Alternative Books in black and white: race and homoeroticism in South African male nude photography from the apartheid period

ABSTRACT

Representations of black-white homoeroticism and sensuality between men of colour in apartheid-era male nude photography aimed at white gay men, which, in South Africa, were exclusive to selected titles published by Alternative Books (AB) (1981–1991), are remarkable yet neglected in queer African studies. In this article, I explore how sexual apartheid was respectively maintained and transgressed in the historical reception of such photographs by two radically different readerships: that is, by censors involved in proscribing homoerotic commodities, and by AB’s intended audiences. Drawing from historical censorship reports on AB’s titles, I propose that the inconsistent treatment of photographs from these publications according to the racial categories of the men depicted is a particularly revealing iteration of selective homophobia and ‘official’ perceptions of homosexuality during apartheid. Considering, then, that AB’s titles anticipated a historical minority readership comprised of queer insiders rather than homophobic outsiders, I make the case for a corrective by ‘outing’ the queer and anti-racist potential of such diverse homoerotic images, which rendered intelligible possibilities for intimacy repressed elsewhere in consumer markets that catered to predominantly white gay audiences and that were, in a sense, complicit with the state’s whitewashing of male homosexual identity and desire.

KEYWORDS:

• Apartheid South Africa
• censorship
• homoeroticism
• male nude photography
• queer archives and markets
• race and representation

Acknowledgments

This article is dedicated to Thys Greeff (1943 – 2022).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this case, the term ‘black’ is contingent on the historical context in which these photographs emerged and refers to subjects who, during apartheid, were excluded from the white norm and variously classified as either African, coloured, or Indian. While collapsing such plural identities into a single category is not ideal, I do not intend to deny the ethnic particularities of these categories but to make explicit the binary logic of apartheid ideology and white supremacy. Elsewhere, I consistently use the terms ‘man of colour’ or ‘men of colour’ (MOC) and ‘people of colour’ (POC) unless more distinction is essential.

2. Surviving material, including, for example, photographic negatives, loose photographs, and galley proofs – as well as other publications, such as international physique magazines, that Greeff identified as important influences (personal communication, September 20, 2020) – are at this stage informally held by an acquaintance of the former publisher.

3. However, this article relies mostly on purposive historical examples that involve African (black) peoples specifically and, therefore, cannot fully account for the varying attitudes towards male homosexuality, or the degree to which it was tolerated and even celebrated, in certain communities of POC during apartheid. Nor can it offer a sustained critique of the modes of homophobia amongst such peoples that emerged from the complex intersection of racial identity, sexuality, and, for example, Islam.

4. They comprise the Arthur Brown (1953–1976), Herb Klein (1986–1997), Roger Loveday (1961-1968), and Hugh MacFarlane (c. 1940–1960) collections.

5. AB, for example, ‘featured prominently in … consumer networks for male nude photography, including the national gay press, in apartheid South Africa’ (Sonnekus, 2023, p. 18), whether in the form of book reviews, readers’ letters, advertisements, or mail-order brochures for the publisher included as supplements in selected issues of Link/Skakel in particular. Therefore, I anticipate that there was considerable overlap between the readerships of AB and those of the papers discussed in this article

6. The influence of physique magazines on AB’s titles is, for example, plain in their emulation of the classical iconographies of such early publications, which recalled Greco-Roman antiquity as halcyon days when homosexuality was revered and not condemned. However, a selection of AB’s titles also radically severed the racist connection between such ideals and whiteness (Sonnekus, 2023).

7. Not until the early 1960s were initial steps taken towards reforming laws broadly criminalising homosexuality in the US (Eskridge, 2009). Such homophobic attitudes were also significantly exacerbated in the mid-twentieth century by the moral panic known as the ‘lavender scare’, which painted gay men and lesbians as particularly susceptible to corruption by communist forces (that is, the ‘red scare’) (Johnson, 2023). While the implication is not that queer POC were somehow exempted from homophobia in this period, it is notable that when the ‘lavender scare’ came to a head with the purging of gay men and lesbians from positions in the American government, comparatively few POC were employed as civil servants (Morgan, 1996).

8. Kobena Mercer (1994) makes this point with specific reference to the affirmative viewing of diverse homoerotic images by gay MOC whose plight for recognition was (and often still is) founded on being doubly oppressed in racist and homophobic societies. However, considering that Mercer (1994) later posits in the same volume that aestheticised images of MOC and black-white interracialism could produce a ‘shock effect’ on the part of white gay men, destabilising ‘psychic or social investments’ in racism (p. 216), I consider this notion of ‘evidence’ of communitas productive in other contexts and with different audiences in mind.

9. There is some evidence to suggest that this was the case: since state censorship had significantly slackened by 1992 (Matteau, 2012), thousands of publications were unbanned, and TBiA appeared in a second iteration in Kennedy (1993), when AB was, strictly speaking, no longer active in the sense of producing original titles – tellingly, in this version of TBiA, also no longer subtitled, the photographs of Zulu women included in the 1988 publication were entirely omitted.

10. See, for example, the exploration of the race politics of the contemporary South African gay men’s lifestyle magazine Gay Pages in recent texts by Andy Carolin (2019), and Lwando Scott (2022).

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article 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 PhD 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).