‘No effort,no entry’: Fashioning Ubuntu and becoming queer in Cape Town

On a wet evening in March, I arrived in De Waterkant, Cape Town’s “Gay Village,” for the city’s 2011 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Festival.¹ While the parade may have ended three hours before, the streets were still alive with the bass and psychedelic strobe lights that pulsated from its string of cafés and bars. I met Thomas, a gay coloured man from the gender rights organization where I volunteered, to celebrate at a popular “gay” nightclub on Somerset Road. The queue wrapped around the club, and according to the people in front of us, would take 45 minutes to reach the door. We decided to stay because—at first—it seemed like people were giving up and leaving. It was not until the queue moved closer to the entrance that we saw what was actually happening. Bouncers announced a preliminary check of identification cards—except, as they moved down the queue, several black and coloured men² were told to leave without explanation or being asked to produce an ID. Patrons who resisted were threatened with arrest. When a bouncer approached us, Thomas asked why people were being thrown from the queue, and the bouncer referred to a sign on the cashier’s podium that read: “Right of Admission Reserved: No Effort, No Entry.”

A fuming Thomas turned and gestured at the sign:

This is absurd. They’re pulling people who don’t look like they belong. They assume they can’t afford a cover charge—much less drinks—because they’re not wearing brands. But it’s more than that. Bouncers assume they still live in the townships—and letting someone in their club from the townships would ruin their reputation. It’s not right, man. We live in a free democracy, but we still have to prove ourselves worthy of our right to be proud.

This article explores what looking and acting the part means for young, black and coloured gay Capetonians. Through interviews, observations, and surveys conducted over the span of five years, I examine how clothing communicates meaning, and I assess what this signification says about how the “rainbow generation,”⁵ or born-free youth, negotiate complex desires for—and means of—visibility. I also consult Women of Color Feminism and Queer of Color Critique to determine what clothing says about raced-class exclusion and the different scales of spatiality that delimit participation in De Waterkant, thereby contributing to geographies of sexualities work on belonging in “Gay Villages.” I use Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) concept of intersectionality to complicate multicultural iterations of Ubuntu, and instead draw from participants’ experiences in De Waterkant and black townships to productively rethink what Ubuntu can mean and look like through clothing. This marks an intervention in African Studies⁶ and an effort to apply Feminist and Queer Studies to the contradictions that compel strategic visibilities across a post-apartheid landscape. I draw from Carol Tulloch’s (2010) insights on “style-fashion-dress” in Soweto to read these strategies as imaginative assemblies that mark the body, articulate identity, and fashion Ubuntu as “confluence” (Stuitt, 2016)—an approach that considers how “Ubuntu communities in becoming” (Waghid, 2014a) can host forward looking, queer forms of belonging (Muñoz, 2009) in everyday spaces.

Ubuntu as “confluence”: Gay identity, fashion, and intersectionality

Gay men’s clothed bodies are entangled in the complexities of post-apartheid Cape Town. Bradley Rink (2013) shows how the discourse of Africa’s Gay Capital depends on evidence of gay men’s “consumer citizenship,” or conspicuous marking of the body with signs of its equality. Such notions of belonging, however, are complicated by the failure of democracy to significantly redistribute wealth and address disparities in housing and labor among those (previously) disadvantaged—leaving many in townships to which they were forcibly relocated during apartheid (Rink, 2016). Catherine Besteman (2008) argues such failures enable a shift from race to class segregation affecting options for community and expression. This disproportionately affects gay South Africans, whose supposed enfranchisement signifies the promises of democracy and conjures modernity’s contradictions—often inviting violence, harassment, and marginalization (Croucher, 2002; Currier, 2012; Munro, 2012; Swarr, 2012; Thoreson, 2008). Gay communities in Cape Town, in many ways, are figured as urgent sanctuaries from such “homophobia,” a point this article does not wholly discount, but how gay men occupy and use those spaces are still connected to apartheid and hegemonic forms of sexuality (Spurlin, 2006).

