Phylicia Oppelt: There is a young man who sits on a bench outside our Rosebank offices. This is no ordinary bench; it's really special.

It is bold and red, erected by a famous artist to celebrate 100 years of the Sunday Times. It is a bench that symbolises words, and images, telling stories of contestation and freedom.

This bench has become the young man's home. From here he watches the traffic and the busy, employed world around him.

He has changed since I first saw him about a year ago. Initially, he was quiet, slightly effeminate and slightly downcast in his behaviour.

But his demeanour has changed and his eyes have become bold. For he is no longer a homeless black man only, but has become a gay, homeless black man who lives on a red bench.

As he struts in front of the building in high-heeled shoes, my male colleagues avert their eyes. It is just too much for some of them to witness this "perversion" of manhood.

He sashays around Rosebank, ignoring the giggles and jeers that seem to come from mainly uncomfortable young black men.

I'm rooting for him. I want him to survive the uncomfortable titters because he makes us - the masters and mistresses of the heterosexual universe - confront something within ourselves, especially when we become so uncomfortable that we make the security guards chase him away from the red bench.

For, like the photographs of Zanele Muholi that unforgettably and uncomfortably wend their way into our consciousness, he will not disappear because we don't like him, because he does not fit into our notions of how a black young man should behave.

Arts Minister Lulu Xingwana said the Innovative Women exhibition of which Muholi was part, was offensive, immoral and against the notions of social cohesion and nation building.

But whose nation was Xingwana talking about? The one that is a perfect heterosexual construct comprising mommies and daddies, girlfriends and boyfriends, men and women, husband and wife, Adam and Eve?

Xingwana's criticism made me curious about Muholi's work and so I looked for the photographs. Surely, I thought, they must be the epitome of licentious vileness.

Surely the minister must know best, having been appointed the guardian of our nation's cultural content and having agreed to spend R300,000 of my tax-paying money on funding the exhibition?

And there they were, images of naked women curled around and into each other.

But these were not just any women - they were black and lesbian and that is what made them awful and vile.

Was it good art? I'm no art critic, but I liked the emotional warmth in the photographs, the ordinariness of their bodies; the tenderness that emanates from Muholi's work.

Yet I somehow doubt that this woman's work has the power Xingwana anointed it with - to fundamentally erode our social cohesion and morally pervert the sons and daughters of our nation.

As I looked at the images, I wondered whether I would expose myself to a photographer's lens in that manner. Would I show myself in all my naked vulnerability as an act of my independence, of my courage to be who I am?

I think not.

Muholi's women had the courage to expose themselves sexually and physically, but I inhabit the heterosexual world that often makes cowards out of women.

In this world, we often pathetically punch against glass ceilings while smiling at a male colleague who has just sexually harassed us. We smile because we know it is a waste of time to complain, to be regarded as sissies who can't roll with the corporate punches. We walk into malls and into the ogling of a man and we pretend we don't see it. We cringe when we hear our sisters derided as sluts and whores and we don't say a word.

And so I look at Muholi's women with a certain amount of envy for they have come out victorious, having swallowed the bitterest pill of gender and racial discrimination.

The minister's reaction is not merely a little storm in a lesbian teacup, precisely because it asks us to side with the heterosexual team. From where I'm standing, Muholi's team has won the day.

And, like the young man on the red bench, they will not disappear into the marginalised, dark closets to which some among us would like them to be exiled.

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