Sometimes you can act
Thandazo alluded to the ethos of straightness performed by Thembeka in her relationship with Nonjabulo, which Thembeka entered into after deciding not to have any more relationships with (cisgender) men. Thembeka said she had chosen to be only in same-sex relationships after her divorce to avoid the risk of infections such as HIV, spread more commonly through unprotected male- female than female-female sex, and avoid becoming pregnant again and having ‘multiple-choice’ or ‘assorted’ children.5 Thembeka implicitly emphasized this decision-making in the assurance of her straightness, not unlike Thandazo’s emphasis on living a straight life. However, Thandazo also emphasized the importance of not only respectability, incorruptibility, and fidelity but also of performing heterosexuality.
Thandazo’s story of her school days is a poignant narrative of growing up in KZN. She was born free in 1994, just after the end of apartheid, in a clinic in Imbali. Growing up, she had what she called a boy’s structure: “1 was so ... naughty. I used to play with boys ... push bricks as if they are cars and all those things.”6 She started going to a crèche ‘‘this side,” she pointed as we talked one day in Edendale. “It was a place ... where they just saying in Dutch.” Thandazo’s multilingual education remained evident. Though she mostly spoke isiZulu, she could read English better than her mother tongue. After crèche, she went to a Zulu school: “It was a black school up there near the hospital.” She recalled the schedule of breaks and the feeding scheme, and that they had to clean the school toilets. She was often sick, so her mother decided to move her to a school in town when she was in grade 2; but coming from a Zulu school to an English school meant that she had to start over from grade 1.
She told me things began when she was in grade 3. When she was nine or ten she met a girl named Dudzile. Dudzile was cool, Thandazo said, “because she was a child who used to carry a lot of money at school.” She continued: “1 don't know if she just stole money or something, because you cannot carry 100 rand [$6] in grade 3!” Everyone followed Dudzile around because she had cash, but, Thandazo said, “It was like she had more soft spot for me.” They would go to the toilets and talk on and on. “And then,” Thandazo said, “she just kissed me, you know, and 1 was, like, so shocked ... but I enjoyed it.” She continued:
We just got used to that- me and her [...] I just saw [...] that 1 was, like feeling something for her, but it’s just that 1 was still confused because I was young at that time, so 1 didn’t really know what was happening, you see.
Thandazo knew that Dudzile was fond of her:
She had ‘ka-ching’ [money] and she really liked me a lot [...] when she came in the morning, there used to be those aunties who used to sell those chips outside the [school] gates [...] she used to buy me that.
Things progressed in this way, with Dudzile showing affection for Thandazo by buying her things:
She comes to me, she’s like- you want something to eat? Do you want something nice? [...] and 1 used to stand behind the container [...] 1 used to like, sit there and wait for her, and then she’d bring something for me, and then we’d go to toilets and then kiss [...] it was so romantic.
Thandazo described it as one of those things from childhood that is both exciting and uncertain. Being young, she said, “You don't think this is happening for real, how adults do it, because you think ... maybe I’m just doing it because nobody sees me.” As they continued on for several months, Thandazo said, “I don’t know how to explain this thing, but ... to me it was getting real, you see? But 1 thought that you know ... maybe it’s because we’re just children.” She estimated that around six months passed, even though it felt longer at the time, and eventually she and Dudzile stopped what they were doing.
The following year a new girl came to their class. Sanelisiwe was “the most wanted girl,” Thandazo said, adding, “She was like so gorgeous ... but on top of it she liked me.” Things followed the same pattern as they had with Dudzile:
I went with her to the toilets and, you know we started talking, chatting and chatting and chatting, and she’s like “I’ve never kissed a girl in my life,” blah blah blah, you know. 1 just said to her 1 have experience maybe [...] I could try to do it with you, maybe if you want. And she’s like, just pulled me and she started kissing me.
