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Xanderglobal
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Name: Xander
Country: United States
State: California
Metro: Los Angeles
Birthday: 8/5/1983
Gender: Male
Interests: art, travel, and the social sciences (*esp. Anthropology and History)
Expertise: anthropology, ethnography, art, painting, African studies, the bushmen of the Kalahari, Orientalism, tropical fauna and flora, primitive art, world geography (cultural and political)
Occupation: Artist
Industry: Art
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  xanderglobal
Member Since:
11/13/2003
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| The Queer Afrikaner: An Ethnography in 8 partsEpilogue
The ethnographer arrives in the field
In December, as my time in South Africa ended, I finally visited the field sites that I had been writing about for months. On our last full day in the Cape, Bordeaux and I spent a few hours touring the Winelands. After having coffee in Stellenbosch and lunch in Franschoek, we visited Paarl, Bordeaux’s childhood home. We drove to the beautiful property on which Bordeaux had grown up, and parked the car outside its gates.
“That’s where Megan lived,” Bordeaux pointed out as we stood in the cul-de-sac. “And that was where I lived,” he told me, nodding to the house at the center of the lawn.
Heading back through town, we passed the Dutch Reformed church his family had attended, and drove through the residential neighborhood that surrounded his first primary school. Before leaving Paarl, we made a stop at the Afrikaanse Taal Monument.
We saw the monument long before we arrived, its spire thrusting up above the canopy of greenery. “I haven’t come here since my last school trip when I was little,” Bordeaux remarked as we curved up the drive.
After paying the entrance fee, we parked in the nearly deserted lot. A craftsman was set up in the shade, selling small canvases depicting pastoral landscapes and bucolic village scenes. We walked up the steps, leaning back to stare up at the gleaming half-circle of concrete towers.
“Of course. It’s phallic,” I commented as Bordeaux read the dedication plaque.
“And of course, the biggest part represents the Afrikaners,” Bordeaux added, pointing to the diagram.
****
We left Cape Town together the next afternoon, our plane landing in Johannesburg in late afternoon. We collected our suitcases, and met Bordeaux’s parents beyond the baggage claim. After exchanging introductions and pleasantries, we followed them to their van, and began the long drive to their home. It was dark by the time we arrived in Hoedspruit, a dense forest of shadows the only suggestion of the landscape that surrounded us. Coasting up the gravelly drive to his house, we were met by his brother, who helped us bring our bags into the house. Though Bordeaux had told me that his family was now very accepting, I was still surprised by how warm they were, and we spent an hour in the kitchen talking before deciding to go to bed. We fell asleep on a mattress in the living room, listening to the steady buzz of insects outside.
The following morning, Bordeaux took me to see the town. The area, as he had told me many months earlier, was beautiful: lush green bush growing to the edge of the road, and climbing up the distant rocky outcroppings. There were a number of game lodges and private reserves along the road, their elaborate gates sticking out through the forest.
The town, however, was not as attractive. “Man, this place gets uglier every time I see it,” Bordeaux sighed as we cruised the main strip. He scanned a group of men standing outside of a shop. “And so do the people…” We passed several new developments, African village style complexes meant to draw tourists. “My dad hates these new places,” Bordeaux informed me.
“Whoa!” I exclaimed, turning in my seat to look at a pair of giant concrete hats installed outside of a shopping center. “What are those?”
“Oh… those are hats. Hoedspruit. Hat stream.”
We parked under a patch of shade outside the Spar supermarket, and walked up the steps to the shopping plaza. “This is the hair salon where the Indian woman got turned away,” Bordeaux informed me. We peeked in the windows, gawking at the elderly clientele inside. “That was probably the woman who refused her service,” he remarked, pointing to a withered old lady with a pile of dyed hair. “And this,” he stated as we turned, “is… what? It’s gone!” I turned and looked into the windows of a well-stocked bottle shop. “Le Café,” he moaned. “It’s gone!”
