, p. 4).
Recognising kin in Images and TBiA
Questions of presence and absence, of representations and their politics, continue to be
central to studies on print and visual cultures aimed at gay men that situate race and racism
as crucial factors in determining who (or what) is rendered visible, who (or what) remains
invisible, and in whose interest such decisions are made. The main thrust of contemporary
queer archival practices in Africa, therefore, has been to excavate, memorialise, and make
public historical narratives and images of gender non-conformity and same-sex desire (but
also to produce new ones) in which POC are central, whether at the level of representation
or on their production and consumption ends (see, for example, de Araújo & Roy, 2022;
Macharia, 2015; Migraine-George & Currier, 2016; Sizemore-Barber, 2017).
In post-apartheid South Africa, for instance, much of the archival and activist
work of GALA, founded in 1997, has focused on personas, movements, and com-
munities historically marginalised within mainstream (white-dominated) queer insti-
tutions in South Africa. The implication is not that the archive has failed to
recognise the value of or collect material apparently incompatible with such
Figure 2. Marius Senekal, black-and-white photograph from Photographs of Guys (Senekal, 1983).
Reproduced courtesy of Alternative Books.
AFRICAN IDENTITIES 9
reparative agendas. Alongside AB’s titles, they hold several collections of commer-
cial books and magazines (as well as loose photographs and photo sets) of the
male nude dating from the apartheid period,
4
which, in terms of their provenance,
acquisition, and content, largely reect white self-interests in the market for
homoerotic commodities – that is, they were donated to the archive by white
gay men variously involved in their consumption, distribution and importation, and
domestic production.
Thomas Sloss (2019) has oered a singular in-depth history of these collections,
attributing the few occasions that MOC were featured in them to tokenism. While AB’s
titles do not form part of Sloss’ exploration (since GALA acquired them after the study had
been completed), I take issue with the prospect that their depictions of racial diversity
would have drawn a similar critique. To suggest that they merely pandered to multi-
culturalism is ultimately out of touch with the oscillation between anxiety and compla-
cency historically associated with many white South Africans (Ratele, 2009b), not to
mention the relatively secure position of white gay men (and representations of
Figure 3. Ian Swann, black-and-white photograph from Images (Swann, 1982). Reproduced courtesy
of Alternative Books.
10 T. SONNEKUS
whiteness) in queer institutions in South Africa in the late twentieth century. The impulse
towards sentimental expressions of ‘rainbowism’ in selected forms of South African
popular visual culture and even comparatively critical representations of POC by some
white visual artists, which have, for example, been described as vindicating their produ-
cers rather than the subjects they depict (Enwezor, 1997), are primarily post-apartheid
phenomena intended to jettison historical complicity with racism or to ‘rehabilitate’
whiteness (Gqola, 2001). Thus, is it not remarkable that such photographs gained traction
with their target market, or existed at all, considering that they were created and
consumed in the late apartheid period against, for instance, the backdrop of the declara-
tion of successive states of emergency that reinforced white fears of ‘black encroach-
ment’? Rather than dismiss them as evidence of the hegemony of the white homoerotic
gaze and stop at that, is it not more productive to propose that they nevertheless resisted
perpetuating ‘isolated ghettos of consciousness’ (White, 1995, p. 133), including those
historically created in South African mass media, whether straight or queer?
Figure 4. Ian Swann, black-and-white photograph from Images (Swann, 1982). Reproduced courtesy
of Alternative Books.
