‘We’re not faggots!’: Masculinity, Homosexuality and the Representation of Afrikaner Men Who have Sex with Men in the Film Skoonheid and Online

ABSTRACT

This article employs the film Skoonheid (Beauty) to explore the manner in which normative, white Afrikaner masculinity still operates to expel gayness from its self-definition. What is particularly vexing to this investigation, however, is the occurrence of behavioural homosexuality among white Afrikaner men who possess a compartmentalised identity constructed from notions of nationalism, puritanism, patriarchy and homophobia. Oliver Hermanus's Skoonheid casts its main character, Francois van Heerden, as the archetypal disenfranchised white Afrikaner man, whose repressed homosexuality amplifies the anxiety and disempowerment he experiences in a post-apartheid world. His masculine identity is constantly under threat from racial and sexual 'Others', who highlight the hypocrisy and constructedness of the outmoded model of patriarchy that he reveres. The goal of this critique is ultimately to position such representations of 'ideal' Afrikaner masculinity (and its problematic relationship with homosexuality) in popular visual culture as indicative of related sociological issues that permeate the South African landscape. The article, for example, also briefly considers virtual or 'online' communities such as Kaalgat 24 (Buck Naked 24) that exist on the peripheries of mainstream culture and serve to facilitate connections among white, 'heterosexual' Afrikaner men who have sex with men (MSM). Ultimately, the author sets out to illustrate that for men like Francois homosexual behaviour is categorically disconnected from gayness, whether in terms of a commercial 'lifestyle' or sexual orientation: The act of having sex with men, in no way suggests belonging to the gay community or buying into any particular lifestyle. Homosexuality (or stereotypical, imagined ideas surrounding it) is still treated contemptuously in certain contexts, resulting in acts of expulsion and violence that re-inscribe the stigmas associated with 'faggots' in traditional Afrikaner, heteronormative rhetoric.

Keywords:

• Masculinities
• men who have sex with men
• visual culture
• virtual communnities