That afternoon I sat outside on the porch with Bordeaux’s family, drinking coffee with beskuit and observing the flycatchers dragging their tails through the warm sticky air. Stepping out of the house, Bordeaux called me in to join him in the living room. We sat on the couch, a heavy photo album spread across our laps. He showed me pictures of his parents in their younger years, and of him and his sister playing dress up. As he slowly turned the pages, I caught a quick glimpse of a young boy in a red skirt.
“Wait a minute,” I stopped him, catching the page before he changed it. “Is that a photo of your brother?”
“Yeah, wasn’t he awful? The little terrorist…”
“Is he wearing a skirt in that photo?”
“Well, yes. But because he was being a ‘Red Indian.’ See? That’s his headdress,” Bordeaux explained. “So that was ok.”
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| The Queer Afrikaner: An Ethnography in 8 parts8. Cleaning out
In May, Bordeaux’s housemate Will let him know that he had decided to sell his house and move to Stellenbosch in order to be closer to his university. Bordeaux unexpectedly needed to find a new place to live. A friend agreed to let Bordeaux stay with her, and so Bordeaux began the process of moving.
Scanning his room, Bordeaux snorted. “I never even really unpacked my stuff from Taiwan.” He lifted the comforter to his bed, revealing a row of cardboard boxes lined underneath. Pulling one out, he began to look through the pile of books inside. “I need to get rid of some of this stuff,” he sighed. “I haven’t even looked at most of it in months.”
We went downstairs to the kitchen, and Bordeaux made a pot of coffee. Carrying his mug with him, he returned upstairs to continue his work. I stayed downstairs, taking a book into the den.
It was an hour and several chapters before I emerged from reading, and I realized that I hadn’t heard anything from Bordeaux. Setting my book down on the coffee table, I walked upstairs to check on him. Piles of CDs and books were scattered around the hallway, and the door to his room was open. Bordeaux was sitting at the edge of his bed, several photo albums at his feet and a framed photograph in his lap.
I sat next to him on the mattress. Looking into the picture frame on his lap, I saw that it was a photograph of
Bordeaux and his sister as children. “What’s the photo?”
“My sister and I playing wedding-wedding.”
“Nice veil,” I commented. His sister was wearing a large piece of frilly cloth over her head, completely obscuring her face. Her hands were dropped listlessly to her sides.
“She was probably scowling under there,” Bordeaux responded.
“Why?”
“Because she didn’t want to play wedding-wedding with me, but I forced her to.”
My eyes moved to Bordeaux. He wore an adult’s shirt over his own, and a strange pair of tailored pants. His brow was low, his mouth drawn. “And you? Why are you scowling?”
“Because,” he answered dryly, “I didn’t get to wear the dress.”
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| The Queer Afrikaner: An Ethnography in 8 parts7. The knights of RAU
Driving home from an evening out, Bordeaux was far quieter than usual. He responded shortly to my passing comments, his jaw tight and his eyes focused on the road. We settled into an uneasy silence, and I shifted in my seat to stare out the car window. I was watching the passing buildings along Somerset Road when Bordeaux finally spoke.
“Working on this project has made me think about things I hadn’t wanted to think about for a long time,” Bordeaux stated slowly, seemingly choosing his words carefully. “Including some things that I’d forgotten intentionally.”
I turned toward him slightly, studying his hard expression, but unable to read his face.
“I already told you about high school, and what happened there. But when I went to university, things got much worse. I had gone to college expecting to get a new start, and to be in a more open environment. But that wasn’t what happened.”
Aside from mentioning friends he’d made at RAU, Bordeaux rarely spoke of college.
“When I went to RAU, I had to live in the res. Each residence hall on campus had a theme. One res had a Roman theme, one had a naval theme, one had a mining theme. My res, Bastion, had a Germanic theme.”
“Bastion? Is that like a sanctuary?”
“I don’t think that’s what they meant. More like a strong fortress. So Bastion had a Germanic theme. Within this ‘Germanic Empire’, all of us who lived in the res were knights. That was a big thing in Bastion; we were knights, so we had to act like knights. You had to dress nicely, keep your hair short, not have any piercings. Be courteous to ladies. Be manly.