AFRICAN IDENTITIES 11
Apartheid-era print cultures, for example, were racially circumscribed in line with the
broader decrees of segregation to the extent that the imaginaries that emerged from
them became dened (that is, restricted) on the same terms. In other words,
[t]he popular press extended the division between racial groupings to ‘leisure’ so that even
publications that were not overtly ‘political’ contributed to the general sense of separate
interest. The most successful popular magazines, whether targeted at [black] or white read-
erships [for example], focused their content on the lives of their readers as if contained in
racial exclusivity. (Viljoen, 2014, p. 256 [n6])
The only gay newspapers with national distribution to appear consistently in South Africa
in the twentieth century, Link/Skakel (L/S) (May 1982-May 1985) and its successor, Exit,
which is still active and was rst published in July 1985, while ostensibly founded to
formalise a queer rather than overtly racialised imagined community, did precisely that. L/
S emerged concurrently with (and as the mouthpiece of) the rst ocial national gay
organisation in South Africa, the Gay Association of South Africa (GASA), itself historically
Figure 5. Ian Swann, black-and-white photograph from Images (Swann, 1982). Reproduced courtesy
of Alternative Books.
12 T. SONNEKUS
white-dominated and largely silent on the ongoing oppression of POC, let alone queer
POC, under apartheid, which was still the case with the founding of Exit three years later.
The concept of intersectional shifting is instructive here: GASA and the South African gay
press were at once complicit with the whitewashing of gay male identity by the state and
voiced in reaction to the disproportionate persecution of white homosexuality, which
they had recast as an exclusive category, compromising for the power decit of queerness
by wielding white privilege and racism. Editorial and commercial content in L/S and Exit
related to queer South Africans not dened as white, male, urban, and middle-class – who
comprised active, albeit limited, segments of their readerships (Batra, 2016) – was, for
example, at best, cursory. Similarly, depictions of beautiful white men abounded, while
comparable images of MOC remained virtually non-existent in these publications in the
1980s and early 1990s (Sonnekus, 2023).
One would also be hard-pressed to nd any buoyant discourses on interracial relation-
ships (or even platonic black-white friendships) in historical issues of these publications.
What was available painted such interactions as unsustainable, given, apparently, ‘the
mutual distrust between the races’ (Deelman, 1984, p. 17), exploitative, and inequitable,
citing, for example, that mixed same-sex relationships often evaded stigmatisation by
emulating employer-employee (in other words, white-black) dynamics based on servitude
Figure 6. Andrew Kennedy, black-and-white photograph from The Boys in Africa (Kennedy, 1988).
Reproduced courtesy of Alternative Books.
AFRICAN IDENTITIES 13
(Soweto’s step-children, 1982). The white partners in such relationships were also some-
times labelled ‘dinge queens’ by other white gay men (Gevisser, 1994), relegating inter-
racial same-sex desire to straight-forward fetishism and suggesting the degradation of
white homosexuality itself. Considered alongside the dearth of idealised illustrations or
photographs of MOC or interracialism in these papers, the opportunities for their pre-
dominantly white gay audiences to consume more coeval possibilities, incorporating
them into and expanding the racial parameters of desire and solidarity, were severely
limited. It is a moot point to suggest that where such scenarios were thinkable, they oer
mere evidence of symbolic (meaning impoverished) versions of actual anti-racism: by the
1980s, there existed – compared to two decades earlier and before some white gay
communities closed ranks following the Immorality Act Amendment – little interracial
contact in, for example, gay leisure spaces where the decrees of segregation were
historically outed (Gevisser, 1994), suggesting that ‘crossing the colour line’ was, to
some extent, necessarily a project for the imagination in this context.
Figure 7. Andrew Kennedy, black-and-white photograph from The Boys in Africa (Kennedy, 1988).
Reproduced courtesy of Alternative Books.
