COMING OUT STORIES
Coming Out in 90s South Africa: A “Small Town” Tale
Cities can be homophobic small towns too!
We often come out in stages. It’s the way of the psyche.
Staggering and accepting small chunks of a huge life-changing event allows our personal Everests to appear manageable.
At nineteen, I tried to convince myself that I was bisexual, having kissed a few boys but no girls. I liked girls though and had not enjoyed the kissing of the boys.
At twenty I backpacked through Europe alone. I stayed in a few hostels as well as with a few of my father’s Rotary friends as I took in the sights and sounds of some of the world’s most famous landmarks.
It was in England, a couple of weeks into the nine-week trip, that I decided to be honest with myself. To admit what I had always known:
I was gay!
I was being driven around Kent by an older Rotarian couple, and whilst they were very sweet and kind, they were also incredibly boring! In an effort to entertain myself on the long and stuffy drives, I did some thinking, I did some acknowledging, and I made some decisions.
I would come out!
I needed to get home and have my twenty-first birthday celebration which was shaping up to be an extravaganza in and of itself. Once the aftermath settled down, I would begin searching for my people and poke a few toes out of my very restrictive closet.
I returned from my tour through the land of the colonizers, dusted off my dancing shoes, and twisted the night away at the local Country Club as I received the “key to the door.”
With the celebration over, I returned to work and settled back into the ebb and flow of my daily grind as a bank clerk.
What was next?
I needed to keep the promise I’d made to myself as I travelled the hills and dales of southeastern England. I had to find my community, people in the know who could support me as I figured out how the hell to tell all and sundry that I was, in fact, a sister of the inclination!
I needed knowledge.
This was 1994 and there was no Internet, no Google, and no surreptitious way of finding people and information. I needed to get myself a copy of Outright, South Africa’s only gay and lesbian magazine at the time.
For those of you old enough to have read actual magazines, you may remember that support groups and organizations advertised themselves in the back pages of certain periodicals — the LGBTQ+ classified sections were full of them. To contact anyone from said groups, you had to make a phone call or send off a letter, “snail mail.”
But first, I needed to get my hands on one of those elusive little magazines.
I gathered all my courage and headed down to the local newsagent, the CNA at Cascades Shopping Center.
A little background information.
Pietermaritzburg, South Africa was a small-town environment. Whilst the city was the capital of the province and had almost a million people living there, the mentality of the place was small-minded, judgemental, and gossipy.
By heading down to the local shopping center, you were bound to run into someone you knew: a primary school teacher perhaps, your father’s colleague, a friend’s mother, possibly a neighbour — it was risky.
The CNA was a popular store and I was terrified.
Hesitating slightly, I entered the store and sidled to the back where the magazines were displayed against the wall. Surreptitiously I scanned the racks for the one I needed — the latest copy of Outright.
There it was, sitting the in the pornography section. The place where all gay magazines found themselves relegated to in the 1990s.
I looked around. There was no one near me and the store was relatively empty. I reached up hesitantly and lifted a copy pulling it as quickly as I could to my chest, pressing the front tightly against me so no one could see what I was buying.
If I recall, I spent about thirty minutes wandering around the store, grabbing a couple of other items to hide the fact that I had a “porno mag” pressed tightly to my abdomen. The main reason, however, for my aimless loitering was to gather enough courage to walk up to the front counter and pay for my treasure.
I was so nervous as I moved towards the clerk at the cash register, my eyes darting around searching for anyone I knew, anyone who would see my purchase once I laid it on the counter, anyone who would tell my parents what they had seen my buy.
South Africans aren’t particularly concerned with honour codes like not outing anyone else, and in a small judgy environment, you’re a goner if you want to keep anything a secret.
I can’t remember whether the store clerk was a man or a woman but I do recall that I couldn’t look them in the eye as I waited to be rung up so I could pay and flee.
They did, I paid, I fled…
… quicker than my feet could carry me straight out to my little peanut-coloured 1978 Ford Escort sedan.
I fumbled with the key as I popped the lock and slid into the low seats of the eyesore, flinging my treasure onto the passenger’s seat. I exhaled loudly as I caught my breath, daring to dart a glimpse out the windows for anyone I knew before settling my gaze on the white plastic bag with the bright red CNA logo proudly displayed on the side.
I didn’t feel very proud. I felt a mix of excitement and shame.
I drove home.
I still lived with my parents and I hustled upstairs, peering into rooms and around corners to make sure that I didn’t encounter anyone on the dash to my bedroom.
I hurriedly stashed the package in my wall unit, shoving it behind my hi-fi where no one would think to look.
I scouted out the house.
My mother was home, busying herself with the endless tasks of a stay-at-home mom and not remotely interested in her twenty-one-year-old daughter quietly hanging out in her room. My sister and father were out.
I returned to my haven and locked the door. I never locked my door.
I slipped my treasure from the red and white bag and dived in.
Melissa Etheridge was on the cover. I had never heard of her before but after reading the article, I wanted to. She had just come out and her Yes I Am album was all the rage.
I bought it about a week later and began my love affair with her music.
Back to the magazine.
I flipped through the glossy pages filled with images and information that seemed to be perfectly natural to the people in them. It was a wonderland for me as I pored over the taboo.
In the last few pages, I found what I was after; the classifieds. And there it was — the contact details for my local chapter of a lesbian group.