“The week before classes started, we were initiated into the knighthood. At first, the initiation was pretty relaxed, and they just had us do some tasks. I didn’t mind it. Then one night, we heard banging on the doors. Some older guys bashed open the doors, and started shouting at us. They told us to take the cases off of our pillows, and made us wear them on our heads. They made us walk out of our rooms, through the corridor, and down the stairs, shouting at us all the time. Pretty quickly, everyone realized it was just a ritual, but it was still pretty hectic even so. They took us to the main hall, and let us take the pillowcases off of our heads. There, they gave us our nicknames- mine was Pinotage- and we were made to learn their names. That was when initiation officially started.
“After that, it wasn’t so bad. They gave us a lot of talks, told us the history of the res. They gave us a lot of rules, made us memorize things. We had a group car wash. We had lots of dances with the girls’ houses, where we had to dance every dance.
“On the last night of initiation they took all us first-years down to the fountain. They told us we were going to have a ceremony: we were all going to get knighted. In the middle of the fountain, there was this little island. So they made us all get undressed, and we had to run naked through the fountain, through freezing cold knee-deep water. When we got to the island we had to stand together in a group, place our hands on our chests, and sing the house song. And that was how we became ridders, knights.
“Within the knighthood, every year had a different title. The first-years were commoners, the second-years were higher up, and so on. The people in the house committee were the highest, and then the head of the house committee was the Kaiser. But apart from that, there was also an underground organization. They were called the SS, like the Nazi secret police. They weren’t part of the house committee, though I think some members of the house committee were involved. Their job was to keep everybody in check. If you did something wrong, they would straighten you out. You would get beaten up, your room would get flooded, or your room would get torched. In one of the photo albums in the res, there was a photo of a room that had gotten torched, with the heading, ‘This is what happens if you stray.’ They would show us that photo to keep us in line.
“In the past, the SS had been pretty open within the house. Then the year before I got there, there had been some sort of scandal with initiation, and the SS had been forced to disband. But I guess there were a group of seniors who felt they needed to keep people in check. So they decided to keep this tradition alive, and the SS stayed in existence, but more secretively now.
“At the res, they were trying to shake the Nazi image that they’d had for years, but it was still in everything. It was this uncomfortable feeling you could still pick up on when you walked around there. RAU was the ideal breeding ground for something like that to come up. It was a young university, but it was a very conservative Afrikaner university. There were rumors that the Broederbond had funded this school as a white, conservative university, since there wasn’t one like that in Johannesburg, and Wits University was seen as being too liberal. Conformity was very big in the university. The school was fenced off, and inside it was very homogenous.
“I came out to very few people at my res, because I knew that it wasn’t a good environment to come out in. One of the seniors told the first-years a story to let us know how the res felt about homosexuals. He said that some guy had come to the campus, and had gone to all of the men’s residences to hand out flyers for some gay club or event. These two brothers in Bastion heard about this, so they found this guy and chased him out of the res. They chased him all across the campus, until he managed to hide under a car. So they got some friends to come help them, they picked up the car, caught this guy, and beat him up. And this story was told to us with a lot of pride. They told us this to warn us, to show us that homosexuality was unmanly and wouldn’t be tolerated in Bastion. So I was quiet.
“At first, I had a lot of friends. I told most of my friends that I was gay, including some I shouldn’t have. My best friends were a group of people who my res didn’t like. I had an openly homosexual friend, Jacques. He had gone to a psychology class and talked about homosexuality; after my res heard about this, they warned us not to talk like that, because that wasn’t what our res was about. Another friend of mine was an editor of the RAU newspaper. He had caused a bit of a scandal by suggesting that the paper get rid of the Christian section. When that happened, the seniors made every first year write a letter telling him our thoughts on it. Basically, they wanted us all to say, ‘I do not agree with this.’