Thandazo was young and obsessed: “1 started writing her letters, buying her things ... this thing was so real.” There was a boy who also had eyes for Sanelisiwe. He would play with her in a rough way, “how boys play,” which upset her. She lamented: "Boys always win, you see?”
The following school year Thandazo dated a few other girls. On two occasions she referred vaguely to sexually experimenting with an older female relative in her overcrowded natal family home. Even when I first met Thandazo and started going over to her house, there were 17 people living there. It was she and her younger sister who would fight over her girlfriends in school. Thandazo and one girl in particular would go for walks and kiss in the trees. But one day she found her with her sister:
I knew how my sister was [...] so 1 just called her [the girl] and started talking to her, asked her if she still loves me [...] she cannot date two people in the same house you see. [...] She told us that she cannot choose because she doesn’t want anyone to fight. 1 said to her, okay it’s fine. Because you don’t want to choose, I am going to choose for you. Then 1 told her that she must just go to my sister and leave me the hell alone because 1 cannot see her with someone else.
Thandazo began dating the cousin of the girl that continued with her sister. She would bring her something on the way home from school:
There’s a shop up there [pointing] [...] 1 used to buy coke and all those nice things [...] there was camp chairs and we used to just sit there and relax. So, 1 used to be with her there, we used to enjoy ourselves.
They carried on for a couple of years, after which Thandazo dated another girl in her teens - “a nice girl, you know those clean girls” - but didn’t like her all that much. She said: “I don’t know why I dated her ... 1 think it was because oh, oh she wanted me so bad, and she used to be the one to ... invite me to the toilets to kiss.” She had a different girlfriend at the same time and explained, "That's the way I was, you see.”
Thandazo liked the attention of the other girls, something that may have eased the sting of unrequited crushes on the ones who did not share her feelings. She talked about two girlfriends she had while she was in a school choir:
There was one who was older than me, and there was one who was living [pointing] on that side [...] near the river [...] but she’s no more living there, she’s living on that [again, gesturing] side now. And that is the girl
I used to love a lot, because I would even go to her house and when there’s nobody, we’d kiss and [...] you know, do all those dirty things.
As Thandazo got older, she had more conflict with others over her romantic interests. She said she started “getting more confused” during her teen years, but reminded me that she had no boyfriends at that time, even though boys would ask her out. Teachers loved her for this, she said, adding that “they thought 1 was so clean” because they observed her lack of interest in boys. Nevertheless, as she said, she did do ‘dirty things’ with girls in corners. As Thandazo brought up narratives of ‘dirty’ sex acts and ‘clean’ appearances, she seemed to echo discussions of social problems and moral hygiene which, though changed since the era of missionary colonialism in KZN, are still present in NGO interventions in Edendale.
While some of these perceptions of her cleanliness had their advantages, Thandazo often felt alone. As other girls became aware of her sexuality, they also began acting differently towards her. Though their recognition of her as one who liked girls boosted her confidence, Thandazo also felt less comfortable around her female peers. On overnight school trips with the choir she used to argue with her teacher. She said, “I would enjoy being around men and talking about, you know those things ... and 1 was, like crying all the time when 1 had to be in the girls’ corridor.” The teacher once called Than-dazo’s mother, expressing concern over Thandazo wanting to sleep in the boys’ corridor, to which her mother said, “She’s crazy! She’s gonna sleep wherever you tell her to sleep!” Her mother was harsh with her in those days, and Thandazo added, “I thought that maybe she didn’t see what 1 was, but she did.”
Thandazo was at an impasse, stuck between childhood intimacies and the reality of growing up with, or without, the stigma that could attach itself to her desires. She reflected on this:
It happens that [...] maybe when you like doing it [...] when you so young, like it happens that you doing it forever. It happens [...] because you’re a child, and it happens that you do it because you enjoy it.
