Written by: Tsholofelo Ranyane | Image By: Zanele Muholi
Homosexuality is as unnatural as blackness equals inferiority – to a bigot
I can distinctly remember the first time I went head-to-head with a black homophobe. It’s a strange thing to recall, especially distinctly, but the encounter was so profoundly upsetting that it towers above every other incident of bigotry I’ve ever come upon. Not to mention that the homophobe in question was my boyfriend at the time.
We had decided to flee the humdrum that comes with being two pitifully broke, young people living in Johannesburg and headed to a nearby hangout spot in Braamfontein. Tipsy on boxed wine and welling up with exuberance, we queued up for a night of mad, rhapsodic dancing. Upon entering, my ex noted that the place was crowded with homosexual men. It seemed an odd thing to note at the time, because in my tipsiness, all I could see was a continuous band of brown, carousing bodies.
Although the night was thickening in its vigour and festivity, witnessing my ex’s increasing discomfort caused a dwindling to my own exuberance. I’m not quite sure what led up to the argument (music and wine addle my brain) but I can clearly remember my face soaked in tears, my glass of wine trembling in my hand and my voice audibly reaching for the cosmos. Right there, amid the wild gyrating and budding hook-ups, was me, head-to-head with a man whose hatefulness was revealing itself like the sun of a thousand dawns. All the points raised in the argument are too lengthy to note here, but his one prevailing sentiment was that it was OK to hate gay people because of the unnaturalness of homosexuality. “God created man and woman to procreate, not two men or two women”, he’d say. His weak attempts at using religion and biology to justify his unwavering hatred for people because of their differentness took me back to the first time I read The Venus Hottentot:
If he were to let me rise up
from this table, I’d spirit
his knives and cut out his black heart,
seal it with science fluid inside
a bell jar, place it on a low
shelf in a white man’s museum
so the whole world could see
it was shrivelled, and hard,
geometric, deformed, unnatural.
These are the words poet Elizabeth Alexander imagined Sarah Baartman would have said on her autopsy table as Georges Cuvier dissected her lifeless body and, in the greater context of her troubled life, her humanness, in the name of science. She was taken from her native South Africa and shipped to London where she lived as a freak show for the bulk of her adult life. She was gawked at, proverbially tarred and feathered with her ‘otherness’ as her one great crime, while white fingers pointed at her in delighted mockery. Her exhibitions occurred at a time when scientific racism was frequently used as justification for white imperialism and even slavery. Scientific racism is the usage of scientific techniques to sanction the belief in racial inferiority and superiority.
I couldn’t help but wonder how he felt he was any different to the white man of yore who felt justified in placing people like him and me on a spectrum of existence somewhere between civilised European and barbaric ape – somewhere between human and animal.
In his thesis, naturalist Georges Cuvier compared Baartman’s genitals to those of orang-utans and ‘her vivacity when alive to the quickness of monkeys’.
Cuvier is one of many scientists of the 18th and 19th century that likened Africans to apes and used their respective studies as proof of a natural racial hierarchy. Along with misinterpreted Bible verses, scientific ‘findings’ were used to perpetuate the notion of innate, black inferiority and to justify oppression.
And as my ex was harping on about the unnaturalness of homosexuality and alluded to God’s disapproval as proof of homosexual inferiority and heterosexual superiority, I couldn’t help but wonder how he felt he was any different to the white man of yore who felt justified in placing people like him and me on a spectrum of existence somewhere between civilised European and barbaric ape – somewhere between human and animal. He is an educated man; he knows that wherever bigotry thrives, the air is drained of freedom and an entire people are made to suffocate. He knows of the transatlantic slave trade; of apartheid; that his very parents were oppressed at the hands of bigots who held the belief in this spectrum so dearly. He sees how the effects of this oppression has trickled down to his welfare and will trickle down to the welfare of his future offspring. How is he saying gay people are “morally inferior” any different to Dudley Kidd describing Africans as “hopelessly deficient”? He uses Leviticus 18:22 as ammunition against gay people while the ammunition used against the Africans of old was Genesis 9:20-27 – both bullets in the same barrel of prejudice used to wage terror against anyone non-white, non-straight, and non-man.
And herein lies my gripe with the black homophobe. He will complain about the wage gap between him and his white counterparts , bemoan poor service received because of the colour of his skin, is riled when he is called kaffir but has no reservations about yelling “don’t touch me, faggot” when accidently stroked by a gay man. He tries to glean sympathy from the world because “being black in a white man’s world is so hard!” while the gay man and lesbian woman who live under his foot are constantly brutalised. I will not venture into which struggle is ‘harder’, but my humanity will not allow hatred to fester in places where compassion is needed, without raising my voice about it. Black homophobe, I will tell you what you are so fond of telling your white neighbour: CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE! Examine your history and dig into the depths of your humanity to garner empathy for your fellow marginalised man. Check yourself.