14 T. SONNEKUS
While their titles did not include cross-cultural homoerotic images across the board, AB
sold over 25,000 books in South Africa (and over 30,000 internationally) between 1981
and 1991 and amassed a mailing list of approximately 5,000 readers or ‘subscribers’, most
of whom were white gay men (Gree, personal communication, 17 June 2021). Gree
suggested that, domestically, Images and TBiA sold well over their ‘limited’ print runs of
1,500 copies each, nominal numbers displayed in the front matter of these titles in an
(ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to evade censorship by assuaging the state’s anxieties
about the mass distribution of undesirable material (personal communication,
17 June 2021). Thus, where diverse depictions of the male nude were commercially
successful with a white gay readership in apartheid South Africa, I propose that any
unambiguous claim to their securing rather than destabilising the white norm would be
ahistorical (as if they did not jar with the political climate and broader popular cultures in
which they circulated
5
) and, perhaps most crucially, misplaced: were conservative institu-
tions, including government bodies such as the PCB and PAB, that sought to usurp the
queer market (and, in this case, thwart the distribution of scarce resources for imagining
racial solidarity) not – as McCloskey (2007) phrases it – the actual ‘enemies’ in this regard?
A way forward is to consider the overlap between postwar segregation in the United
States (US) and South African apartheid (as well as similarities between the mobilisation
for gay rights in these contexts) to oer a transnational historical perspective on the
consistent inuence of institutionalised homophobia and racism on the development of
western gay print cultures in the twentieth century, and how such discourses were
negotiated by their intended readerships. Tracy D. Morgan (1996), for example, proposes
that the contentious (and sporadic) presence of MOC in queer-coded physique magazines
in the US in the 1950s and 1960s, the foremost antecedents of later iterations of homo-
erotic photography, including AB’s titles,
6
is evidence of how culturally dominant
Figure 8. Andrew Kennedy, black-and-white photograph from The Boys in Africa (Kennedy, 1988).
Reproduced courtesy of Alternative Books.
AFRICAN IDENTITIES 15
notions – in this case, of the supposed hypermasculinity and ferocious (hetero)sexual
appetites of African-American men that precluded the possibility of black homosexuality
(reiterated at a vernacular level in the apartheid imaginary) – informed the overwhelming
whiteness of such publications: in other words, ‘[t]he inclusion of “too many” photographs
of Black men might run the risk of dehomosexualizing the publication completely, while
too few might draw attention to the magazine’s queerness’ (p. 292), thus exposing their
readers, mostly white gay men, to severe homophobic persecution.
7
Alternatively, the
historical near-absence of images of MOC in ‘muscle’ magazines could be understood as
a prominent expression of what I referred to earlier as intersectional shifting: white
queerness was already a much-maligned category in this context, meaning that it
might have been ‘even worse for someone white to be queer and reading interracial
publications in a segregated culture’ [emphasis added] (Morgan, 1996, p. 291).
It does not follow that such publishing and reading practices cannot be conceived of
on agentic terms: apart from the suggestion that they operated in white self-interest as
Figure 9. Andrew Kennedy, black-and-white photograph from The Boys in Africa (Kennedy, 1988).
Reproduced courtesy of Alternative Books.
16 T. SONNEKUS
foils for same-sex desire, it is also possible that the bodies of MOC were fetishised by white
gay men based on the racist perceptions of machismo that streamlined their conditional
inclusion in the rst place. Yet, to posit that, when it came to such photographs or images
of black-white interracialism, their reception was historically contingent on these two
options exclusively is to neglect certain aesthetic traditions established in mid-twentieth
century physique magazines that profoundly aected how their readers related to their
own homosexuality, other gay men, and nascent notions of a collective identity, particu-
larly at a time when prominent proto-gay rights (‘homophile’) organisations in the US
were almost entirely white-run (Peacock, 2016). What set physique magazines (at times
covertly) aimed at gay men radically apart from their straight counterparts, when ‘a mere
glance between men was dangerous’ (Johnson, 2021, p. 8), was that they innovated the
commercial publication of illustrations and photographs of duos and groups of men
posing for the viewer but also gazing at one another, performing mundane domestic
tasks together, and often touching, even holding hands (see, for example, Barriault, 2009;
Bronski, 1992; Howard, 2001; Krauss, 2014).
