“Gays, it is said, are moving from the swish era into the macho era”: mapping the Butch Shift in the early South African gay press

Abstract

Drawing from a content analysis of early issues of the gay newspapers, Link/Skakel and Exit, I map the force with which the masculinization of gay culture, the Butch Shift, entered the white gay imaginary in South Africa in the 1980s via transnational exchanges with comparable print and visual cultures from the Global North (especially the United States) and related processes of indigenization. Along with other relevant editorial and commercial content, selected advertising images for South African gay leisure spaces invested in macho iconographies are discussed as prominent sites for shifting white gay male identity away from effeminacy and toward hypermasculinity in this period. The sissyphobia (or anti-effeminacy attitudes), misogyny, and race politics that informed such discourses are also addressed, along with some polemics against the Butch Shift that appeared in Link/Skakel and Exit at the same historical juncture.

Keywords:

• Butch Shift
• gay men and masculinity
• gay press
• indigenization
• South Africa
• transnationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Jackson, “Real Men.”

2 Nor can this article offer a sustained discussion of the historical integration and celebration of effeminate gay men of color – affectionately referred to as moffies in Afrikaans⁵⁸, a term lacking the vitriol of its English variation, “faggot” – and their forms of cultural expression (including drag) in selected communities of POC during apartheid or the contribution of such practices to South African gay cultural heritage. See, for example, Chetty, “A Drag at Madame Costello’s”; and Ramsden-Karelse, “Moving and Moved.”

3 For a history of the increasingly consumerist tone of the Advocate, which, by the 1990s, had transformed from a local activist paper into a fully-fledged glossy lifestyle magazine, see Sender, “Gay Readers, Consumers, and a Dominant Gay Habitus.”

4 Tyler, “Boys Will Be Girls.”

5 Weinberg, Speaking for Vice, 9.

6 Connell, “A Very Straight Gay.”

7 Levine and Kimmel, Gay Macho.

8 Odets, Out of the Shadows.

9 Connell, “A Very Straight Gay,” 737.

10 Chauncy, Gay New York, 50.

11 Ibid.

12 Green, “Gay but not Queer,” 536.

13 Taywaditep, “Marginalization Among the Marginalized.”

14 Tyler, “Boys Will Be Girls,” 35.

15 Gallo, Different Daughters.

16 Levine and Kimmel, Gay Macho.

17 See, for example, Herdt, “Coming Out as a Rite of Passage”; and Levine, “The Life and Death of Gay Clones.” The Stonewall Riot, precipitated by continued police raids and the harassment of patrons at establishments that catered to the gay community, in this case, the Stonewall Inn in New York, is considered a watershed moment for the mobilization of gay rights in the US in the twentieth century.

18 See, for example, Humphries “Gay Machismo”; Reilly, “Top or Bottom”; and Taywaditep, “Marginalization Among the Marginalized.”

19 Cole, “‘Macho Man’.”

20 Green, “Gay but not Queer,” 535.

21 Levine and Kimmel, Gay Macho, 18.

22 Lahti, “Dressing Up in Power.”

23 Robbertze, “The ‘Masculinity’ Movement,” 16.

24 Exit/Link-Skakel Collection (AM 2723).

25 Cameron, “Unapprehended Felons.”

26 Ratele, “Apartheid, Anti-Apartheid and Post-Apartheid Sexualities.”

27 Elder, “Of Moffies, Kaffirs and Perverts”; Retief, “Keeping Sodom Out of the Laager”; Sonnekus, “Africa is not for Sissies.”

28 Sonnekus, “Africa is not for Sissies.”

29 Elder, “Of Moffies, Kaffirs and Perverts,” 59.

30 Sonnekus, “Local Guys Wanted,” 7; Holmes, “White Rapists Make Coloureds.”

31 Retief, “Keeping Sodom Out of the Laager.”

32 Sonnekus, “Homoerotic Photography,” 9. See also Van der Westhuizen, “Race, Intersectionality, and Affect.”

33 For an in-depth critique of the historical white bias of the national gay press in South Africa, see Sonnekus, “Homoerotic Photography.”