When I say local, I mean Durban, a larger city about an hour’s drive from Pietermaritzburg. No one in my city was organizing or advertising anything remotely gay. It was a school-based city, a conservative city, a place where the gays were not free to roam.
It was time to write a letter!
In the spirit of full transparency, I have no idea what I wrote in that first letter. I can only assume that I mentioned that I had just realized I was gay and wanted to meet some people “like me.” I probably asked for some information for any groups in my small-town-big-city and mailed it off on a wing and a prayer.
The waiting was agony.
Snail mail was painfully slow, although we knew no different back then. I ran down to the letterbox every day to intercept the possibility of my parents picking up the mail. I had no idea whether the woman that I had written to would put a return address on the envelope, clearly marked with the name of the Natal organization.
That would be terrifying as I hadn’t told a soul that I was gay yet.
Finally, the letter full of promise arrived. The correspondents told me that, as of yet, no group existed in my city, but that I was welcome to come down to Durban and meet with them to talk further.
They were kind and happy words, filled with lightness and acceptance.
Planning that trip down the N3 highway was exhilarating and yet frightening. What would I find there? How would I sneak away from a family that wanted to know where you were at any given moment?
I lied.
I made up some excuse about heading down to the big shopping center just outside Durban and headed off on a Sunday morning in my little peanut-coloured 1978 Ford Escort. Her name was Fagan and she had only three gears in her automatic transmission. If you went over 80 kilometres an hour for more than a few minutes and then slowed down, she wouldn’t shift her transmission back into third until she’d cooled her engine.
Thankfully, there were no tolls on the road and I didn’t have to slow down until I reached the first traffic light of the inner city. Fagan crawled in second as I consulted the map book lying on the seat next to me until I pulled into the parking lot of their apartment complex.
I climbed the stairs to the second floor and nervously rang the doorbell.
The lesbian couple was lovely and we chatted together for a good hour. I felt a little better about my decision to drive down to the seaside city, until…
… the parade of women checking out the “new bird on the block” arrived.
Unfortunately, I didn’t realize then what I know to be true now — I was in a lesbian scouting combine!
These two ladies had spread the word amongst the singles of Durban that a newbie was heading down to the harbour city, and they had come out in full force to check out the fresh meat.
Some of us went out for a bite to eat and, thank the Lord, they all eased off one by one. I was obviously not what the observers were looking for.
To add insult to injury, the conversation was also a little extreme for my newly-out mindset. The language that I use freely and without a thought now was shocking to me back then. The words dyke and lesbian, as well as a range of sexual innuendos, were thrown about with gay abandon but were also a tad strong for my fresh, young, virgin ears.
After thanking the couple for their time, I jumped into my peanut car, shifted her into drive, and tore out onto the highway as I raced back to the relative calm and naivete of my hometown, all the time thinking:
“If this is what a lesbian is, then I don’t want to be one!”
As we can’t deny our nature for very long, my embargo didn’t stick and luckily I found a group of women more suited to my slow transition into the raging lesbo that I am now.
Coming Out.
The first person I came out to after that incident was my best friend at the time. She was even more naive than I was and took it as best as a practicing and indoctrinated Methodist could.
Whilst her religious traditions contradicted who I was, we stayed best friends for a while but drifted further apart after I left the city six months later. We lost touch completely after a few years of living very separate and opposing lives.
I can’t remember whether my mother was the second or third person that I told, but she later admitted that she’d suspected it since I was sixteen. She also admitted many years later that I shouldn’t “label myself” causing me to realize that she hoped it was a phase and that I would grow out of it.
At almost fifty, I don’t see that happening any time soon!
To give my mother credit, she has no issues with my sexuality now and hasn’t for the past twenty-five years. As I have no idea what it’s like to accept a gay child in a heteronormative world in the 1990s, I can’t blame her for her reaction.
She ran a lot of interference for me with my father.
I only officially came out to him as I prepared to move to the City of Gold, Johannesburg, to move in with my first serious girlfriend many years later. I had allowed my mother to be my buffer, having numerous private conversations with my father over the course of my early adulthood as she attempted to calm his “What will the neighbours think?” mentality.
On that momentous day in the early spring, I took him to lunch and actually spoke the words, “I’m gay,” to my father for the first time, to which he responded, “I know darling, I’ve known for years.”
I wanted to make sure that when my new partner and I visited my folks in Cape Town that there would be no confusion. We were a couple and we would be sleeping in the same bed as any couple would.
I’m a strong woman with a strong mind and when I decide something, it’s a done deal!
Whilst my coming out seemed slow and steady to me, I took to it like a duck to water, after the initial bumpy Sunday in Durban of course!
A gay friend of mine who witnessed the early days of my lesbolicious transformation, says that I threw open the closet door and jumped out with both feet, announcing my arrival in Queersylvania with a bang, not a whimper.
Maybe I did.
I managed to tell those important to me, found a community, started dating, and had my first “lesbian experience” all within a couple of months of that auspicious day in the CNA.
It seems like a lifetime ago and in a lot of respects, it is.
So much has happened since I gathered my courage to buy that first copy of Outright magazine. I have cycled through some of the lesbian stereotypes and found myself exactly where I need to be: content with who I am.
Come out, come out, wherever you are — olly olly oxen free!
For more of my gay agenda, please feel free to read some of my other lesbian-infused posts.
Thank you for reading.
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