You Have to Be Gay to Know God. Siya Khumalo
‘No,’ I choked. ‘Thank you, but no thanks.’
She looked at me, head tilted. ‘You are gay,’ she decided. Whenever we broke the news to anyone, she’d use the line from the Brenda Fassie song to end the discussion. ‘Indaba yakhe i-straight: ayidingi ruler’ — His story is straight-forward; no ruler required to straighten it. She’d have the hint of a smirk from the cleverness of her pun.
‘How do you know?’ some of the guys she said I could trust would ask her.
‘He refused to let me show him my boobs,’ she’d say, bounding them up and down just a little through her shirt.
‘What?’
‘I even said he could feel them if he wanted.’
‘And he said no?’
‘Exactly!’
A glare at me. ‘You stupid man! Ingrate!’ Then a moment’s thought. ‘It must be true. Siya is gay!’
Many of the girls were disappointed that I had no experience with boys that I could tell them about. Because they wanted details. Pictures, if possible. The one with the boobs mentioned she’d felt embarrassed at being turned on by guy-on-guy action when Jesse Metcalfe’s and Ryan Phillippe’s characters hooked up on Desperate Housewives. I played it very cool as she spoke about this. Time and data bundles have been spent on a most futile quest to find said scenes on YouTube. I think she mixed up actors’ and characters’ names. ‘I felt bad,’ she recounted, ‘because I was turned on. It was so hot. All that man. All that muscle.’
I wanted to reply, ‘Now imagine how I feel’, but I don’t think they had to imagine. I probably always looked thirsty.
One or two of them weren’t as thrilled about my sexuality, though they had the decency to be respectful in their tone and delivery, keeping the secret within the (growing) circle of ‘safe’ people. They insisted that gayness was unAfrican, but they balanced that with the belief that ostracizing me would also be unAfrican. So, they had to figure out how to help me through my ‘confusion’, and wondered what the cure for this ‘white man’s perversion’ would be. One suggested traditional ritual, another, prayer. ‘No’, said the first. ‘Prayer and the white man’s god aren’t as strong as what Africans had all along. The issue was that the white man had uprooted Africans in the first place …’
I’d turn left and right as I listened to these discussions, trying to get a word in edgewise. I became a topic but less and less as a participant with own views on my own experience, which were conflicted anyway. But it was my conflict; that’s the thing I wanted to hold on to more than anything else when I was pulled into those discussions. I was the only person who knew what it was like to be inside of my particular story.
I became a learning subject, hovering through many of their school day periods because the discussion that dominated the background conversation was sex. And when teenagers talk sex, they turn the topic around. As much as I loved attention, I didn’t want any for being an alternative to their ‘normal’ expectations. But just as I’d become a learning subject, I also became to some a project — something to be fixed or tweaked not because I’d gone out my way to trouble anyone, but because I’d existed wrong in their world, and owed it to them to exist the right way.
One classmate spoke to me while we were travelling home on the train, saying if it were true that I was gay, he’d be disappointed. He’d heard people talking. Did I have a girlfriend? Why had nobody seen me with a girl or heard me talking about girls to prove my heterosexual masculinity? ‘Are you gay?’ he kept asking.
‘No, I am not,’ I lied and the wondered how many times someone can say, ‘I am not’ before denial is all that’s left of them.
‘Siya, it’s no big deal,’ someone might say. ‘You were doing what you had to do.’
Only, it’s not that simple because when you’re something to be denied, you start acting like it. You develop a double life, the hidden part misshapen by the shame that drove you to the shadows.
If I could hide the fact that I was black, would other people be okay with my denying it? Fellow black people would see it as a negation of them too — blackness as something to be escaped, denied or erased. Yet many of my fellow black people will welcome a disclosure of who I am to the extent that it validates their existence, and never to the extent that my existence is as validated as I need it to be. I can be there for their part of the struggle, but they won’t be there for mine.
Even the cousin I’d heard disparaging the gay guy came forward to say he knew I was gay. ‘If anyone gives you trouble for it, come tell me about it,’ he offered. ‘I’ll sort him out. You are one of us.’
‘Oh, thanks,’ I said, half-tempted to give him a list from school days. While I wasn’t sure how to feel about it, I’d never expected to be on the good side of a shit-sorter’s shit-sorting tendencies.
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