Such insights allow us to think differently about space in Cape Town. As a growing canon on the geographies of sexualities shows, how people are drawn to others can not only reveal local politics of race, class, and other categories that sexualize space and interpellate subjects (Casey, 2007; Held, 2009), but also show how those experiences are shaped by multiple, intersecting scales of spatiality that implicate local, national, and inter/transnational circuits of knowledge in the production of desiring and desired bodies (Andersson, 2015; Caluya, 2008; Hacker, 2007; Livermon, 2014; Nero, 2005). Andrew Tucker (2009b), for instance, explores how De Waterkant institutionalizes essential and racialized belonging in spaces firmly situated in the orbit of an international gay nightlife circuit. This insight is troubling for Gustav Visser (2013), who argues such standards—at best—affect what belonging looks like, and—at worst—“de-queers” nightlife’s potential. I am interested in how different scales of spatiality affect belonging in De Waterkant, and, like Graeme Reid (2003), the ways in which dress operates as a medium and analytic for sexuality that helps sustain and—at times—altogether transform spaces associated with popular imaginings of gay-friendly, multicultural democracy (Rink, 2016).

Such notions of multiculturalism have been increasingly paired with reductive iterations of Ubuntu since the mid-1990s. Ubuntu, a dynamic sociopolitical philosophy with a long, storied history of community building, communitarianism, and fostering trust and coalition among Africans in different contexts (Waghid, 2014b), has been co-opted by an intoxicating post-apartheid fervor that dilutes its insights and flattens subjectivities to evince the supposed success of participatory democracy (Donne, 2012; Kroeze, 2012). Meg Vandermerwe (2013) shows how such cathexis is incited and propagated through popular representations of unity and (South) African nationalism that not only obscure Ubuntu’s history, but also conflate its articulation with a broader initiative to counteract negative images of Africa in global media—leading to the 2010 FIFA World Cup, where Ubuntu acted as a profoundly affective technology by which Cape Town was framed as the epitome of a multicultural, progressive Africa. Melissa Myambo (2010), however, argues such iconography conceals tension between legislative equality and experience, which, if not masked, would threaten its possibility. It is this precarious yet pervasive and emotionally potent figuring that sutures popular imaginings of Ubuntu to democratic multiculturalism in post-apartheid Cape Town.

This article reconsiders the import of Ubuntu. Unlike conflations with post-apartheid nationalism, it is attuned to an urgent, growing discussion of Ubuntu’s insights on subjectivity in contemporary African contexts (Adeofe, 2004; Bamford, 2007; Barret, 2008; Bekker, 2006; Coertze, 2001; Cornell, 2014; Cornell and van Marle, 2012). Michael Onyebuchi Eze (2010), revisiting Africans’ histories of interdependence, tellingly defines Ubuntu as a social and political philosophy in which a “person is a person through other people”—a viable response, he argues, to the divisive excesses of “liberal individualism.” Veena Sharma (2013) demonstrates how this nuanced understanding disturbs modernity’s fragmenting calculus and offers alternative models for individuality. For Hanneke Stuit (2016), such potent(ial) individualism and materiality, like her notion of queer visibility, is a “confluence” of people, ideas, and ways of being that simultaneously reveal and navigate historical coevolution. Confluence, in this regard, not only describes Ubuntu in different contexts, a discursive multiplicity embraced by Hennie Viviers (2016), but also an assembled materiality (Stuit, 2016: 118).

I am interested in how clothing articulates confluence. Articulation should be understood as the imaginative integration of dress “parts” from different and sometimes divergent fashions to create a whole subjectivity (Kaiser, 2012). This speaking subject mixes fashions to wear socially intelligible articulations of identity, community, and other components of subjectivity. Tulloch (2010) frames this process in terms of the “style” or subjectivity conveyed by the clothed body, the “fashions” that affect clothing’s meaning in a given time and place, and the “dress” parts through which one speaks the self to others. Tulloch (2010) dispenses with oppositional or essential approaches to style, and instead, through analyses of dress in Soweto, South Africa, shows how articulations of subjectivity can involve negotiations of conventional fashions that are inseparable from—and transformed by—the space and time of their collective becoming.

