We Are the Joburg Girls; or, This Year's Model

There's a famous moment from the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, described by Martin Duberman in his Stonewall (1993):

When the police whirled around to reverse direction at one point, they found themselves face-to-face with their worst nightmare: a chorus line of mocking queens, their arms clasped around each other, kicking their heels in the air Rockettes-style and singing at the tops of their sardonic voices:

We are the Stonewall girls
We wear our hair in curls
We wear no underwear
We show our pubic hair...
We wear our dungarees
Above our nelly knees!

It was a deliciously witty, contemptuous counterpoint to the TPF's brute force.

The climax of Graeme Reid's How to Be a Real Gay is the workshop (or rather, series of workshops) from which Reid took his title.  Despite his good intentions, I must say that Reid treats the workshop, its organizers, and its participants with modern, Western, global (to use his favorite words) condescension.

The political project seemed doomed from the start: how could anyone, I thought, try to impose a standard norm on the myriad processes, performances, desires and identities that constituted gay life in the area of my fieldwork? At the heart of the workshops were two competing yet intersecting ideas about gender, sexuality and identity that circulated in Ermelo. On the one hand, a particular set of gender ideals was promoted and reinforced by my informants (what it means to be a lady or a gent) and, on the other hand, sexual orientation and gay rights that suggested a modern gay identity, based on object choice, were the primary discourse of the workshops … This was a context in which what I will call traditional understandings of sexuality and gender, coexisted with a modern gay identity, which underpinned the provision for freedom of sexual orientation in the Constitution [154]...

The workshops showed that ‘being gay’ was a contested terrain. If there was a real way to be gay there must then be other, presumably less real or even fake ways of being gay [155]

Le duh.  Everything is "a contested terrain."  Reid works hard here to assimilate the workshops into his modern, global, Western bogeyman, without success.  He claims that the "stated intention of the workshops [was] to encourage the emergence of a 'real gay' identity" (192), but that intention doesn't emerge from his report of the workshop: it's in the Western academic authorities he cites in his discussion, Not having attended the workshops myself, I can only go by Reid's report, and he makes it reasonably clear that although the organizer, a local gay named Bhuti, was in touch with activists and organizations in Johannesburg, he addressed his audience in terms of the lady/gent model, with an eye toward refining ladies to comport themselves like ladies.

Bhuti stands in front of a sheet of newsprint clipped with pegs to the pelmet, wearing a jersey against the cold and a hat for style. He is explaining the meaning of terms that appear on the newsprint: ‘homosexuality; heterosexuality; transvestite; transsexual; hermaphrodite; bisexual; gay; lesbian; butch; femme; dragging queen’ ... Tsepo, as one of the group leaders, reports back that in his group they felt that ‘gays should not make themselves a joke’, they should not arrive for a job interview ‘wearing twenty earrings on each side, a lady’s two-piece suit and long nails’. And gays at school should behave like normal students; lesbians should not insist on wearing trousers and gays should not insist on wearing skirts. Bhuti jokes that for some it was easy to come out to family and friends, ‘because your families always called you intombazone’ [157].

Throughout the book Reid shows that the Ermano ladies had their own very firm ideas about how to be a real gay, and weren't shy about expressing their dislike for people who didn't conform.  It isn't only "activists" who try to impose a standard norm on the myriad processes, performances, desires and identities that constitute gay life in the area of his fieldwork  This isn't a standoff between a freely-chosen local model and one imposed from without.  For example, Reid quotes his informant Nathi, who

regarded himself as a real gay. He was born this way and had no time for ‘fake gays’: ‘Me, I was born like this, Graeme, so I see the others they are changing, you see? They are no longer gays. They are fake. To be a real gay you are born like this and you don’t have a feeling for ladies [women].’ He spoke with contempt and disapproval of Sipho, originally from Driefontein and now based in Johannesburg: ‘He wants to fuck the guys and then he wants others to fuck him? Uh-uh.’ Nathi is not sure, but he thinks this has something to do with ‘white gays’. Sipho, Nathi says, is attracted to white gays and he has evidence: ‘You remember at Andrew’s engagement party? Sipho had a cell phone and he was phoning a white gay' [164-5]

Nathi's reaction to gays who don't fit his model is basically the same as that of  the African "traditionalists" Reid quotes on 225-6, who denounce homosexuality as un-African, something brought in from outside; Nathi agrees, but only about constructions of sex between men that he doesn't share.  Reid also quotes a gent, Samuel, who told him, "It is a style. In fact, it is a new style, a new style that is a fashion" (144). Reid admits that the "idea of homosexuality as fashionable is not a new one" (145), but his heart isn't in it.  The thing is, sex between males may be "a new style" to Samuel, but it isn't new in Africa.  Neither is the gendered gent/lady model that Samuel calls a "fashion."  The ladies want to be fashionable and modern, but this only applies to their clothes, makeup, and hairstyle: they not only have no interest in Reid's modern global international gay model, they condemn it.