34 Levine and Kimmel, Gay Macho, 10–11.

35 Morgan, “Pages of Whiteness,” 281, 291–292.

36 In earlier decades, so-called ‘health clubs’ or bathhouses formed an essential part of South African gay men’s social and sexual worlds and were, indeed, restricted to a male clientele. However, such spaces were few and far between in South Africa by the 1970s and 1980s. Nor were they explicitly ‘gay’ in ways similar to the bars and clubs discussed in this article: they were primarily homosocial spaces appropriated by some gay men to facilitate homoerotic encounters. See Galli and Rafael, “Johannesburg’s ‘Health Clubs’.”

37 Gevisser, “A Different Fight for Freedom,” 41.

38 Considering that Hillbrow was historically a ‘grey area’ where the decrees of spatial apartheid were flouted in an unprecedented fashion, Johannesburg’s LGBTQ + community was relatively racially integrated in this period. Nevertheless, there is evidence that POC were often denied entry into gay bars and clubs, a practice which was on the increase by the mid-1980s and not only in Johannesburg. Notably, Hillbrow became the first officially deracialized neighborhood in Johannesburg in 1986, but this decision was met with severe backlash from the editors of Exit, who, during the 1987 parliamentary elections, notoriously rallied support in the paper for the National Party, which sought to recreate Hillbrow as a “white area,” a prominent example of the historical modes of intersectional shifting amongst some South African white gay men that I referred to earlier. See Gevisser, “A Different Fight for Freedom”; and Conway, “Queering Apartheid.”

39 Gevisser, “A Different Fight for Freedom”; Dungeon Club, 5.

40 Burt, “Menergy at Mirage,” 5. See also “Fridays now ‘Men Only’ at Equusite,” and the advertisement for Heaven.

41 Roche, “New Durban Bar,” 3.

42 Stines, “Cloning Fashion”; Gevisser, “A Different Fight for Freedom.”

43 Lahti, “Dressing Up in Power,” 189. See also Cole, “Macho Man” and “Fashion or Dress?”; and Levine, “The Life and Death of Gay Clones.”

44 Levine and Kimmel, Gay Macho.

45 Ibid., 95; McCormick, “Finding Johannesburg’s Gay Leathermen.” Also see the advertisement for Lane, one of the various proprietors of leather ‘gear’ that consistently advertised in L/S and Exit in the 1980s.

46 Stines, “Cloning Fashion,” 139.

47 Sonnekus, “Local Guys Wanted.” Also compare the extensive collections of international physique magazines and male nude photography distributed in South Africa in the twentieth century held by the GALA Queer Archive: the Arthur Brown Collection (AM 2829); the Roger Loveday Collection (AM 2845); and the Hugh MacFarlane Collection (AM 2636).

48 Johnson, Buying Gay, 95.

49 Ibid.; Snaith, “Tom’s Men,” 77.

50 Mercer, “Homosexual Prototypes.”

51 “Lang Wag Was Moeite Werd”; “New Macho Bar Opens at Dawsons,” 5.

52 Gevisser, “A Different Fight for Freedom”; Nardi, “The Globalization of the Gay & Lesbian Socio-Political Movement,” 569.

53 Ibid., 569.

54 Lauritsen, “Political-Economic Construction,” 222.

55 “American Vibe a Real Hit”, 3.

56 Kynoch, “Of Compounds and Cellblocks.”

57 While I do not assume cognizance on the part of the reviewer of the same-sex practices amongst some black men that were common in mining compounds during this period, it is a notable irony. See Moodie, “Migrancy and Male Sexuality.”

58 “Jamesons [sic] Nou Butch Op Donderdae,” 2. This passage has been translated from Afrikaans, the language in which L/S and Exit appeared (alongside English) for the period under review in this article. Afrikaans is a creole language derived mainly from Dutch that emerged from the interaction between indigenous peoples and European settlers in South Africa during colonization.