Women of Color Feminisms and Queer of Color Critique illuminate how articulations of fashion enable Ubuntu’s becoming. This consideration draws from a lecture series at the University of Cape Town in 2016.⁷ I consult Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) intersectionality, derived from the problematic assumptions of civil rights law, to ascertain the multiple, mutually constitutive experiences shaping identity. As Roderick Ferguson (2004) shows, discrete notions of difference guide multicultural democracies—systems that rely on ideal models to purvey cultural and sexual citizenship (Beal, 1995; Hong and Ferguson, 2011; Melamed, 2011). AnaLouise Keating (2013) warns such politics can naturalize the fixed, essential categories that Crenshaw (1993) intends to disturb, but also argues that convention can still be transformative when contradictory experiences compel movement between spaces associated with static ways of being (Keating, 2008). Chela Sandoval (2000) describes this movement as a differential consciousness animating an imaginative, integrative, and context-specific choreography of (conventional) strategies to manage the particularities of time and space—a confluence, through dress parts, that inaugurates new vestimentary codes and practices attuned to intersectional experiences. This captures the essence of what Yusef Waghid (2014a) calls an “Ubuntu community in becoming”: one engaged by virtue of their “humanity” and “living” (2014a: 279).

The becoming of fashion, in such regard, ties Ubuntu to queerness. As participants choreograph dress parts evincing a confluence of different and possibly divergent ways of being, they work toward rearticulating conventional identities with regard for the intersectional experiences that multiculturalism often obscures. I want to know what these moments reveal about race, state, and sexuality in De Waterkant, and how fashion practices can transform the potential of space. The latter is concerned with how participants’ fashions can intentionally disturb multiculturalism; thereby enabling “queer,” Ubuntu communities committed more to “change” than hegemonic cultural or sexual citizenship (Waghid, 2014a). I argue such becoming facilitates queerness because, as José Muñoz (2009) might say, gay men’s clothed bodies wear ways to live the present yet pursue futures that are not “here,” like Ubuntu in a democracy, or fixed, like fashion, but still temporarily “make worlds” (Muñoz, 1999) more consistent with Ubuntu’s productive histories. This article shows what the mutually constitutive becoming of Ubuntu and queerness can look like, mean to, and do for gay Capetonians.

Research methods

I examine participants’ understanding and use of clothing through interviews, surveys, and observations. From 2010 to 2015, I traveled to Cape Town six times—with stays ranging from three weeks to two months—to speak with participants. I posted calls for participants in city newspapers, gay leisure magazines, and online forums for gay men to “meet and connect.” Participants were limited to men who were 18–30 years of age,⁸ or those who, according to respondents, most frequent nightlife and are often paired with representations of a Gay Capital.⁹ I focused on participants who identified as “black” or “coloured” to acknowledge their hypervisibility in gay tourism media and curate a venue for sharing experiences among the supposed benefactors of democracy.¹⁰ The latter involved organizing participant-driven discussions on this article’s arguments.¹¹ I interviewed 29 respondents,¹² who then introduced me to potential research participants in their social and professional networks. I surveyed 50 respondents from these networks to learn about nightlife and which spaces to observe. I then spent 32 nights at nightlife venues in De Waterkant and Gugulethu. I also examined Out Africa, a LGBT interest magazine, and The Pink Map, a gay events calendar from “Cape Town Tourism,” to observe popular representations of gay life in the city. Participant data is quoted with pseudonyms to ensure anonymity.¹³

I met interviewees wherever they felt most comfortable—often in cafés, libraries, or their homes. Loosely structured interviews lasting 30 minutes to 1 hour were recorded for transcription. Notes from informal conversations in nightlife and other public spaces were shared with participants for clarity and accountability—an exercise in collaborative feminist praxis¹⁴ (Swarr and Nagar, 2010) aligned with recent discussions on centering African words and voices—and disturbing notions of intellectual authority—in African Studies (Cohen et al., 2001; Miescher, 2005). This was carefully conducted with regard for how interrogating race can inadvertently reify categories I want to trouble—an insight that compels experimenting with “doing race differently” (Nayak, 2003). Acknowledging how research inevitably subjects participants to exotic notions of otherness (Watts, 2006), and the ways in which observing racialized practices might be amenable to a colonizing gaze (Knowles, 2006), I engage a reflexivity attuned to “shared political and theoretical investments” (Ali, 2006: 472). As a gay man, I am a partial insider to subjects’ struggles for queer community, but in this context, the privileges that my white, mobile, educated, American body signify also make me an outsider to the particularities of gay Capetonian experiences. Centering intersectional accounts of oppression and sharing a concern with exposing the violence endemic to a Gay Capital helped make the research situation a collaborative, consciousness-raising and coalition-building endeavor.