“So these were my friends… amoral, areligious, deviant. We never got a reaction really, and I never thought that the people in my res were unhappy about me being friends with them. But then one day some friends came and visited me. We were walking down this one corridor, talking. Suddenly two third-years opened their doors, came out into the hall, and looked at us very aggressively. We walked past them, trying to ignore them. I turned around once we were past them, and they were still there, glaring at us, and one of them spat at us. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I asked him. ‘You guys don’t fucking belong here,’ he told us. We immediately got out of there. After that, things quickly went sour.
“That Friday night, my roommate threw a party. He had long hair, so he wasn’t too popular in the res either. The room was packed, with a very strange, very Bohemian crowd- some lesbians, some gay guys, some straight people- and we all got very drunk. During the party some seniors came and slammed on the door, and asked what the fuck we were doing. We told them we were just having a party, but they said they were studying, so everyone had to leave or they would call campus security. The party broke up, and everyone left. They said they were complaining because we were too noisy, but really they just didn’t like that there were a bunch of freaks in their res. One of the guys who had complained that we were being noisy was in the corridor two hours later, playing rugby very loudly. So I don’t think it was just that we were being too loud.
“So they didn’t like me, and they didn’t like my roommate, and they didn’t like our friends, and they weren’t hiding it. Someone wrote a note saying ‘No homos,’ and stuck it on the doors at the entrance to the corridor. Then one night, the letters SS were written on my door: the Secret Service was watching me. There were often bangs on my door in the middle of the night, just to scare me. Comments were shouted at me. I remember I was walking on campus once, and people actually threw stuff at me. It got to be very scary, and I would be nervous just walking around my own res. Then, I got threats written on my door. The SS said that my room was going to get torched.
“My roommate was out one night, at his girlfriend’s. I was alone in my room, in bed. Around eleven ‘o clock, I heard a knock on my door, but I didn’t answer. They knocked again, but I still didn’t answer. I then heard a big garbage drum knock over, and water suddenly poured into my room under the door. They were trying to flood my room. They had been hoping that I would open the door, and they could pour the water in and flood me, but since I didn’t open the door they just knocked it over anyway, to do what damage they could. They did it twice that night, at 11 and again at 2 am. I didn’t sleep that night… I was up until morning trying to clean up the water.
“From then on, I was just very scared. I would walk on campus, waiting for someone to shout at me, throw something at me. Just before the July holidays, I had a nervous breakdown. I wanted to move out of res, but my parents wouldn’t allow that.
“After the holidays, the situation did not get better. Things just went on. I was still getting threats. Comments were shouted, and I always felt very unsafe. So my parents decided to make an appointment with the dean and the housefather. I went with my parents to the meeting. The dean asked me if I was gay, and I said no, because my parents didn’t know yet. He knew some of my friends were gay though, so his advice was that I should get new friends. His attitude was that my friends were the problem, not the people threatening me or harassing me. No one would do anything.
“I told my parents I wanted to transfer to another school, but they wouldn’t let me. When it was time to start my second year, I said that I didn’t want to go back to res, and I got into a big argument with them about moving out. They refused, and told me to go back and try it out again. So I moved back into the res. During the second week of the school year, two first-years came up to me and said hi. I said hi. They asked me what my name was, and I told them. They chuckled. They said that someone had told them to come up to me, and to tell me that I was a faggot. I asked them who had told them to do that, and they pointed out a second-year who was standing behind me, sniggering. I immediately walked to a pay phone, called my parents, and told them that I was moving out of the res.
“Sometime later that year I was at a student club in Randburg, and I went to use the restroom. Just after I entered, two seniors bashed in the door, so I ducked into a stall and locked the latch. They banged on the stall door, called me a faggot, and demanded that I come out. So I just stayed there, crouched in the stall, waiting for them to leave. Eventually I heard traffic coming in and out of the bathroom, and decided that they must have gone. I went to my friends, told them that I was leaving, and got out of there and drove away as quickly as I could.”
Feeling the sudden chill of an abrupt silence, I quickly asked him when all of this had happened.
