With the 10th annual Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade taking place in Johannesburg on September 25, in a month which has been declared ‘Pink September’, Shaun de Waal looks back at the first march
Standing amid the gaudy panoply of the Pride Parade of the last couple of years, with its floats blaring music and half- naked beauties gambolling on the tarmac, one is struck by the contrast with the very first gay march.
In October 1990 there was much argument about the participation of drag queens – some felt they would draw the focus of news reports away from the moffies who were trying to demonstrate how “normal” they were. Much of the news coverage did focus on the drag queens, but nowadays no one raises any objection to their right to participate. In fact, transvestism has gone so Hollywood in the last few years that there are more drags than ever at the parade.
And, of course, it rained. The first march went from Braamfontein up to Hillbrow, along Pretoria Street, then down to Pieter Roos Park. We were barely up the hill topped by the Civic Centre before it began to rain. The band of a few hundred (many of them straight people showing support) were drizzled on all the way to Pieter Roos Park, which played hell with the drags’ wigs and make-up, and made the people with paper bags over their heads seem even sadder.
Those who wore such bags were afraid to reveal their faces. Now no one wears paper bags; some people wear barely anything at all. That paradoxical paper-bag gesture, making a show of one’s need for concealment, now seems very old hat, so to speak, especially in the context of a march that glories in its very exhibitionism.
What I still casually call the moffie march is now, officially, the Pride Parade. The balance has shifted from protest to celebration, though the mere existence of such a parade, annually filling the streets of Johannesburg with gay men, lesbians, their friends and families, does more than simply rejoice in a particular sexual identity. Visibility is very important: again, it can be hard to recall how, in decades gone by, it was almost impossible just to acknowledge the existence of queer desire. Speak to someone who grew up in the Fifties (or even, in South Africa, any of the subsequent three decades) and you’ll get the idea.
And let us not forget, either, that such social and political repression is easily reinvented. Michel Foucault said that the best guarantee of freedom is freedom, which is true: every Pride Parade, every out moffie, every gay-themed movie on television, makes it harder for anyone to force homosexuals back into their closets. But, at the same time, remember the openly gay men who celebrated their identity in Weimar Germany, only to find they had made of themselves a prime target for the Nazis. The first tentative steps of an emergent gay movement in Zimbabwe led to instant condemnation from President Robert Mugabe, and similar events have taken place in Botswana, Namibia, and other Southern African countries. Which is not to say that gay movements should not emerge, or that they will not, indeed, be strengthened in the long run by having to fight the state, but we need to be aware of the gap between their specific conditions in an often authoritarian, paternalistic African polity and the way our Pride Parade structures itself according to First World models.
Pride now has an official identity, a logo, a whole ad campaign behind it – and very attractive it is too. It has an official song (though sung by straight- identified artists). The raves and parties that were appended to the parade in recent years will, this year, be combined into an ongoing all-day, all- night mardi gras.
The intention, presumably, is to start building some kind of rival to Sydney’s gay mardi gras, which has become a global tourist attraction and rakes in millions for that city. (Cape Town, similarly, is becoming one of the world’s top gay tourist destinations.) This is the mainstreaming of gay pride, and it makes perfect sense that in a globalised capitalist world the best hope for survival as a marginal group is to make yourself into a powerful consumer entity with something to sell and cash to spend.
In 1996, for the first time, the parade started and ended at the same point (the Library Gardens). I joked that I hoped this didn’t mean gay and lesbian politics was now going in circles. Such circumambulation did make it much easier to get back to your car afterwards, but marches aren’t really about convenience.
Glossy gay magazine Outright this month advises its readers to ignore the “killjoy queer politicos” telling them not to have fun. Which is a trifle idiotic, since no one has ever told the marchers not to have fun – though, in the early days, we weren’t doing it for fun. Perhaps what Outright resents is the lingering sense that the march is about more than getting drunk (as it recommends) and finding someone to have sex with.
And perhaps the writer – and the bulk of ever-so-white paraders – need to be reminded that but for the efforts of those “killjoy queer politicos”, especially the late Simon Nkoli, there wouldn’t be this opportunity to cruise the streets at all.
The parade is always fun, and it should be fun; let’s have at least one revolution we can dance to. And we should provoke. Walking near Steven Cohen’s highly controversial banner in 1996 – “Give us your children; what we can’t fuck we eat” – I saw how onlookers read it, frowned, and more often than not laughed. For those who didn’t laugh (and that includes a large number of gay people), the shock was surely salutary. Also, however tiresome it may be, let the Bible-wavers accompany us, snapping at our heels.
But part of the parade is still a march, a form of protest. Look at the additional energy generated when there’s something to make marchers angry. “Recognise our relationships” was a theme of one parade, but, valid cause though it may be, it didn’t engender many chants. Yet the then minister of justice Dullah Omar’s declaration that he would oppose the Constitutional Court application to repeal the anti-sodomy laws gave that year’s parade an additional frisson of defiance. (I still regret not managing to get together a poster which would have said: “Life without sodomy would be so much Dullah.”)
Perhaps the biggest and most positive change since the first gay march is the absence of fear. In 1990, it wasn’t like the political marches of the previous decade, where there was a very real danger of the police opening fire or hurling teargas – the cops were well-behaved (because we were unthreatening? Because we were mostly white?). But there was a fear that there would be a spontaneous outburst of rage from the public. Some whispered that it was clearly a bad idea to be marching down Pretoria Street in Hillbrow – what if someone threw a brick or something down on us?
It didn’t happen, mercifully, and now the fear is gone. Perhaps it was exaggerated at the time, but it felt good to feel it and to face it. The possibility of violence is now negligible. Today, no onlooker, faced with ten thousand gay men and lesbians, is likely to risk causing offence (except the Christians, of course, but one must resist their need for martyrdom and leave them alone).
Still, on a parade free of paper bags, we should not forget that there are many people unable to march for fear of what might follow their self-exposure; that we are not truly free until we all are free. We may celebrate the political protection offered in our Constitution, but the real meaning of that clause, as it pertains to the daily life of individuals, will take some time to percolate down to what politicians are pleased to call the grassroots of our society. With or without feathers and high heels, the struggle continues.