She agreed that it could go either way; maybe you grow out of it, maybe not. Though, with me, Thandazo would never specify. While she claimed to only be genuinely interested in women, she had relationships with some men, and had forgone embracing the more ‘butch’ look and style that got her noticed by girls in high school. During this conversation, she was both mulling over her experiences in school and separating herself from people who do not grow out of such things, and who take those innocent relationships as an indicator of their future experiences of sexuality.
When 1 asked if people around her tended to have homophobic attitudes towards these relationships among schoolchildren, she said, “I don’t think you even talk about it because it’s still early.” While Thandazo was, in a sense, writing off her own experiences as ‘early' and trivial, she also noted this was all they could ever be:
All those girls that 1 dated, they didn’t take me serious [...] because most of us, we usually do this because we are still growing up you see? [...] 1 started getting tired of this [...] thing of dating girls because I could see [...] I am growing up now [...] maybe most of the people don’t take this serious, and 1 didn’t even think that there are like adults [...] who do that. So [...] 1 started, you know, leaving it.
Though she did not leave her desires for other girls and women behind, it did seem as though Thandazo left behind the possibility of ‘growing up’ as someone whose desires would, publicly, not be taken seriously. The description is similar to Thembeka’s situating of her early same-sex experiences in her 20s as ‘play.’ Thembeka had clarified: “When I'm saying, ‘playing around,’ I’m trying to say 1 wasn't serious about the same-sex relationships when 1 began.” Seriousness in both cases implies an intrinsic assured sense of same-sex subjectivity: knowing, and making known, one’s own same-sex desire as continuous rather than situational; and, in doing so, taking on the implications of that pattern, which vary.
These same-sex experiences in childhood formed the crux of Thandazo’s autobiographical narrative. They were caught between competing moralities of gender expression, of clean and dirty behavior, of age-appropriate experimentation, and only later of sexual identity. While Thandazo felt constrained by these, queerness is only one axis of a broader system of sexual norms at play here. I noticed further evidence of these sentiments among interlocutors and acquaintances. For example, sex (both between members of the same and opposite sex) was often referred to as ‘dirty’ or ‘naughty’ in casual conversation, particularly when referring to children and teens experimenting. Thandazo almost exclusively referred to her early intimate experiences this way, though she was keen to recount them and seemed nostalgic in doing so. Similar utterances, such as by Thembeka, were often (but not always) delivered in jest or in a giddy way.
‘Dirty’ and ‘naughty’ thus do not always carry negative connotations. On the other hand, their significance is bolstered by juxtaposition: Thandazo’s teachers thought she was ‘clean’ in assuming that she was not getting involved in those ‘dirty,’ ‘naughty’ things. The juxtaposition shows how same-sex practices can end up at the negative end when discovered, but at the positive end when clandestine, not unlike the advantages of ambiguity, vagueness, and silence. This discussion of early experiences of same-sex intimacies therefore reflects similar tensions in South African society around sexual expression, or, more accurately, talk of sexual expression.
Thandazo used the term ‘straight’ frequently to refer to heterosexual people and the need to act straight as a mode of self-protection. She spoke about people in the area she lived:
They just judge you and if you’re, like, a gay person, they like, they just laugh at you whenever you talk, whenever you do things, whenever you act. It’s better for [...] people like us [myself and her] who act just straight.
Thandazo and 1 initially bonded, in an incidental yet clear way, because of our feminine gender presentation. We both wore our hair long, used makeup, and wore feminine clothing. The first time we actually spoke, one afternoon in Edendale, she was surprised to hear 1 had a female partner, telling me she had one also, which 1 admit had surprised me. She had assumed I was straight, and I had done the same in turn. Both of us shared a critical view of assumptions about femininity and heterosexuality, yet we were also affected by them in view of one another.