“I started at university in 1995. That made it so much worse. Discrimination was illegal in the constitution, and the country was supposed to be changing… but at RAU, it was just like it had always been. I had gone to university expecting it to be an open, liberal environment. But it was just like the Old South Africa, and these guys were actively making sure that it stayed that way.”
As we stopped behind a row of cars at a red light we settled into another silence, and I failed to think of anything to say to break it. Eventually, when the light turned green and Bordeaux brought the car onto the highway, he continued his story.
“During the beginning of my first year, during initiation, I was pretty popular. I had a lot of friends, and I was getting involved in the res activities. It felt like it was going to be very different from high school. I thought maybe I’d gotten the change that I had wanted.
“The day before classes started, the first-years were supposed to throw a braai for the seniors. For the week before that, I had worked on the preparations, getting everything ready, making decorations for the hall. The day of the braai, things were hectic, and we had a lot to do. While I was setting up, this one student I didn’t know came up to me. He asked me, ‘Are you Pinotage?’ I told him that I was, and he told me to go upstairs, and knock on a certain door.
“I had no idea what was going on, but I went anyway. So I go and knock on this door, and a senior guy opens the door. In the room, there are three senior guys and one girl. The guys were all very drunk, and the girl was looking really uncomfortable. I was pretty uncomfortable too; I had never really been around drunk people before. At first I thought this girl was someone’s girlfriend, but pretty quickly I figured out that she wasn’t. She didn’t seem to be with any one of these guys. After a little while, the senior guys told me that they were going to leave, and that I had to keep her company while they were gone. So they left us alone in the room, and locked the door behind them.
“After a few minutes, I realized that the guys were standing outside the door, laughing and listening. This girl still looked really uncomfortable, but she was trying to be nice, making conversation with me. She was wearing next to nothing, and I don’t know if I’m right, but I started to figure out that maybe she was a prostitute, and the guys were all waiting for me to have sex with her. Eventually the guys opened the door, and called me out into the hall. I was really freaked out. In the hall, they told me, ‘You’re going to go back in there, and we want to hear some action. If we don’t hear any action, you’re going to be in shit.’ With that, they shoved me back into the room. It was awful. The girl didn’t want to be there, I didn’t want to be there. When they didn’t hear any action, the guys in the hall started shouting, trying to get me to do it. I wanted to leave so badly, but I didn’t know how to get out of the room. I don’t really remember what happened next; I don’t know if I banged on the door and pleaded, or if they just let me out. But the minute they opened the door, I ran out of there, and got away from the res. Once I was far enough away, I just started crying. I didn’t go to the braai that night. I ran off to another res, and stayed there. I was too scared to go back.
“Eventually, some of the house committee members convinced me to go back. One of them had a long talk with me, and he took me to talk to the head of the house committee. He told me that what these guys had done was unacceptable, and asked if I was willing to testify against them. I said I was. There was a hearing, but I think the guys just got a light punishment, like a warning not to do it again or they’d get in trouble. But I think that sealed my fate within the res. Not only did I freak out when put in a room with a girl alone, but I had caused shit for some of the seniors.
“In the end, I realized that they didn’t want me to be one of them. I wasn’t worthy of the knighthood. After all that happened at RAU, I began to feel really weird around Afrikaner men. I guess I felt like they didn’t think I was man enough to be one. I think subconsciously I came to really dislike Afrikaner men. I mean, I know my dad is an Afrikaner man, and my brother is an Afrikaner man, and I have some friends who are Afrikaner men. But I still cannot see myself as an Afrikaner man. If I talk about an Afrikaner man, I see certain faces, and bodies, and clothes, and none of that is me.”
I remained quiet; I hadn’t been prepared for what he had told me. As I tried to come up with a response, he spoke again.
“I’m just worried. Talking about my past, or thinking about my past, is never pleasant. I’d really worked so hard to forget some of these things. What if writing about my past makes me think about things I don’t want to think about, things I’d wanted to forget? What if it makes me go to parts of my memory that I don’t want to go to?”
