You Have to Be Gay to Know God. Siya Khumalo
they were supposed to do after catching the men they’d been running from; she ended the most useful tangent she’d ever gone off on to pour her considerable wisdom into teaching Shakespeare. Shakespeare!
After getting my hopes up that high, Josh found someone else online as though nothing had happened. ‘It’s nothing personal,’ he said, except it was because it was literally over before it began.
We were running at Crawford La Lucia or at some similarly affluent hotbed of masculine beauty when he confessed to hating running more than I did. He had joined because another boy he had a crush on also ran. That boy had his eye on some girl, which was why he ran. Ordinarily, I would have cringed at bigotry but because sometimes God’s prejudice worked in my favour, the crush Josh had pursued in the running team was straight and homophobic. I suppressed a laugh at the image of us chasing one another down a running trail of unrequited affections.
I’d been seeing an educational psychologist and occupational therapist to help me work out why I had irritable bowel syndrome, among other anxiety-linked psychosomatic issues that had me biting my nails and chewing the insides of my mouth. They never explicitly said, ‘You’re struggling to embrace yourself for who you really are,’ but gently guided me towards that realisation.
On Thursday, August 2004 at 4:34 pm, I concluded my last session with the psychologist. I also made my first adult decision — to redirect the sting I felt at the situation with Josh to my studies. My marks caught fire. I went from the middle of the class to somewhere in the top ten. Maths, until then a labour of note, developed one redeeming feature that pulled everything else into focus: Calculus. And by the time I delivered that English oral, I was an avid reader. Bullies didn’t go to libraries so it was perfect.
I also cultivated a stoic indifference to everything. I avoided speaking to Josh, though his registration class desk was seven and three-quarter tiles in front of mine where the summer morning sunlight made his hair look like a bronze spun silk cap above his bottle-green blazer. I repurposed him from The Flame into The Muse. He unknowingly ignited raw, passionate essay-writing in me. I was screaming at him with every sentence, holding the pen in my fist like it was a chisel to his heart where I etched my unspoken words. For Shakespeare, I would not just answer the question about Macbeth’s plot to murder King Duncan. I would argue that everything foreshadowing this assassination proves Macbeth was out to betray his king all along — that he was born a traitor.
This made my teachers sit up and take notice. ‘Your writing is quite refreshing,’ the History teacher would say.
‘Thank you,’ I’d reply, then quickly turn away before she picked up (as some had the perception to) that the source of all this was a wound. The English teacher could tell more than she let on, once pulling me aside to give me a talking-to over a written piece she’d been unable to fault technically, but found lacked emotional risk. I bitched and moaned about our teachers with my schoolmates but on some level, we respected how seriously they took our development as ‘well-rounded, balanced people’. I sensed I was watched over even by teachers who believed my particular disposition, though unchosen, was perverted. ‘I can’t believe Siya claims to be a Christian but chooses that lifestyle,’ one of them said to a girl in a lower grade than me when she became a Matric after I’d left school. But all I’d done was ask questions about Christianity.
In the context of the unconditional acceptance being wrought out amongst us, it was what it was.
Near the end of my Matric year, my family faced some crises so I just achieved the results I wanted. After exams, I was told by some classmates to go look on the Dux Achievers list.
‘What for?’ I asked.
‘Your name is there,’ they replied.
I giggled. ‘Nah, I’m not on that list.’ There must have been some mistake.
While I was completing end-of-school paperwork, I passed the admin offices and foyers. Someone else was near one of the expensive, people-who-belonged-there plaques; I wouldn’t have even known which one to look at. ‘Siya, you’re Dux,’ she was saying.
I looked. Under the column headed ‘Top Boy,’ I saw S. Khumalo in gold letters. I didn’t realise someone else is called that in our grade. Top Boy? Jesus Christ, I’d been on top of a pile of boys and I hadn’t known it? No, wait. There was a big gold dot next to the Top Girl’s name. That meant she was Dux. Oh, I was the academic Top Boy, I realised, relieved I hadn’t missed out on a fantasy come true. How had I passed if I couldn’t figure out what that meant? If I couldn’t even plan my own achievements so I could experience their whole unspoken purpose — Josh next to me in the end? This was like the night he’d declared his interest: I was completely unprepared. Had I been born unprepared? In any event, he’d realise I’d only climbed to the top of that pile of boys so I could yell from its pinnacle, ‘Do you see me now?’ And it still wouldn’t have been high enough because then it wasn’t an organic achievement, but one pulled off for him. It’s nothing personal but smarts don’t make people think, ‘Damn, that one was a keeper.’
It’s okay, Siya; this one’s for you to celebrate with your friends who have not messed with your feelings. Ah, but they’d immediately pick up that the biggest part of my joy was missing. Then they’d figure out the backstory and say, ‘Argh, shame’ the way they had when one of the hot rugby player nerds drew my attraction to him out to toy with me. Those friends knew and loved me better than I was ready to be known and loved. I left that moment, as I had many others and the Matric Dance, too determined to protect my dignity to let go and celebrate. The moment was always a minefield.
The Top Boy before me had been a pretty Indian guy whose favourite colour was the blue of copper sulphate crystals. Prior to him and me, it had been white boys all the way back to when Jan van Riebeeck arrived, so to speak. The year after me, it was a gay black kid whose family was probably Jehovah’s Witnesses. He went on to become a chartered accountant.
I also got the prize for creative writing. That’s what my teachers had been pushing me towards. It felt like their bittersweet way of remembering the boy that Josh forgot. Though, they weren’t supposed to know about what almost was, let alone conspire for my consolation prize.
More than a year later, when I was in military basic training — I’ll explain! — Josh and I got back in touch. Without studies to insulate me from my feelings for him, I was a camouflaged goner, man down without a pile of green-blazered boys to stand on or foxhole behind.
As we chatted on Mxit about his relationship with Online Guy, I sensed it was intense and sado-masochistic. His boyfriend was borderline abusive. At the risk of sounding like I wanted to rescue him, I sent him lyrics from a song that speaks to the difference between being desired and being valued.
His response was brief but powerful: ‘And?’
I kept quiet, having weighed my desire to tell him my unchanged truth against my fear he would run even further than I could catch him. His boyfriend and I also chatted a bit. He nicknamed me Mr Anderson (Neo from The Matrix, I guess) and I called him Clark Kent because one of those names was his first name, and because he’d had to have superhuman strength to make his own way in the world at his age. His backstory involved being thrown out by his family home because his ‘Mormon Aunt Bitch’, as Josh described her, had issues with his sexuality.
I still have vivid memories of Josh’s copper hair waving in the ocean bluster under that coastal town’s skies. Whenever I go to the gym around where he lived, I replay that part of my life. I look at buildings unchanged in over a decade, and see our see-through ghosts running past the holiday apartments. If I strain my ears, I hear the sea breeze and remember our laughter bubbling over the traffic. Other Siya, to his credit, would have run ahead to let us duck out of the path and talk until Coach van der Handsome came running past, doing his head count. ‘Guys, you’ve got to run faster than this at Kearsney on Wednesday!’ he’d say, jabbing at his wristwatch.
‘Of course, we will!’ we’d insist, knowing we were a lost cause.
In one of my dreams, Josh and I were standing on a cliff edge in the sunshine.