We were late, and people had gathered to put on a little performance for us—some singing and dancing. It was a very sweet and celebratory show. I took photos, and the children watched and huddled around me. More people gathered on the outdoor stage, and I began videotaping. A girl of eight or nine year old brought a chair over to me and stood on it to see what I was videotaping.
People had done so much despite the slow pace of reform. Staff from the nearby city’s community center had built that stage as a place for this township’s people to meet and entertain. Townships grew up in South Africa as places attached to an urban center where non-whites could live. In a way they were holdovers from the old apartheid system, but they were getting a little more help now.
Susan’s friend, Nokwezi, took us to the top of the hill and showed us the modest day-care center, which was a little hut they had just finished building. She talked about the support she had gotten for her project from the Black Fisherman’s Association. The view from the hill was breathtaking. Not only could you see the whole township, but beyond the hills was the bright blue of the ocean. We were then led to the “best place” in the township for our meeting.
It was the home of Bukeka, the restaurant owner. How in the world did she ever get that huge entertainment unit into a shanty house? The room also held two couches, a large coffee table and several other chairs—arranged and furnished as if it were a home in Middle America. Susan came in with a basket of fish that had just been cooked and some glasses for beer. She said we must be special because this room was not used very much. We ate with our fingers and shared glasses. Mothudi, a Black man in his late thirties, began to speak about the struggle, the details of what happened in those days. He was imprisoned for communicating with Umkhonto we Sizwe, (the armed wing of the African National Congress) and remembered running for his life and nearly dying in the process. He worked with different political factions, he said, and there were conflicts. Being a leader he spoke with a class perspective, describing the devastating claws of imperialism.
The room grew dark, and someone brought in a candle—there was no electricity. Mothudi talked a lot and seemed absorbed in the stories he was telling. I listened, amazed that I was there. I was only in South Africa because my partner Leslie wanted to come for her fortieth birthday. It had been a dream of hers. I never expected an experience like this.
I remembered, years earlier, bringing up resolutions at union meetings to boycott South Africa, demonstrating in favor of divestment, talking to people to build support, all to put pressure on the white regime to open the prison townships and to treat black people like human beings. Now here I was in the very country that had made a profound change—the elimination of apartheid. The anti-capitalist African National Congress overturned the old system and elected their great revolutionary leader Nelson Mandela as President of the formerly colonized South Africa. He was a man who had struggled in that very movement with his hands, his body, his mind and heart. I felt honored to be invited by Nokwezi, Bukeka, and by Susan who had cultivated a friendship with the townspeople.
Slightly hunched and wearing a cap, another man talked about prison, torture, betrayal. Hopes and dreams were destroyed and disappointment reigned. “My family was lost, killed. I don’t know how I survived. Now I have a new family.” He spoke of the dark days of apartheid, the thrill of the ANC victory, and the difficulties of constructing a new life today.
“We are here and they give us things but we are not on the same level as the city people. We are still a township with nothing. But we have Nelson Mandela. We have some dignity.” He talked and he needed us to listen.
Then Mothudi spoke again, about events in 1968 and 1970, noting that others outside Africa had helped “and we will never forget that.” He paused.
I rose, climbed over people’s legs, the coffee table, and stood opposite him. “Can I hug you?” And he nodded. Then a human thing happened. I hugged him and he stood there. I could feel him breathing, and my eyes filled with tears. The room was quiet as everyone watched us.
After I went back to my seat, others started talking. A dark man with his teeth missing and his hair sticking out in all directions, then Nokwezi’s husband, a sweet mild-mannered man, spoke. Bukeka and the young boy from the community center all took turns. I wondered what Nokwezi, and the other women who were silent, thought about all that was said.
Talking, I had done so much talking about these injustices, this crime against humanity called apartheid. Now I just wanted to listen and take these people in. It was them, their lives and deeds and losses that mattered. This was love, this was humanity in its glory.
I felt that I had come home and was able to love those I had known remotely—the people in Soweto, the people in this little township, the people who were in Robben Island prison, including Nelson Mandela, and others who wrote books about those times.
Love was pouring out of everyone in the room. It was the simplest of human situations and the most complex. We were eating and talking now about a time when you could die and suffer and lose your children because you were black.
The likelihood of an activist from California being in this place near the very tip of South Africa was about as great as the likelihood of finding a needle in the solar system. Yet we were all on this earth together. The children had just been looking at my camera as I was filming, looking at themselves being filmed, laughing.
We were white, black, brown, from the U.S., from South Africa, even from Reunión, a French colony off the coast of Africa. We were different ages, different backgrounds, different sizes, with different privileges and sexual orientations. But we were there together and listening to each other with the greatest interest and love, with the greatest respect for each other. It was more than beautiful. I felt full of hope and longing.
The Rest is Poetry: Why We Come Out
In Buenos Aires, women sat in a circle called by an older woman, a writer and activist. In her sixties and just joyfully out as a lesbian, Ilse convened this gathering of women-loving women. She suggested that all of them write down stories of their loves, without signing their names. They did so. She collected the stories, shuffled them, and dealt them out again like a pack of cards. She asked one woman to read aloud the story she had been dealt. “I fell in love with the mother of my child’s friend.” There was quiet. Another read the story she had randomly received: “I went to church and confessed after kissing a girl the first time. Although I felt guilty I did it again, and I no longer confessed and stopped going to church altogether.” Then another and another. The stories were so amazing and engaging. Spontaneously, one of the women, Amelia, proudly claimed hers was the one just read. More stories were read; more were claimed. In the end, all the women identified with their respective remarkable, beautiful, and fantastic stories.
The desire to make public what is most private is what moved me to collect and publish interviews of queers in Russia. Over a period of time in the 1990s I collected coming-out stories of men and women in Russia. Sometimes these interviews chronicled moments when individuals thought about their coming out as an event for the first time. Some interviewees felt transformed by the interview itself.
Making public what is feared and risking ridicule or castigation is a demanding undertaking—a decisive step in favor of life. For the interviewer and translator it involves even more—understanding words and intonations, working with people in the context of their own individual and national histories, making many choices about how to publish the material. Complicating matters are family problems, the politics of a country (repressive laws), differing cultural understandings (butch/femme or gender roles), and much more.