59 Jameson’s advertisement, 3.

60 See, for example, “Women-Only Night Aimed at ‘Correcting Neglect.” The historical and contemporary marginalization of women and POC in urban gay enclaves has been well-established: literature on the issue typically propose that the forms of economic and cultural capital that streamline access to participating in the “gay scene” (in South Africa and internationally) are disproportionately distributed amongst middle-class white gay men. See, for example, Barrett, and Pollack, “Whose Gay Community?”; Puar, “A Transnational Feminist Critique”; Skeggs, “Matter Out of Place”; Valdes, “Mapping the Patterns of Particularities”; and Visser, “Gay Men, Leisure Space and South African Cities”.

61 Ward, “Queer Sexism.”

62 Ibid., 165.

63 Green, “Gay but not Queer,” 535.

64 Bergling, Sissyphobia.

65 See, for example, Baker, “No Effeminates Please”; Engelstein, “Spartacus Magazine”; Lumby, “Men Who Advertise for Sex”; and Saucier and Caron, “An Investigation of Content and Media Images.”

66 See, for example, “Is Drag a Drag?”; Lewis’ letter to the editor of Exit; “The Gay Survey”; and “Views on Queens.” Considering that drag culture was particularly pronounced in some communities of POC during apartheid, and held entirely different (that is, more buoyant) affective values in such communities,² it is possible that the denigration of ‘queens’ in L/S and Exit was also informed by racism. However, since the authors of the material consulted for this article were not forthcoming in this regard, such a critique remains necessarily speculative.

67 Freeman, 10.

68 Argonaut, “Macho and Ultrafem,” 3.

69 Freeman, 10. Gayle is comparable with other highly coded in-group languages prevalent in twentieth-century gay subcultures in the Global North and historically trickled down from its origins amongst LGBTQ + POC to become a key (but by no means universally accepted) feature of South African gay cultural heritage. See Baker, Polari; and Cage, Gayle. Again, it is possible that racism and anti-effeminacy attitudes significantly intersected here.⁶⁶

70 Olivier, “From Ada to Zelda,” 221.

71 Soja, Thirdspace, 67, 69.

72 Schroeder and Zwick, “Mirrors of Masculinity,” 24.

73 “New Bar for Hillbrow,”10.

74 “Stud Party at the Barn,” 5.

75 Davidson and Nerio, “Exit.”

76 “The Gay Survey.”

77 Bergling, “Sissyphobia and Everything After,” 30.

78 See Robbertze, “The ‘Masculinity’ Movement”; Poofte, “In Defence of Camp”; Van der Laagen, “Up With Camp!”; and Zipp’s letter to the editor of L/S.

79 Snaith, “Tom’s Men,” 83.

80 Poofte, “In Defence of Camp,” 16.

81 Indeed, “[i]n their most polarized forms among gay men, both feminine and masculine expressed sensibilities suggest some reactivity. The man is not seeking himself; he is reactively embracing or rejecting the person that others expect him to be. ‘Straight-looking, straight-acting’ and highly effeminate gay men are sometimes examples of such reactivity.” Odets, Out of the Shadows, 50.

82 The race politics of the South African gay men’s lifestyle magazine Gay Pages (which was founded in 1994 and is still running), for example, has been the subject of several critical studies. In this regard, see Carolin, “South African Gay Pages,” Scott, “Paradoxes of Racism,” and Sonnekus and Van Eeden, “Visual Representation, Editorial Power, and the Dual ‘Othering’ of Black Men.”

Additional information

Funding

My research was made possible through funding by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa under Grant 98572. Please note, however, that any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed here are my own, and the NRF accepts no liability in this regard.

Notes on contributors

Theo Sonnekus

Theo Sonnekus is a postdoctoral research fellow with the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg. He holds a Ph.D. in Visual Arts from Stellenbosch University and recently contributed chapters to the Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness (2022) and Troubling Images: Visual Culture and the Politics of Afrikaner Nationalism (Wits University Press, 2020).