Taken aback, I struggled for an answer. “I’m not a psychoanalyst,” I replied weakly. “I don’t want to pry you open, or force you to face things you don’t want to…” I started to explain, to rationalize my position. My invasion. But I realized how feeble my answer was. I dropped back into my seat, retreating from his statement.
We sat silently, uneasily at either edge of the space that had opened up between us. The space that I had placed between us.
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| The Queer Afrikaner: An Ethnography in 8 parts6. Coming out
“What time is Pierre’s flight supposed to land?” I asked as we pulled up to the airport. Bordeaux switched off the engine, and I began surveying the steady stream of people coming out of the domestic terminal.
“Not until 4:30; we’re a little early,” he answered. He reclined his seat, and stretched out.
I watched a group of tourists gather at the curb. Their khaki hats and vests suggested that either they’d just come from Kruger Park, or that they were very confused about what to expect in Cape Town.
“When did you come out?” Bordeaux asked, breaking my observation.
“Oh… well, I came out to my friends when I was pretty young,” I responded as I gathered my thoughts, a little fazed by the topic. “Maybe thirteen. I told most of my friends around then. But I didn’t come out to my parents until I was seventeen.”
“And how did you come out to them?”
“Well, I’m pretty sure they’d known for awhile. It wasn’t exactly like I was hiding it or covering it up, we just never talked about it. I kind of just assumed they knew, and left it at that. Anyway, I’d always been the only gay student at my high school, so I never dated or had gay friends. Then, when I was a senior in high school, we got a transfer student who was pretty flaming. We sort of became friends, and he started calling me, usually around midnight. And since there was a phone on the nightstand next to my parent’s bed, my mom would usually answer it before I could. I’m sure she could tell from his voice that he was gay, so I think she was kind of worried about what was going on, and about who this guy was. One day we were driving, and she asked me, and I told her.”
“She asked you?”
“Yeah… She brought it up kind of oddly. I think she said, ‘If there’s anything you want to talk about…’ I tried to get her to clarify what she meant, and she said, ‘I know that sexuality can be very confusing at your age…’ And I told her that I wasn’t confused, that I was gay.”
“Ha! And your dad?”
“She told him. When I got home later that day, he said that he was very proud of me.”
“Wow. That’s really nice that they were so supportive.”
“Yeah, it was just a bit awkward. I think my mom was a bit freaked out at first, but she got over it pretty quickly. And you? How did you come out?”
“Like yours, I think my parents knew for a long time.”
“I guess the childhood drag shows might have been a tip off.”
“Yeah. But I don’t think they wanted to deal with it. I tried to bring it up with my mom a few times. When I was in the eleventh grade, I asked my mom, ‘Is it wrong if two men love each other, and are really close?’ She seemed a little confused, and answered, ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with two men loving each other. Your father and his brother love each other very deeply, and you love your friend Janus very much, and you’re very close.’ That wasn’t what I meant though, so I pushed the subject, and said, ‘But what if they really love each other?’ I think she figured out what I was steering towards, so she responded very firmly. ‘It’s fine if they love each other, but they shouldn’t act on it physically.’ So I asked her, ‘Why not?’ She tried to remain very firm, but without overreacting, and said, ‘Well, you see, men who love each other physically… well, they have sex. And do you know how they have sex? They have anal intercourse…’”
“Your mother did not say that!” I interjected, sitting up in my seat. “She actually brought up anal sex with you?”
“Yeah. She said it very politely though. Not like, ‘It’s disgusting and wrong’, but just like, ‘They have anal intercourse. Isn’t that just sort of gross?’ I think there was another time I asked her, and she figured out where I was going, and said, ‘What are you getting at?’ She told me that if I did decide I was gay, I shouldn’t hesitate to tell her, and that she would accept me anyway. This was something she denied later, when I did come out. ‘If I said this, I was obviously not thinking,’ she said.”
“Yikes. So when did you actually come out to her?”