What may be new is the language of rights and sexual orientation as identity that Bhuti used in the workshop.  But he also multiplied identities: look at the list of words on his sheet of newsprint: "homosexuality; heterosexuality; transvestite; transsexual; hermaphrodite; bisexual; gay; lesbian; butch; femme; dragging queen."  They're a mixture of sexual-orientation language and language about gender.  The audience, Reid says, paid close attention to these words, and some told him they found them useful.  By contrast, the second workshop, on gays and the law in South Africa, was run not by a local but by professionals from Johannesburg, bored the queens and drove most of them outside.  That didn't mean they weren't interested in their legal status -- according to Reid, they brought questions with them -- only that the workshop was badly designed by people who didn't bother to learn how to communicate with non-professionals.  The same problem arises in the US, as I know from experience, and I doubt it's a "modern" one.  (I don't think such professionals should be designated the owners of modernity or Westernness; at most they are only a small part of either one.  This is one of the problems with orthodox Foucauldians: partly because they are generally professionals themselves, they are too willing to let the 19th-century European medical professional model of homosexuality be homosexuality.  It isn't.  It's a limited, inaccurate, and unrepresentative conception of homosexuality, and that's leaving aside the fact that it's basically a rebranding of older prescientific models anyway.)  Insofar as the Johannesburg professionals assumed a "modern" concept of sexual object-choice, it doesn't seem to have been apparent or a stumbling block for their audience, who were quite ready to embrace a modern discourse of laws and rights and assimilate it to their own styles of being gay.

Reid also seems rather confused about what "activism" entails.  He tries to tie it to the Western internationalists, but he has to acknowledge that gay activism in South Africa "was at home in the anti-apartheid movement, affiliated to the United Democratic Front and participating in political protest" (260) with an eye to the world outside.  Activism covers a wide range of behavior from fighting cops in the streets, like the Stonewall girls, anti-apartheid activists, and students in Chile today, to wearing suits and talking to bureaucrats.

One early instance of gay activism in South Africa involved three teenaged gay boys who 1994 went to their (Western, Christian) school "wearing make-up and their own versions of the girls’ red and black uniform. Dumisani recalled that Ayanda wore a particularly tight skirt, while he and Siyanda opted to wear trousers and high-heel shoes" (142).  They weren't harassed or criticized, and reported that even the teachers encouraged them.  Activism as such doesn't have a dress code, no matter that some factions try to impose one.

One reason the "modern" construction of "the homosexual" was developed was because the traditional ones were inadequate.  There were many people the gendered model didn't fit; maybe most people. Judging from Reid's account, ladies aren't all that interested in what gents think about their involvement with feminine but male-bodied partners.  The lady/gent model relies, in fact, on neither partner thinking about it very much.  This is performance (though not performativity).  The model works all right for some of them, though there are a number of acknowledged problems with it: miners may have provided for their boy-wives, but the township gents don't provide for their ladies -- usually it's the other way around, and ladies complain a lot about "gold diggers" who are only interested in them for their money.  It wouldn't do, of course, for anyone to point out that in this respect the gents are playing a "woman's" role, but that's one of the contradictions in the lady/gent model.

What happens if a gent starts to realize that he likes, even prefers, a male-bodied partner?  That's the beginnings of a "modern" gay identity.  It really has nothing to do with modernity per se, nor with the West.  It seems to me that many modern, even post-modern, Western queer theorists want to privilege heterosexuality: it annoys them as much as it does a Christian traditionalist that some people have rebelled against the assumption that sexuality inherently and inevitably must involve a male and a female partner, whether anatomical or fictive, against the evidence that many people discover and reinvent a nongendered pattern all by themselves.  Instead these postmodern Westerners agree with the traditionalists by blaming homosexuality on foreign influence and contamination: no one would have done this if "modern" "Western" "international" outside agitators hadn't corrupted their innocent minds.

Many people claim that "gay" is too narrow a category to work as an identity, though the adoption and redefinition of the word around the world indicates the opposite.  But the lady/gent model of male/male sexuality is too narrow a category even in the townships of South Africa.  It excludes people who practice homosexuality in a less-gendered or non-gendered way, and not by accident.

