Writing piece from zine
Queer spaces of the Past, Present and Future: a Daniel Lee Interview
By Owethu Kholofelo Tema
Daniel Lee (they/he) is a 20-something year old postgraduate student of history at the University of the Witwatersrand. Having recently completed a mini-dissertation exploring queer spaces with their connected stories and experiences within 1980’s inner city Johannesburg, Titled: ‘’From Heaven to the dungeon: Mapping the Production of Gay Spaces in Johannesburg’s Inner-city Nightlife in the 1980’s.”, Daniel has gained much knowledge and insight on the experiences and life of gay men during an interesting and shifting time for the city of Johannesburg and the politics of 80’s apartheid South Africa and through that knowledge has gained an understanding of the making of queer spaces within an urban framework. In this interview, we discuss queer space in the past, present and future.
Link to Daniel’s text is available in the bio on his Instagram (@dsnlee)
Owethu: So, what drew you to this topic?
Daniel: So, my interest in it started when I was going through the history of the power struggle in South Africa. And I realized quite early on that there seemed to be a lot more queer spaces and a lot more of a diverse queer scene in the 80s and 90s than there is now, with the caveat that when I say diverse, I referring to the number of spaces that have different music styles and different types of parties, not necessarily referring to diversity in terms of demographics. And so, from there wanted to sort of understand, why there was that difference in the number and sort of spaces that existed and what role that sort of diversity in terms of spaces might have played in? Sort of the queer consciousness of the 80s and 90s, while to some extent wanting to avoid reducing the conversation to one of politics and activism. So, the focus was more clearly oriented towards recreation and nightlife and how that affected how people saw themselves as queer people and how they engaged with queer people, not necessarily how that resulted in political transformation or the advancement of rights. And so, from there, the chat and the research became more clearly focused around what these spaces were, how they function and how people saw their time in those spaces. The research then took an ethnographic focus and was largely led by conducting interviews with white gay men who were engaging with these spaces throughout the 1980s.
Owethu: Is there any reason why you chose to mainly focus on white gay men?
Daniel: It’s because these spaces were predominantly white. During apartheid, in terms of like access to the city, right to the city, all that sort of stuff. Formal establishments were almost exclusively white in that they were the individuals who could create spaces and those spaces then were largely restricted to white people through apartheid legislation. Any licensed (alcohol) restaurant or club had to be segregated. What I can say is that one venue which is called the dungeon. Was able to like to override the segregation law because they didn’t sell liquor. So, they were able to have a more diverse crowd.
Owethu: So it was almost like a loophole?
Daniel: On the thing of loopholes, loopholes were very important to how people navigated sexuality in general during apartheid South Africa. So, a lot of the time the homophobic legislation existed and it did create problems for people. But, for the most part, there was an element of negotiability and like maneuvering, that could happen that was specifically accessible to white gays, which again then informs the focus. So, for example, one of the people that I interviewed was conscripted to the military. And he had a great time. Like he loved it. Because there was this level of negotiability. So, he found other queer people in the military and they sort of formed an enclave and they would look after one another and the colonel and the rest of the sort of military dudes just sort of turned a blind eye and chose to ignore it. And so, he faced absolutely no bullying, intimidation, horrible s**t.
Owethu: That’s so interesting because while I was reading your thesis I was surprised, through all the stories advertisements and pamphlets you showed in the writing, that there was space for such a wide and lively queer scene in Johannesburg even though the city existed within a country that was ruled by a Christian, conservative white supremacist regime. But as you said, this scene was allowed to happen because of the loophole and negotiability that white gay men were afforded by the government at that time. The apartheid regime must have been more concerned with racial segregation than dealing with queer people.
Daniel: On the racial, sexual segregation. The apartheid government laws and regulations about sexuality were stricter for whites than they were for blacks. And the homophobic legislation that was introduced was specifically targeted at curtailing white gay activity. Because if you think about apartheid as a sociological project, it’s largely about upholding a specific white identity. Calvinist. Segregated. Straight. Religious. Pro-capitalist. Middle Class, etcetera. And so, they were more concerned with curtailing white gay activity than they were black gay activity.
Do you know about the Immorality Amendment Act?
Owethu: No, I don’t.
Daniel: So, the immorality Act was the one that condemned interracial relationships, etcetera. And then in 69, following the forest town raids. Do you know about the Forest Town raids?
Owethu: Yes, I do
Daniel: An amendment was introduced that was specifically about homosexuality.
Owethu: Would you say the Forest Town Raid were like our Stonewall? As in an oppressed queer community rose up and rioted against the police?
Daniel: Yeah so, I think people do reference Forest Town as our Stonewall, but it’s different, right? So, there was no riot. But there was a concerted legal effort to free the people who were arrested, and that’s because the Forest Town raids targeted very wealthy white men. So the party that were there were like dentists, members of government, doctors, lawyers, etcetera. And so they obviously had the capital to stage a clear legal fight. And so, they got all of those people freed and then the apartheid government response was to amend the immorality act to include some homophobic stuff.
Owethu: In your opinion, what is queer space? Because I really enjoyed this one paragraph you wrote in your thesis that read, “This is significant, as it was not the reporting of homosexual activity, but the reporting of vice in general from which a sensed, queer character developed. This is consistent with the findings from the interviews I conducted - when asked how they knew where to find gay Joburg, the resounding response was along the lines of ‘I just knew.’ Here, Lefebvre’s notion of discursive space is relevantthe covert, ephemeral transmission of queer subtext is an intervention in the discursive realm. Rather than a ‘gay quarter,’ the space is defined as dangerous, sexually depraved, and to-be-avoided; in Houlbrook’s words, a site of “vice.”” Could you break down and explain this passage?