David K. Johnson (2021), who refers to the exchange of physique magazines and the
correspondence between their readers (and between their editors and audiences) in the
mid-twentieth century as a signicant expression of early ‘consumer activism’ in the US,
suggests that the shared consumption of such tableaux, perhaps more so than solo
photographs of beautiful men, validated same-sex desire and relationships for their readers,
many of whom experienced feelings of shame and isolation, or found it dicult to establish
sympathetic social networks on the ground. In other words, they played an unprecedented
role in formalising what is commonly referred to in scholarship on print cultures as an
imagined community and remained prominent in various iterations of male nude photo-
graphy aimed at gay men throughout the twentieth century, counting among them AB’s
titles. The implication, whether considered against the legacies of Jim Crow or South African
apartheid, where legitimate citizenship, in general, and integration into sexual minority
movements, in particular, were subject to whiteness, is that the consumption of images of
‘racial reconciliation, even the most naive, apparently historically superseded or otherwise
easily defamed, should be apprehended not only for the deformations of their social-
historical origins but for the redemption they demand’ (Cutrone, 2000, p. 252).
Put dierently: since twentieth-century gay print and visual cultures were ‘an impor-
tant means of saying “other gays exist”’ (Mercer, 1994, p. 136),
8
then the photographs
from Images and TBiA that are the subject of this article could be considered radical in that
they insisted, in deance of the erasure of black homosexuality and interracial intimacy
and other ‘ocial’ and in-group racisms, that recognising kin across the racial divide was
not impossible. Returning critically to such images with this premise in mind means
recalling from obscurity, albeit imaginatively, their potential for (but also shortcomings
in terms of) aecting homoerotic and anti-racist interpretations on the part of some of
their historical consumers. Rather than merely a formal experiment in contrast and
symmetry, could the men depicted in the photograph reproduced earlier have met,
from the point of view of AB’s audiences, in a (near) kiss (Figure 4)? Was the depiction
of their ‘strife’ in another instance (a strategy of deection, to begin with) not signicant in
that the gures were nevertheless touching (Figure 3)? Since AB’s readership was also
initiated into an aesthetic tradition that blended voyeurism with the ‘libidinous plot lines’
of multigure studies (Howard, 2001, p. 210), could the remarkable scene of camaraderie
AFRICAN IDENTITIES 17
from TBiA mentioned earlier (Figure 9) have set in motion perceptions of the development
of a romance, culminating in an intimate depiction of this duo towards the end of the
same title (Figure 10), at a stage when AB’s publications had indeed evolved narratives?
At a glance then, the hunting safari staged by TBiA in the former province of Natal in
South Africa resembles the frontier fantasies typical of western quest or adventure
literature, which – whether in the form of novels, popular magazines, comic books, or so-
called ‘photo stories’ – historically propelled the impulse amongst white boys and men to
experience rst-hand, or vicariously, thrilling encounters with the ‘untamed’ peoples,
animals, and topographies of Africa as a means to recapture a formerly virile mode of
white masculinity, ripe for homoerotic interpretations (see, for example, Waugh, 1993),
supposedly lost to the comforts of modernity. And I concede that TBiA does backslide into
primitivism to some extent, especially in the inclusion of some gratuitous photographs of
semi-nude, ‘traditional’ Zulu women – possibly an attempt on the part of the publisher to
Figure 10. Andrew Kennedy, black-and-white photograph from The Boys in Africa (Kennedy, 1988).
Reproduced courtesy of Alternative Books.