I recognize that many people react to the discovery of a non-gendered homosexuality by rejecting and denigrating gendered homosexuality, claiming authenticity only for their preferred pattern.  I don't want to claim that either model has more authenticity or should be privileged.  Both models are real and authentic. I think we need to recognize that there is not only one way to feel, act on, and construct "homosexuality" -- no one model represents "real gays"; real gays come in a variety of models -- but can we?  Many people's brains shut down in the face of the problem.  I don't believe it's inevitable, but clearly a more accurate picture of sexuality, which recognizes its complexity and contradictions, is more difficult to hold onto and use, even in academic work, than I thought.  What I think is needed is an "identity" that can cover a variety of styles of same-sex eroticism.  We already have one, "gay", which doesn't have a pejorative history as "queer" does, and it has caught on around the world.  It might be that it has done so because it's not indigenous in other cultures; on the other hand, it is usually assimilated to local models, as it was in South Africa.

The Limits of Language: Andrew Hodges's "Towards 1984"

I missed Alan Turing's centenary, though I didn't have much to say about it anyway.  Turing was a brilliant man, brutally mistreated by his government for his queerness, and he deserves to be remembered for a number of accomplishments.  One of the most impressive things I've learned about him as a person was that he doesn't seem to have felt any guilt about being queer, which was unusual though not unique among British buggers of his generation.  (The circle of friends that included W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, for example, seems to have been just as comfortable with their sexuality as Turing.)

But the mentions of Turing that I encountered online often mentioned Andrew Hodges's 1983 biography of Turing, Alan Turing: The Enigma (Simon and Schuster).  When I read in the gay press that Hodges was working on the biography, I began looking forward to it.  Hodges was well-qualified to write it, for he not only had the mathematics and technical background to understand Turing's professional work, he was a gay activist and writer, co-author with David Hutter of an important Gay Liberation pamphlet called With Downcast Gays, published in 1974 but available online.  This was important because even in the 1980s, most biographies of important gay or lesbian figures were marred by homophobic armchair psychoanalysis purporting to show why the Subject had turned out That Way.  Hodges was having none of that, and his groundbreaking biography not only did justice to Turing but helped set the tone for future biographies.

Aside from With Downcast Gays, I'd also read an article by Hodges published in the Canadian radical gay magazine The Body Politic at the end of 1979.  Its discussion of the way language affects our ability to think about homosexuality made a big impression on me -- it was the first critique of Orwell's dicta about language I'd read till then -- but it was never reprinted anywhere and wasn't available online as far as I could discover.  The flurry of attention to Turing's centenary and to the biography reminded me that I'd been meaning to write to Hodges and ask him about it.  I knew he had a website with some of his writings on it, but "Towards 1984" wasn't there, so I hoped to persuade him to add it; I could even send him the text if he didn't have it.  So I wrote to him, and he kindly gave me permission to post it here.

As its title implies, "Towards 1984" is dated now, but as Hodges wrote, the issues it (and Orwell's novel) deals with are still current.

TOWARDS 1984

by Andrew Hodges

(This article first appeared in Body Politic #59, December 1979 / January 1980.)

As the real 1984 approaches and becomes just another calendar year, one thing is certain: there will be no lack of voices claiming to draw political lessons from George Orwell's book. Indeed, the election posters for Mrs Thatcher's Conservative Party have already suggested that we should believe Labour policy to be leading Britain into an Orwellian nightmare. 1984 has sold millions of copies; it is a standard text for school examinations. But what does it hold for us?

A number of Orwell's suggestions have become reality; a number have not. That is not the point. The real value of the work is as a modern Gulliver's Travels, as serious political satire, and in particular as a thesis on the politics of language. It was Orwell's idea that language was not simply a means of communicating thought, in the way that an open road affords space for every kind of traffic. Rather, language could be more like a railway system, with a laid-down schedule which could convey only ideas of a defined shape and size, fitted into the compartments which the managers provided. Only these right ideas could ever be used.

But Orwell's target was narrow and distinct: not the language of everyday conversation, but the official languages of his own class and time, the British educated middle class of the 1930s and 1940s. Wartime censorship, Communist Party theory, military euphemism, Times leaders and newsreel journalism -- every case involved its own trahison des clercs in which state violence of revolting enormity could be justified or concealed by the manipulation of language. It was his thesis that language was not merely symptomatic of engineered thought; rather, that language determined what thoughts it was possible to have. "How could they believe it?", "How could they accept it?", Orwell asked of his contemporaries, and his answer was that once they had accepted a political language, then their thoughts could not be other than would fit inside its concepts.