Daniel: So, what Lefebvre says is that space can be defined into three things: social space, physical space and discursive space. So physical space is as it exists objectively: form, streets etcetera. Discursive space is space as it is discussed or socially conceived, according to the hierarchical order. So, in this case, how the apartheid state sees and describes space, which is space as it is, navigated by individuals. So, what I’m talking about in that paragraph you quoted is discursive space or social space, it’s space as it is ideologically constructed in response to its physical and experienced element. So, I’m I’ll give you an example, right. So, let’s say an industrial area like Newtown. So physically it’s spread out, it’s non-residential, it’s disparate, highly active in the day, very inactive at night. In the day, it is male dominated because it is an industrial so then subject to the gendered division of labour and space, so it is then coded as a workspace. When people talk about Newtown. It is industrial, it’s where people do work. So, in the discursive realm it is an industrial area and that is separate from the physical reality that it is just a place where there are factories and it’s spread out and empty at night. Then we get to experience space, and so where most people will navigate Newtown and will see it exactly as it is coded (it is a place of work). If a gay man goes there, it takes on a different experience capture. It becomes a space where cruising can happen at night in particular, it can become a spot where homosexual activity can happen because in the day it is male-coded. If you stick around long enough, certain types of people will stick around. So that is how does three things work together. When the apartheid government loses control over certain spaces, it would impose it as a site vice or a place to be avoided. This is similar to how majority black neighbourhoods in America are oftentimes described as dangerous, as sites of crime as sites of sexual depravity. You could get raped there and so on and so on and so on. And my argument is that in Joburg, gay men understood that a site that is coded as morally depraved is a space that is opportune for gay activity. So they knew that these spaces were places where they could navigate gay sexuality a little bit more. They could do riskier stuff, and so the first step. In the creation of queer space, then is a sort of ideological relinquishing of that space to vice. So that is how then I argue that queer spaces are produced at their first level, but your initial question was how would I define a queer space? I would define a queer space as a physical space that is host to a number of queer experiences. And is understood as a place where those experiences can happen. So it takes it takes both experience and discursive elements to create
a queer space. So then I would define a place like Melville as a queer space even though there aren’t many explicitly queer venues in Melville, just liquid blue and rats.
Owethu: On the topic of queer venues, in your mini-dissertation there’s a passage that I like that said, ”This, coupled with political issues such as exclusion and the influx of nonqueer ‘alternative groups’ to queer clubs which can often result in the transformation of queer venues into alternative venues for the owners’ financial interests, results in queer venues, and the geography of the queer city, taking on a transient, ephemeral character.’’ What is your opinion about the current state and future of queer venues in Johannesburg? Especially venues like Babylon or Shakers? Because I, personally in 2022, don’t perceive them as explicitly gay clubs anymore but more as the type of alternative venues this passage writes about.
Daniel: We are losing explicitly queer venues. And they are being, I would say, captured by a broader, alternative or at least left-leaning social environment. But I would even say that ‘left-leaning’ is not guaranteed.
Owethu: Or like ‘youth culture’.
Daniel: Yeah. ‘youth’, ‘alternative’, somewhat ‘transgressive’ And I think that is a result of COVID and that is a result of the nature of Joburg’s queer community as one that is exceptionally divided. And as a result, the number of venues that are explicitly and somewhat exclusively queer is being reduced. I think we have three bathhouses left? There are no venues that you can expect close to exclusive queer demographics. And I would say that there is risk associated with that as we’ve seen with places like Babylon where the crowd can no longer be assured to be a specific, a sort of specifically safe place, a place where all forms of queer sociability can happen. And so as a result, I think that as a queer community in Joburg, we have less spaces than we do events. And so the queer community is sort of being rendered a…
Owethu: An aesthetic? Like it’s an aesthetic or…?
Daniel: I wouldn’t say aesthetic. What I’m trying to say here is that rather than spaces, we have spaciality, we have temporality. So at specific times, in specific places, hosted by specific people we have queer space.
Owethu: To close this discussion, what does this mean for future of queer spaces in Johannesburg?
Daniel: I will say that we are at kind of a point of crisis at the moment where, and this is again to do with COVID, it’s to do with like a general decline in nightlife in Joburg. Where space is no longer absolute. You can no longer say we have this gay bar; we have this lesbian nightclub or whatever, and that instead we rely on largely spaceless collectives and parties to carve out spaces for us in a very temporary sense. And so the issue then is that without certain guaranteed spaces our queer community is formless. And doesn’t have a number of spaces that it can consistently stake a claim to.
Owethu: Yeah, there’s no like anchoring point.
Daniel: And what that means for the future is very difficult because the second that you need to create a space, you then become reliant on profit. You also no longer have the same freedom to reject people at the door and at the end of the day you need to
meet your overheads. You need to meet your cost and when that happens you end up in a space where you can’t necessarily assert the boundaries that are as important to the project of creating queer space and then you’re in this weird sort of contradictory environment where your spaces are relied on people being in the know, they’re reliant on their existing in certain social circles. so we’re in this position where it’s very difficult to carve out explicitly queer spaces. And so we rely on collectives and then that opens itself up to a whole other host of problems.
Owethu: Like collectives can be exclusionary and exclusive?
Daniel: Yeah, and I think that’s issue with collectives, is that they have this whole other host of issues etcetera.
I mean, yeah, the future of like queer spaces in Joburg is… complicated.
Seventh Floor
Eighth Floor
Nineth Floor
1:25 Perimeter section, North Facade of Olympic Sports Centre
Perimeter model
A re-interpretation of Alvar Aalto’s Easy Chair model 406
1:5 final model (Covid pandemic restrictions)