Acting straight, or performing heterosexuality, was a survival mechanism for Thandazo, who said that she entertained the attention of men to make herself seem interested and avoid scrutiny and possible violence, including rape: “I’m not interested, 1 just do it. Just for the sake of doing it. ... Sometimes in order for you to get along with everyone, sometimes you can act ... so that’s what I'm doing.” She elaborated:
I can date them. I can just kiss them when I'm drunk, and don’t have sex. ’Cause I cannot just kiss, cannot kiss a guy when I'm like sober. Never, ever. [...] And that’s what I did because [...] 1 just wanted to hide this thing.
She told me that, in addition, she wanted to confuse her mother. If her mother knew Thandazo didn’t have a ‘man’ she could tell people her daughter was single (for instance at the tuck shop where she worked) and then local men would approach Thandazo, something she wanted to avoid.
Unlike her partner at the time, Bongie, who Thandazo said people can ‘see’ is not straight, Thandazo’s ‘acting’ and, both by default and by intention. her femininity served to hide her same-sex desire. She emphasized that the way people act is important because, as noted by several interlocutors, changes in behavior linked to sexuality and/or the expression of gender are often not taken well by natal/extended family, friends, and local communities, with responses being harsher the older one is at the time. Thandazo and Fikile would also include the LGBT1 community here. Women in particular are pressured to maintain certain modes of being, which Nolwazi and Thandazo attributed to the existence of ‘after nines’ - those who might hide their same-sex or, in Fikile’s explanation of the phenomenon, even their opposite-sex practices before nine o’clock at night.7 Thandazo gave an example of those changes that must often be hidden:
You know one of the reasons that made people to end up like [...] maybe sleeping with the guys and all those things when they grow, it happens that like maybe [...] you get raped or something you see. And you’re starting to like hate men. and maybe you start changing the way of dressing, maybe you start to fall for a woman and then you started to adopt the style of having sex with the other woman 'til you enjoy it, you see. [...] Yes, maybe like when you start to grow, you start to realize, you start to forgive whoever done something wrong, and end up having sex [with a man], you see.
Being seen to act or become, in terms of sexual practices, 'not straight’ or ‘straight’ both form a kind of social and sexual transgression. A report by the AIDS Foundation of South Africa found that these attitudes persist in Pietermaritzburg. One respondent said the following:
[W]e live with them and we accept them and we take them as our own children. When we call them, they respond ‘Ma.’ However, the ones that we do not like are the ones that have children and then suddenly decide to be homosexual. We do not like those. We want the ones that grew up not hiding their sexuality because as parents they grow right before our eyes ... We welcome them with our open arms a hundred per cent.
Here in our ward no one can say they have experienced ill treatment or abuse because they are misunderstood. We do not like people who change after having a child ... who decide to change their identity ... She is hurting herself and her children as well, because the child will become a joke amongst other children at school. They knew a child’s mother as a woman and then suddenly she is a guy and loves another woman?
(quoted in Nduna 2017: 32)
While Thandazo explained that gays, lesbians, and bisexuals face harsh judgment in society for perceived ‘change,’ so do others who fail to meet assumptions and expectations. Thandazo faced criticism for the lack of clarity about her sexuality from within the LGBTI community, with people saying things like she does not know what she wants or who she is. Affirming her desire for women, particularly feminine women such as herself, was difficult because of her own expression of femininity and the fact that she sometimes dated men.
Thandazo was aware that acting straight was not possible for everyone, just as it was sometimes very difficult or impossible for her. Presenting as more masculine during high school like the Imbali lesbians she idolized not only allowed her to find romantic partners and community, but also allowed her to exist and be seen. While she later embraced a more feminine expression of gender in her adulthood, she seemed to have autonomy over that presentation. She also sometimes relished the attention she garnered from local men, something I would notice as we walked around Edendale. While their advances would more often bother or weigh on her, her outward femininity was neither a facade nor too high a price to pay. The same fluid
Acting straight and acting straight 121 movement between states of gendered expression was not possible for her partner Bongie; neither was it for Ayanda, Leko, or Nolwazi, each of whom exuded varied masculinities as extensions of who they were inside and out.