It was a small step for him to suggest in 1984 that the State might consciously impose its official language upon its servants with that very objective in mind. This was a major theme of the book, summed up in its definition of "Newspeak", the officialese of the Anglo-American superstate. It was its purpose that:

...the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy. It would have been possible, for example, to say "Big Brother is ungood." But this statement, which to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available....

The modern Newspeak of "extremist", "moderate", "security", has continued to keep Orwell's critique as alive as ever. But our reaction to Orwell's ideas must necessarily be more critical. In 1984, it was possible to escape from the official thought by means of ordinary language, the old English language, associated with good old ordinary decent things and feelings. Orwell seems to have thought the common language of his day to be a perfectly adequate vehicle for thought. But was it? Was it only the official, or state-imposed language that constrained what it was possible to think? Clearly we can see that it was not: in Orwell's own description of Newspeak, he wrote:

In somewhat the same way, the Party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalised terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words "sexcrime" (sexual immorality) and "goodsex" (chastity). Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake....

Millions of readers must have swallowed unquestioningly Orwell's definition of homosexuality as a "perversion", together with the connotations of "immorality" and "normal" -- just as they would have gone along with the use of "he" in that paragraph to imply (as a "rule of grammar") a person of either sex. Why not? These were the available concepts, the "proper words" that English had to offer. Whether Orwell intended this classification consciously or not is beside the point; in either case this was simply the ordinary written English of 1949, in which sexual expression had to be packaged and valued by a tiny range of nasty words.

To be more precise, a writer who was sufficiently sensitive to value-judgment might, by a sufficiently laborious discussion, avoid the unconscious communication of received ideas. Thus in 1948, the authors of Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male had been able to use the word "homosexual" in a very precise sense, carefully detached from the connotations of "abnormal." It was no easy task, as they themselves explained, and one which met with profound resistance from the "scientific" world as well as from popular opinion. But for those without access to the language of academic authority, words imposed the bounds of possible thought, in which "queer is good" was almost as self-evident an absurdity as "Big Brother is ungood."

Another observation to be made on reading 1984 is that all those features of the State which Orwell presented in imagination as the most deeply appalling were none other than those which in 1949, were being experienced in reality by homosexual people in Anglo-America. Not only the commonplaces of censorship, blacklisting, guilt by association; not only imprisonment on police say-so; but compulsory drug treatments, castrations, electric shocks, even brain surgery; the implication and betrayal of friends or lovers; the required confessions of thoughtcrime in the dock. Worst of all, according to Orwell's book, defiance was robbed of all meaning when history would never know or care, when the past would not even be known to exist.

But Orwell would never have perceived the connection. And we too are so well trained to think of homosexual oppression as not counting, not mattering, not being "real" politics or history, that it seems fanciful to make the comparison, a slur on "real" political martyrs. But this training is itself performed by the available language, which has defined homosexual oppression as a "non-political" form of dissidence, as a "social" or "psychological" or "medical" problem. Perhaps most poignant of all is the fact that Orwell chose as a symbol of escape from the official system the drama of a spontaneous heterosexual affair. For the millions of readers, the ultimate dreadfulness of 1984 has been brought home as the system where love to be a crime, where lovers could not even be seen to touch, even to know each other for fear of the State; where the smallest sign of affection was a political gesture. And how many of them have considered that all of this was so for homosexual lovers in the real world of 1949, of 1959, of 1969, of 1979? Indeed, our position is in a sense worse than that of Orwell's rebels, who at least had the cultural resources of "ordinary language" in which to express their spontaneity. But for us, the ordinary language of sexuality is something that must be fought for: childhood training and cultural values discarded and a second language learned in order that spontaneous feeling can be realized.

And yet, for that reason, one cannot but be cheered by reading 1984. The figure of Winston Smith was brought to say and believe that "Big Brother is good," just as so many of us have succumbed to "Queer is bad," yet so many of us have not given in. Not only have we continued to utter the "crude heresies" that the old available words allowed, but we have, since 1949, since 1969, found new words, new images, new language to express ourselves. So often we are immersed in conflicts over what seem mere words: our words (the straightforward use of "gay") are hated; the available "ordinary" words ("promiscuous", for example) constrict a million different experiences into one foolish epithet; the official words of psychology and of law degrade and imprison thought as well as people.

Yet we are gaining: with an ever-expanding vocabulary of word and picture, poetry and history, music, film and art. Orwell, against his own will, reminds us that the expansion of language is no ignoble cause, nor some unreal shadow of "real" politics, nor our own strange peripheral problem. 1984 has touched so many people because it touches the heart of things that matter. That is its lasting integrity and heroism -- and that is ours, too.