“Not for a few years. The first person I came out to was one of my teachers in high school. It was during the second semester of my final year, when I was eighteen. I became close to this one teacher, and I definitely had a crush on him. He was only four years older than me, and had just graduated from university. In the last year of high school, my best friend Janus left to study abroad, and I was feeling completely alone. This teacher was very supportive during that time, and I would spend a lot of time hanging out in his flat. After the June vacations, I got accepted to go to the Rand Afrikaner University, and we began talking about what university would be like for me, and what it had been like for him. When we talked about it he would always tell me, ‘University will be a lot of fun, but you should watch out for people trying to take advantage of you.’ He was very elusive about what he meant, but I could kind of figure out what he was getting at. By this time, I was very certain I was gay. And then one night, I was visiting him in his apartment, and I decided to tell him. We were talking, talking. And then I think I just blurted out, ‘I’m gay.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I kind of thought so, and that’s what I meant about being careful about people taking advantage of you.’ Then when we saw each other after spring break, he came out, and he told me had a boyfriend. I was heartbroken. He was the only person who knew until I came to the Cape that December, and I told some of my friends here.”
“And your family?”
“I came out to my sister before everyone else, during my first year in University. She was in Johannesburg on a school tour, and I met up with her at the Randburg Waterfront.”
“Johannesburg has a Waterfront too?”
“It used to. I’m not sure if it’s there anymore. Awful place. Anyway, my sister and I were chatting, and I told her that I was gay. And she bawled.”
“She cried?”
“Yeah. Her friends showed up, and I think they thought she was crying because she had to say goodbye to me. I think she was just frightened, and really confused.
“All through college my parents knew I had gay friends, and even met a few of them. Even so, I continually denied to them that I was gay. I guess I was scared that they would kick me out of the house. Then in my third year, I finally came out. I was twenty-one. In the middle of the year, I broke down, kind of conked out, and ended up in hospital. After that, I went home. So I was at home with my mom, my dad, and my brother; my sister was in college. We were sitting around the dining table. I think we had just had dinner. My mom was asking me about how I was feeling. ‘Well mom, I think I’m confused,’ I told her. She asked me, ‘Confused about what?’ ‘About myself, about who I am.’ I could see in her eyes that she could tell where I was heading, and that she was very scared. ‘Well, what about yourself is confusing you?’ she asked. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know if I like men or women…’ ‘Well,’ she told me, ‘you need to decide. If you don’t pick, you’ll be messed up for the rest of your life.’
“I think that for a minute I thought that she was saying that as long as I picked, it would be ok. So I said, ‘I think I like men.’ It turned out that, actually, that wasn’t ok. My brother turned white as a sheet, and went out of the room. ‘I hope you’re happy now,’ my mom said, ‘your brother is totally freaked out.’ He slept that night in my parent’s room. I had a long argument with my parents, and they told me that this would not work, that I could not be gay.”
“You couldn’t be gay because it freaked your brother out?”
“I think it freaked them out more than it did him. The next day I talked to my brother and told him that I was sorry that I had freaked him out, but that I hadn’t changed, he just knew more about me now than he did before. We didn’t talk about it again for years, until he graduated high school. We got drunk together one night, and he told me that he had thought about it all day after I talked to him, and by the end of the day he was fine with it.
“My parents, however, were very upset. It wasn’t discussed often after that, but one day my dad came to talk to me on my mom’s insistence, and said, ‘The minister in our church would like to see you.’ Apparently, there was a married man in town who had had gay ‘inclinations’, and had been cured. He had decided to go with the lord, had talked to the minister, who advised him to ask god to help him. So they thought maybe I should I talk to this minister, but I told my dad I didn’t want to.
“One day my mom showed me a clipping from some Christian magazine, and told me ‘I’m going to call this group.’ I forget what the group’s name was, but it was founded by a man who had been cured of his homosexuality. He had been gay, but he had found the lord and become heterosexual, and was now married with two children. I think he used to be a hairdresser, and now he was full time counselor.
