Pride Month — Mind the gaps in the rainbow

If memory serves me correctly, I have twice had consensual sex unlawfully. The first time I was at the World Universities Debate Championships in Asia somewhere. The sex wasn’t very memorable, unfortunately. I obviously couldn’t have known that before taking the risk of engaging in consensual same-sex sex with another adult, which was outlawed in the host nation. Desire trumped homophobic penal codes. We risked being convicted of a crime.

The second time, funny enough, was also at a student debate tournament, this time held in one of our neighbouring African countries. The sex, though also unlawful despite being consensual, was definitely memorable on this occasion. It was most sumptuous. We also managed not to get into legal trouble.

There is no thrill in engaging in consensual sexual activity with another adult knowing you could be convicted of a crime for doing so. The moral police — from homophobic family members to law enforcement officers — have a disturbing obsession with the sex lives of queer citizens. This happens in societies that are homophobic, and which criminalise same-sex desire. Such laws are wicked, and have no place in any decent society. This is still the reality in way too many countries.

Pride Month does not normally interest me much because issues affecting queer people should matter the whole year round. I feel similarly about the month as some women feel about Women’s Day or Women’s Month. I get especially annoyed when companies weaponise our struggle for their capitalist gains, like Uber vehicles on the Uber app appearing in rainbow colours for a few weeks or a Sandton company’s building illuminated in bright colours for a day or three. (And then what? Back to unchecked heteronormativity the morning after the final Pride party? Marketing gimmicks do not count as meaningful allyship.)

Nevertheless, I have found myself reflecting on aspects of the lives of queer people quite explicitly in the past few weeks as many of my friends, who are activists within the community, ramp up their content on social media, celebrating queer life and drawing attention to ongoing sites of struggle for justice and equality.

Straight friends take for granted the freedom to have consensual sex without fearing criminal sanction. It is important to recognise that for millions of queer people across the world, this is not the case. Discrimination against queer people is found both in the laws of many countries as well as in the attitudes, beliefs and actions of their fellow citizens within our communities.

Homophobic laws send a message to queer citizens that we are not equal in the eyes of the law, not regarded by the state as having inherent self-worth. This is why such laws are wicked, even in countries where they are rarely enforced. As a principled matter of equality, such statutes should not exist, quite apart from not being enforced. Every citizen should know the state takes seriously, affirms and promotes their rights to dignity and equality. When queer people have consensual sex but must do so under a legal cloud, our moral entitlements to enjoy rights to dignity and equality are trampled on.

In SA, of course, legal equality was achieved a while back, in part due to the work of queer activists and progressive allies who ensured it is constitutionally enshrined that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is not permitted in our country. That was and remains a massive constitutional design victory, bolstered further by victory in landmark cases over the years, all of which now comprise an impressive body of queer rights jurisprudence. But does that mean SA is a country in which queer people flourish? The answer is: It depends on facts other than your being queer.

There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as “the queer community” because none of us live single-issue or single-identity lives. If, for example, you are a butch, professional, degreed gay man, you likely have a better time in SA than black lesbian women, transgender people, men who are labelled “queens” because they are deemed effeminate, queer people living under conditions of poverty and so on. The intersection of class, income, gender expression, geography and other social facts and constructions, with one’s sexual orientation, mix in complicated ways to determine your quality of life in SA. The constitution’s promises are meaningless to the most vulnerable queer people in the country.

This is not to imply that any one of us can live a life wholly free of social discrimination in a world that is heteronormative and patriarchal. It is, quite simply, not easy being queer, even if you have money or muscles or multiple degrees. But the queer community isn’t homogeneous, and when we praise the overall architecture of the SA legal system, we risk rendering the struggles and experiences of some queer people invisible. There are minorities within minorities, struggles within struggles, and that is where the frontiers for greater justice are.

I watched Date My Family the other night, and the featured single who was looking for love doesn’t have biological sex, gender or gender identity preferences when it comes to dating. He dates anyone he finds attractive (assuming the feeling is mutual, of course). All three of his potential dates were gay men, and between them and their families the social attitudes displayed towards someone who is bisexual or pansexual were unfortunate. Some laughed at him off-camera, suggesting he is confused, while others implied it would be impossible for him to be faithful to one gender if he is attracted to men and women. All the usual stereotypes bisexual people are familiar with were trotted out. And they were trotted out, in this case, by gay men, their friends and families.

Straight people do not have a monopoly on ignorance nor on bigotry. Sometimes it seems as if there is an implicit hierarchy of acceptance within the queer community, which is why many gay men can often be as guilty of transphobia or of displaying odious attitudes towards lesbians as any homophobic straight person. Because we do not jail people for being gay, we think we are, on the whole, a safe space for queer citizens. And, yes, it is relative. I’d rather live in SA than many other countries where my sexuality would make me susceptible to a lynching. But we cannot be complacent. Once we accept there are many queer communities and not just one queer community, then we are ethically obliged to pay more careful attention to those for whom it is not yet uhuru.

True allyship therefore requires more than Pride Month symbolism on your app or an elite cheese and wine at your Sandton offices with some prominent queer professionals. The more difficult work to do is, first, to chip away at beliefs and attitudes that are false and dangerous. Many of us have received ideas, religious and cultural, of homosexuality being wrong or even evil. You have a right to hold such beliefs but are not entitled to state policies and laws that enforce them as secular gospel. We are not living in a theocracy. These dialogues must happen in our homes, schools, sports clubs, religious communities and other spaces.

In the world of work, a more useful response from corporates would be to include queer discrimination on their radars when doing social justice work. Racism and misogyny are the biggest but not the only forms of discrimination within corporate SA. A singular event during Pride Month or a bit of money made available to queer staff for an annual gay party does not root out systemic workplace prejudice. Get serious experts in to audit your company on a range of social justice issues, and to map out a journey of organisation cultural change, and systems changes, where needed, to align progressive rhetoric in recruitment brochures with workplace realities.

Pride Month is bittersweet. I personally enjoy enormous comforts and privileges as a gay professional man who lives openly, and with the enjoyment of a public profile of sorts. But, in comparison to tens of thousands of queer South Africans who live precarious lives and are victims of hate crimes daily and weekly, I may as well be a straight white man. That makes my individual freedom morally pathetic, in a way, because it is enjoyed in a world of un-freedoms for way too many queer people.

Equality is therefore not only about decriminalising same-sex sex. The legal victories were a massive start but not the end goal of the struggle for justice. While it is nice to not fear I am committing a legal sin when in the embrace of my partner, SA will only be a place in which queer people flourish when the promises of our gay rights jurisprudence are a felt reality for more than just a subsection of the queer community. We have a lot of work to do. We dare not relax just because we have liberal case law we brag about.

— McKaiser is a contributor and analyst for TimesLIVE  

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