You Have to Be Gay to Know God. Siya Khumalo
to happen. My more immediate concern, as I vaguely recall, was relearning eating and walking. I was skin and bones. My panicked mother took me to the doctor. He insisted I was healthy. ‘What’s healthy about this?’ she protested. He gave me something to help me gain weight and it worked! She took me back to complain, ‘He’s swollen!’
The doctor said I’d been fine before and I was fine then; that’s just what the food supplement did. Add that to everyone’s fear of letting me do anything in case I got sick again, you’ll see why I became a fat, sheltered kid whose weight yo-yoed up and down. My face probably screamed, ‘Bully me!’
I had been born in 1987, my younger sister followed practically holding my heel in 1988, and my younger brother holding hers in 1989. His name translates to something like, ‘That’s all folks!’
When I was about four or five my parents moved us to a house in another corner of the township. We’d been there for months or years when one afternoon, I got a strong urge to go to my grandmother’s house. I pestered up a storm. A family friend agreed to take me. I was quiet the whole way. When we arrived, it was crowded and rowdy. My maternal grandparents ran an in-house shebeen to make extra money. One of their sons was a cop who did things by the book but they’d somehow made it work since apartheid days. There was a soccer match on TV, which took my discomfort with the scene above my normal tolerance. I hated sports, an oddity my maternal grandmother found infuriating. ‘What use is a grandson,’ she’d joke affectionately, ‘that I can’t watch sports with?’
I wanted to go back to my parent’s house. I must have been crazy, asking to come here! Not caring about losing credibility, I prepared to pester someone to take me back when a stern voice in my head said, ‘Sit!’ Startled, I planted myself on the chair next to the front door and stared at the ceiling fan to pass the time.
The next morning, we woke up to hear my parents’ house had been robbed and my family held hostage at gun and knifepoint. One of the burglars had slapped my four-year-old sister out cold. No one in my family felt safe in that part of the township after that. Dad had previously been mugged on his way home from work. The expression for this baffled me. ‘Ngibanjwe inkunzi,’ he reported, with pent-up tears in his bloodshot eyes. My siblings and I repeated these words amongst ourselves, baffled and shaken. Ngibanjwe inkunzi literally means, ‘My bull was grabbed’; you say it when you’ve been mugged.
Years down the line, our family life was racked with more traumatic incidents. My parents’ house was burgled twice while Dad was away working the night shift. He once drunkenly asked me why I hadn’t defended the house like a man. I must have been ten? Eleven? I eventually realised that beneath that outburst was his fear that I wouldn’t survive as who I was, and it would be on him as a father. Love has funny disguises like that.
The question that repeatedly came up was, were all these troubles coming from the witch Satan had assigned to our family? Just as every black township family has a ‘family farm’ in its background, each of those has a resident witch. And witches don’t sleep.
After the hostage situation, my parents moved us back to my maternal grandparents’ house where they’d gone after being chased out of my paternal grandparents’ house. I changed schools from the one my father went to when he was a kid to the one my mother went to when she was a kid. At seven, my life was reaching its first full circle. It was then, before the dream about the walking stick, that I first had a dream confrontation with my sexual interest in boys.
Awakening
There was a boy, also seven, who lived in the house across the street from where we were staying. Picture Taye Diggs at that age. He had a new bike. I walked across his yard one afternoon and saw him on it.
I didn’t give this a second thought until I dreamt about him a few nights later in high definition, slow-motion, full colour detail. My mind replayed the moment he glanced up at me, his eyes arresting mine. Sparrow chirps echoed in my ears — high-pitched, fitful. Demanding. They matched my heart hammering in my chest like it was being chased by his flexing legs. And the slower those legs pumped, the harder my heart beat — like there was somewhere I wanted him to get to but he was taking so damn long. My eyes stopped moving at the shaded place along his inner thighs where his skin was its darkest; a different darkness gradated into the shadow where his pants hung loose over his upper legs before tightening over his crotch. There, the fabric bulge folded under him onto the saddle. It strained, like my breath trapped in my chest; like the tubular growth in my groin as it pressed into the bed mattress that pushed back. I dimly sensed I was dreaming, my body sleeping front-down.
The sight of bike-boy’s legs pumping in slow circles matched itself with an instinctive, rhythmic pressing from inside me; I felt my hips, groin and torso grinding into mattress. The pressing feeling was concentrated, almost painfully, to a raging, bone-like hardness that searched for more pushback, more aggression, from the tickly demon fingers squeezing their way up me. Their pressing pulled me, insides-first, down that shaft as it throbbed between my legs, extending, engorging away from me, aching for someone to press against.
Was he cycling, or was he rocking and grinding himself on that saddle? My limbs restless, I realised I wanted to be the bike so those terrifyingly smooth limbs could clamp down on me with their boyish voluptuousness. I’d want him, not to pedal as loosely as he was doing, but to really squeeze himself against that bike; to use it. To crush it; to wear it out. The languid way he was cycling was torture; I felt like he was teasing me.
With all my will I squeezed the duvets between my knees; I rocked and bucked myself into the bed, running my groin up and down over it, feeling through the sheets the ribbing, the give and the springs of the mattress many of us cousins shared. Breathy and breathless, I was climbing towards something — and I woke up before I could quite figure what, exactly.
Too awake to black out and too tired from wrestling myself to get up, I realised I had a secret to keep buried and indoors. I was different. The other boys had sensed it, too. My mother had promised to get me a BMX with 20-inch wheels but she never had to: I never asked for one again, and I stopped spending enough time outdoors with other boys to need it.
It was 1994. The country, too, was undergoing an awakening. Black people were set to participate in the first democratic elections. In view of the conflict in KZN, everyone in our house was warned never to go outdoors with any political material — not a nipped election ballot sheet, nor a party flag, nothing. We kids were warned those things were not toys. And no matter if our peers were repeating things their parents had said, we were allowed nowhere near discussions on political leaders like Nelson Mandela or Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
Between 1990 and 1994, I also discovered there were neighbours who kept fireworks for special occasions. Like they had when Nelson Mandela was released, they launched those when the ANC won the general elections. Our newly-minted freedom was pretty pops of colour against the night sky. Not having fireworks, Mom burnt steel wool and waved it about, throwing sparks to the cool, darkened ground. The scourer looked like loopy joy scratching glow marks that quickly faded off the skin of the night.
She was dancing in the black-and-white polka dot maternity gown she wore when she was pregnant with my younger brother. My sister and I initially peeped out at her from behind the closed lower half of the stable door to the kitchen. I’m sure we hoisted our brother up to see; Mom swung past and picked him up, planting him on the ground. His subsequent fat-calved imitation of her dancing suggested he knew less than we did about the occasion. On Mom’s invitation to join her witch’s dance, we unbolted the door, swung it open and plunged ourselves into the cool night livened by her sisters’ ululation.
We’d danced to the front yard, my mother and aunts chanting, ‘We’re free!’ when a new kind of firework exploded — bone-rattling, rapid gunfire.
‘Mariya Ocwebileyo!’ Holy Mary! Mom’s shoulders jumped in shock, confused frown lines crossing the parts of her back I could see through the dress’s rip on the right shoulder. Steel wool tossed aside, she swept the youngest up while driving us towards the front door. Neighbours’ voices screamed in panic; adult feet thudded and little feet pitter-pattered into