“Local guys wanted”: homoerotic photography, censorship, and national belonging in apartheid South Africa – the case of Alternative Books (1981-1991)

Abstract

This article explores the singular case of Alternative Books (AB), a South African publisher of homoerotic photography active in the late apartheid period. While AB's titles broadly engaged established Western aesthetic traditions of the male nude (salient in gay print cultures of the twentieth century), their erotic scenes frequently played out against national landmarks and symbols, suggesting a distinct mode of vernacular homoerotic photography. Given the widespread disenfranchisement of gay men during apartheid, this study considers the affective and political potential of such images for reconciling same-sex desire with national identity, albeit for a limited (that is, predominantly white) historical audience. First, to plot the history of social homophobia and anti-gay legislation in apartheid South Africa, this study considers censorship discourse a compelling barometer of the state's attitude towards male homosexuality during this time. Second, via comparison with contemporaneous homoerotic commodities distributed in apartheid South Africa, accessed from the GALA Queer Archive, this article suggests that AB's visual language uniquely challenged heteronormative associations with the South African landscape to open the nation to queer possibilities.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

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

Acknowledgements

This article is dedicated to Thys Greeff (1943-2022). My research was made possible through funding by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa. Please note, however, that any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed here are my own, and the NRF accepts no liability in this regard.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 See, for example, Baines (2020), Clowes (2001), Froneman (2011), Hayes (2017), Newbury (2007), and Viljoen (2006 & 2014).

2 It is useful to note that while research on AB is virtually non-existent, their catalogue is partially represented in several noteworthy institutional collections in South Africa: the majority of the books were acquired by GALA in 2020 (GAL0042), explaining their absence in the study by Sloss (2019); several books form part of the Africana Collection of the University of the Witwatersrand; and a single title is held by the Hiddingh Hall Library of the University of Cape Town.

3 Most of the books were ultimately banned. River Rafters (1990) and Breakaway (1991) were the only titles declared ‘not undesirable’ when first presented to the PCB (Western Cape Archives and Records Service (WCARS) IDP 3/400, nr. P92/9/20; IDP 3/409, nr. P93/4/6). Following successful petitions to the Publications Appeal Board (PAB), the embargoes on Shoreleave (1987) and Desert Patrol (1989) were repealed in 1993 (WCARS IDP 3/403, nr. P92/12/1; IDP 3/403, nr. P92/12/2); a likely result of the introduction of the Publications Amendment Act No. 90 in 1992, which expedited the appeals process and led to the unbanning of thousands of publications (Matteau 2012).

4 According to Carolin, the ‘first iteration of the Immorality Act came into effect in the late 1920s and prohibited sexual relations between those classified as European and those classified as natives. This law was amended several times between 1950 and 1988 to intensify restrictions on and penalties for interracial (and later same-sex) physical intimacies’ (2017, 133).

5 Black male homosexuality was, for example, disciplined in a contradictory fashion by the state, and even deemed permissible in certain milieux. According to Currier, while the regime ‘maintained an ‘obsessive interest’ in policing white gay men’s sexualities’, black men were more likely to be prosecuted for sodomy than white men in South Africa in the mid-to-late twentieth century (2012, 29). However, by way of Elder (1995), Falkof notes that ‘the common practice of migrant black mineworkers taking or becoming ‘wives’ was excluded from state legislation in part because ‘homosexuality helped to contain the threat of unbridled black male sexuality’ within the hostel space’ (2019, 285). Moreover, this article cannot fully account for the prevalence of homophobia in black communities during apartheid. For perspectives on the notion of homosexuality as ‘un-African’, as well as the colonialist origins of this discourse, see Dlamini (2006).

6 The Afrikaners represent the singular case of a subaltern white minority (descended from Dutch settlers) which deployed considerable ideological force to achieve parity with, but distinction from, their wealthier and more powerful British counterparts during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Afrikaner ethnic identity is therefore historically predicated on the myth of the Afrikaners as a ‘chosen people’ (divinely ordained to rule), notions of (white) racial purity, and the centrality of the Afrikaans language – a creole derived from Dutch, and first spoken by slaves and servants in colonial South Africa. In other words, the constructed synonymy of Afrikaner identity and South African identity during the years of NP rule must be understood as a process that has its origins in colonial ideology and reached fruition in the apartheid regime. It is also useful to note that the history of intra-white competition for dominance during colonialism, which culminated in the South African War (1899-1902), continued to inform hostilities between the Afrikaners and white English-speaking South Africans well into the apartheid era.

7 Nevertheless, it is worth reiterating that the government largely failed to curb the exchange of homoerotic commodities (Sloss 2019). Therefore, I am not particularly interested in the material effects of censorship (or the lack thereof). Instead, this study considers censorship discourse a compelling barometer for the broader homophobic sentiments propagated in apartheid South Africa.

8 It is admissible that such qualities were used interchangeably with the idea of a moral majority, given that a slew of ‘undesirable’ media (including most of the titles published by AB) was banned specifically according to Section 47 2(a) of the Publications Act, which homed in on any object that is ‘is indecent or obscene or is offensive or harmful to public morals’ (Stemmet 2005b, 138).

9 The first title published by AB in 1981 (and banned the following year), Man, also includes an epigraph of various quotations by renowned artists and art historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; together, they champion the male nude as integral to the canon of Western visual art.

10 Link/Skakel emerged as the monthly newsletter-cum-mouthpiece of GASA. In 1985, the publication disbanded and transformed into the widely distributed (later bi-monthly) tabloid newspaper, Exit, the only South African publication aimed at a queer audience that appeared consistently in the late apartheid period (Davidson and Nerio 1994). It is still in circulation.

11 See, for example, ‘Not just another pretty face’ (1983), ‘Klein Enterprises presents direct from America … ’ (1985), ‘Campus men of California’ (1988), and ‘Klein Enterprises’ (1990).

12 See, for example, ‘Hunks of the year calendar’ (1983), Hunks of South Africa (1984), and Mail a male (1990).

13 A fair amount of overlap occurs between the genres of erotica and pornography, creating slippages that scholars have attempted to resolve at moral or ethical, political, and aesthetic levels, with no sign of consensus (Corneau and van der Meulen 2014). Nevertheless, to situate AB as erotica, I have adopted the fairly conventional view that erotic imagery is more ‘stylized, artful, and subtle … and by its suggestive nature … leaves room for a vast array of interpretations and imaginings’, whereas pornography apparently does not (Corneau and van der Meulen 2014, 498).

14 See, for example, Carolin (2019), Scott (2022), and Sonnekus and van Eeden (2009).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Research Foundation of South Africa: [Grant Number: 98572].