“My mom put me in contact with the group, and I decided to try it. I think I was pretty messed up at the time, and I thought, ‘Maybe they’re right. Maybe I will be happier if I’m straight.’ The counseling sessions were held in the far northern suburbs of Johannesburg. I went and had a one-on-one session with this guy. He told me his story, I told him mine, and he gave me the schedule of the group sessions. I went to a couple of the meetings, which were fine. It wasn’t like we went around in a circle, said, ‘Hi, I’m a Bordeaux and I’m a recovering homosexual.’ We just talked about our struggles and the difficulties we were facing.
“The formerly gay counselor who ran the thing was often in the States, so he was never around. Without him, there wasn’t much leadership. There was this older guy who would run it, but he was pretty useless. At one point I started freaking out, and I needed someone to talk to, so I called him. But he wouldn’t help me, and said, ‘I’m not allowed to counsel you, I’m not strong enough yet.’ Other than myself, there was only one other Afrikaner in the group, this kind of older guy. And since we were both Afrikaners, and I needed someone to talk to, we became friends. After a few sessions, he suggested we go see a movie. Before we went to the movie we met for lunch, and during lunch I started feeling like maybe he had ulterior motives. Thankfully, we met up with some friends of mine who went with us to see the movie. While we were sitting in the theatre, he started tickling me, and trying to hold my hand, so I just turned to my friends and ignored him.
“After that, I never went to the group meetings again. I told my parents someone there had hit on me, so I think they agreed that I shouldn’t go. Instead, they suggested I go see a psychologist, and they agreed to pay for it. After a couple of sessions, I found out that my psychologist was a lesbian, which really helped me. Through her, I think I dealt with a lot of my problems, and I began to accept myself. At some point though, my mom asked me how it was going, and if my psychologist was helping me with my ‘problem’. I told her that she was, and that she was helping me accept me for whom I was. My mom asked, ‘And who you are is…?’, and I said, ‘Gay?’ And my mom freaked out. They thought they had been paying for someone who would cure me, not someone who would help me accept my homosexuality.”
“But your mom’s fine with it now, right?”
“Oh, God yeah. They all are. They’re practically PFLAG. I think my dad and brother have even made some enemies in town, since they always stand up against people who make homophobic remarks. For a while though, it was pretty rough. I really wasn’t sure if they were ever going to be ok with it. It didn’t seem like it. You were very lucky, you know.”
“Lucky?”
“Yeah, that your parents were so accepting. And I think the environment and time when you came out made it much easier.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I was trying to figure out who I was, and what I was, there weren’t a lot of open homosexuals I could compare myself too. Like if there were ever any homosexual characters on TV, they were always portrayed as deviants. Being homosexual was wrong, and there was nothing more than that.”
“I hadn’t realized that before…” I replied, working through the thought.
“That you were lucky?”
“No, that coming out was maybe a different process for each of us.”
I thought about what Bordeaux had said for the next hour, as we drove Pierre to his apartment and dropped him off. I carefully considered what I wanted to say, but when I explained it I ended up speaking in fragmented academic phrases.
“There’s an anthropologist who said that in writing about third world women, early feminist ethnographers were looking for ‘ourselves undressed’. Like they were using them just as primitive versions of themselves in order to talk about their own situations, without being fully critical of the differences that divided them.” Bordeaux nodded, listening attentively, but unsure of my meaning. “In doing this ethnography, I didn’t think I was doing that, or that I could do that. We’re both educated, first world, from similar economic backgrounds. And most of all, we’re both gay men, in a relationship together. Our identities in the present are as equals. But we came to that identity in such different ways, and I hadn’t thought about how different the environments we came out in were. Compared to you, I grew up in a fairly accepting time and environment. Maybe I saw something in your stories- dressing up as Princess Diana, wanting to be a fashion designer, facing homophobia- that made your coming out experience seem more authentic than my own,” I cut off, unsure of how to fully explain what I meant. “In your stories, I may not have found myself undressed. But maybe I found myself in a dress.”
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