18 T. SONNEKUS
attenuate the homoeroticism of the publication by appealing to the censors’ assumptions
about the innocuous nudity of some African peoples, shifting the title towards ‘ethno-
graphy’ and away from ‘pornography’,
9
inviting critical feminist analyses that cannot be
fully realised within the connes of this article. Something, however, remains to be said
about the ultimately ambiguous treatment of apartheid-era constructs of race, gender (in
this case, masculinity), and same-sex desire in TBiA, as well as the colonialist tropes that it
intentionally or unintentionally resisted rather than reiterated, as in the example above.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, numerous modes of popular culture that re-
packaged Africa for white consumers in and beyond the continent, for example, char-
acteristically scripted MOC as porters and other variations on the ‘noble savage’, literally in
service to the white hero’s journey of self-actualisation (see, for example, Pieterse, 1992);
as bestial gures intended to satiate a taste for exoticism, danger, and illicit sex; or not at
all, as embedded into the vast ‘emptiness’ of the landscape against which white mascu-
linity alone is linked to action, sovereignty, and desire in an ‘Africa without Africans’ (Del
Mar, 2017, p. 79). Thus, while perfect harmony between the authorial intentions and
reception of this title cannot be guaranteed, the deliberate decision to include a model
from every racial category institutionalised by the former regime – that is, African,
coloured, Indian, and white – in the coterie of men that gured as protagonists in TBiA
(Gree, personal communication, 17 June 2021), must be treated as an unprecedented
and productive historical interruption in the South African white gay imaginary: since
from the outset, they are shown collaborating in a non-hierarchical manner, sharing
meals, cabins, and beds, I propose that TBiA not only expanded the iconography of
aspirational male same-sex desire beyond whiteness but also envisioned cross-cultural
solidarities and friendships, vivid in, for example, Figure 11, which together refused
a status quo that typically deemed such intimacies in the apartheid state untenable or
‘culturally doomed’ (Rees-Roberts, 2006, p. 275).
Figure 11. Andrew Kennedy, black-and-white photograph from The Boys in Africa (Kennedy, 1988).
Reproduced courtesy of Alternative Books.
AFRICAN IDENTITIES 19
Conclusion
In this article, I oered parallel histories of the reception of selected photographs of MOC and
black-white interracialism in apartheid South Africa by two conicting white readerships,
proposing that they respectively upheld sexual apartheid and potentially released notions of
gay male identity and community from the logic of racial segregation. In the rst instance,
I presented a historical and theoretical framework for sexual apartheid and the inconsistent
admonishment of male homosexuality in apartheid South Africa, consulting several censorship
reports produced on AB’s titles, including Images and TBiA, to make explicit the streamlining of
the cultural synonymy of whiteness and queerness (and simultaneous splitting of blackness
from same-sex desire and identity) in such iterations of state-sanctioned homophobia. Second,
with the commercial success of AB’s remarkably diverse titles and the complicity of the early
South African gay press in whitewashing gay male identity in mind, and by revisiting the
broader historical development of western gay print cultures, their race politics, and certain
queer aesthetic traditions salient in the twentieth century, I discussed the possibilities for such
images, once they reached their intended audiences, to negotiate and ultimately oer
correctives to the expulsion of MOC and interracial homoeroticism and fraternity from the
apartheid-era white gay imaginary. Finally, the conceptualisation, production, and commercial
success of such modes of cross-cultural homoerotic representation, however awed, in apart-
heid-era gay print cultures reveals a troubling irony: they bring into stark relief the white bias
and failure of prominent post-apartheid domestic gay publications to connect with (and oer
the kind of redress ostensibly made possible by) the democratic ethos of their emergence.
10
Notes
1. In this case, the term ‘black’ is contingent on the historical context in which these photo-
graphs emerged and refers to subjects who, during apartheid, were excluded from the white
norm and variously classied as either African, coloured, or Indian. While collapsing such
plural identities into a single category is not ideal, I do not intend to deny the ethnic
particularities of these categories but to make explicit the binary logic of apartheid ideology
and white supremacy. Elsewhere, I consistently use the terms ‘man of colour’ or ‘men of
colour’ (MOC) and ‘people of colour’ (POC) unless more distinction is essential.
2. Surviving material, including, for example, photographic negatives, loose photographs, and
galley proofs – as well as other publications, such as international physique magazines, that
Gree identied as important inuences (personal communication, September 20, 2020) –
are at this stage informally held by an acquaintance of the former publisher.
3. However, this article relies mostly on purposive historical examples that involve African
(black) peoples specically and, therefore, cannot fully account for the varying attitudes
towards male homosexuality, or the degree to which it was tolerated and even celebrated,
in certain communities of POC during apartheid. Nor can it oer a sustained critique of the
modes of homophobia amongst such peoples that emerged from the complex intersection
of racial identity, sexuality, and, for example, Islam.
4. They comprise the Arthur Brown (1953–1976), Herb Klein (1986–1997), Roger Loveday (1961-
1968), and Hugh MacFarlane (c. 1940–1960) collections.
5. AB, for example, ‘featured prominently in . . . consumer networks for male nude photography,
including the national gay press, in apartheid South Africa’ (Sonnekus, 2023, p. 18), whether in
the form of book reviews, readers’ letters, advertisements, or mail-order brochures for the
publisher included as supplements in selected issues of Link/Skakel in particular. Therefore,
I anticipate that there was considerable overlap between the readerships of AB and those of
the papers discussed in this article
20 T. SONNEKUS
6. The inuence of physique magazines on AB’s titles is, for example, plain in their emulation of
the classical iconographies of such early publications, which recalled Greco-Roman antiquity
as halcyon days when homosexuality was revered and not condemned. However, a selection
of AB’s titles also radically severed the racist connection between such ideals and whiteness
(Sonnekus, 2023).
7. Not until the early 1960s were initial steps taken towards reforming laws broadly criminalising
homosexuality in the US (Eskridge, 2009). Such homophobic attitudes were also signicantly
exacerbated in the mid-twentieth century by the moral panic known as the ‘lavender scare’,
which painted gay men and lesbians as particularly susceptible to corruption by communist
forces (that is, the ‘red scare’) (Johnson, 2023). While the implication is not that queer POC were
somehow exempted from homophobia in this period, it is notable that when the ‘lavender
scare’ came to a head with the purging of gay men and lesbians from positions in the American
government, comparatively few POC were employed as civil servants (Morgan, 1996).
8. Kobena Mercer (1994) makes this point with specic reference to the armative viewing of
diverse homoerotic images by gay MOC whose plight for recognition was (and often still is)
founded on being doubly oppressed in racist and homophobic societies. However, consider-
ing that Mercer (1994) later posits in the same volume that aestheticised images of MOC and
black-white interracialism could produce a ‘shock eect’ on the part of white gay men,
destabilising ‘psychic or social investments’ in racism (p. 216), I consider this notion of
‘evidence’ of communitas productive in other contexts and with dierent audiences in mind.
9. There is some evidence to suggest that this was the case: since state censorship had signi-
cantly slackened by 1992 (Matteau, 2012), thousands of publications were unbanned, and TBiA
appeared in a second iteration in Kennedy (1993), when AB was, strictly speaking, no longer
active in the sense of producing original titles – tellingly, in this version of TBiA, also no longer
subtitled, the photographs of Zulu women included in the 1988 publication were entirely
omitted.
10. See, for example, the exploration of the race politics of the contemporary South African gay men’s
lifestyle magazine Gay Pages in recent texts by Andy Carolin (2019), and Lwando Scott (2022).
Acknowledgments
This article is dedicated to Thys Gree (1943 – 2022).
Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
The research for this article was made possible through funding by the National Research
Foundation (NRF) of South Africa under Grant 98572. Please note, however, that any opinions,
ndings, conclusions or recommendations expressed here are my own, and the NRF accepts no
liability in this regard.
Notes on contributor
Theo Sonnekus is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the SARChI Chair in South African Art and
Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg. He holds a PhD in Visual Arts from Stellenbosch
University and recently contributed chapters to the Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in
Whiteness (2022) and Troubling Images: Visual Culture and the Politics of Afrikaner Nationalism
(Wits University Press, 2020).
AFRICAN IDENTITIES 21
ORCID
Theo Sonnekus http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5939-0048
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