“No effort, no entry”: Fashioning “Africa’s gay capital”

De Waterkant is nestled between Cape Town’s Central Business District and Green Point—a predominantly white suburb on the Atlantic Seaboard. As a gay village, De Waterkant’s diverse offerings for leisure and sex garner significant reputation (Rink, 2016). Out Africa, a quarterly publication committed to “unwrapping the potential of the Pink Rand,” invites gay men to tour the village, explore its bars and dance clubs, and, as one participant joked, go “on safari” to find “a mate.” De Waterkant, however, performs specific scripts relevant to its target audience—foreign gay tourists. This means that the village must not only supply supple “gay” bodies, but also stage a pageantry sustaining fantasies of Cape Town’s bountiful “sun and sex” (Currie, 1997; Fleishman and Pather, 2014; Lett, 1989; Ryan and Hall, 2011). William Leap (2004) observes such performances on Somerset Road, where venues have been renamed to fit familiar forms of gay cultural and linguistic capital.¹⁵ Similarly, Visser (2013) asserts that venues’ orbit around western culture institutionalizes interactions shaped by local and global scales of spatiality. Rink (2008) identifies one such (trans)action as the compulsory, conspicuous accumulation of material commodities: “consumer citizenship.”

Admission standards at Cape Town Pride after-parties in 2011 demonstrate this kind of consumer citizenship. Participants agreed that “No Effort, No Entry” standards had three constants: closed-toed shoes, gelled or well-coiffed hair, and conspicuously branded American and European clothing. While the former may protect patrons’ feet from—as Seth, a white gay man from Durban jokes— “a broken bottle in one of Cape Town’s many bar-fights,” the latter two exclude patrons who cannot afford import tariffs on hair gel and western clothing brands, and specifically black and coloured Capetonians whose hair often requires gelling to straighten (Mann, 2013). Black and coloured men describe the process and effort required to afford such practices as making it. Participants define “making it” as completing a university degree, finding a job, and affording life in the city—an ideal of democratic citizenship referenced by University of Cape Town’s social media invitation for students to “make it here.”¹⁶

“No Effort, No Entry” standards enforce practices that—when documented—produce spectacles of such enfranchisement. When participation—or consumption—is captured by The Pink Map and Out Africa, or documented at Pride events, it fits Dennis Altman’s (1997) concept of “Global Gay”—an epistemic framework through which gay subjects are only intelligible as “gay” when their participation in civil society is visible to transnational publics. Advertisements that show gay men shopping on Somerset Road or enjoying spa holidays, for example, are intelligible evidence of “equality” because such participation is framed as unfettered access to the market and read as gay men’s access to familiar forms of social capital. Participants claim that specific clothing evinces this kind of citizenship—conspicuously branded dress composed of fine, durable, imported fabrics that, as Thomas said about clothing at Pride 2011, “look expensive or, like (his) ‘NYC’ sweater, foreign.” Such artifacts produce what I call a global gay ideal: a composite of American and European clothing brands—Abercrombie, Express, Puma, Nike, American Eagle, and Armani Jeans, among many others, which as Tobi, a gay coloured man from Lavender Hill said, “gay men in Europe and the states wear.”

While such brands may connect wearers to a global ideal of gay visibility, their wearing is indelibly shaped by a local context of economic inequality. Indeed, global gay ideal brands and their import tariffs remain cost prohibitive for most participants, and as Thomas said, are often sold at V&A Waterfront—a shopping mall, built on a “Fan Walk” for the 2010 World Cup, that now serves as “a retreat for tourists, and a museum for us.” He described shops as silent and empty exhibits, guarded by security, with exorbitantly priced items that “one dare not touch.” Similarly, Khayone, a gay black man living in Woodstock, joked that he and his colleagues who work at the mall are trained in “Pretty Woman” style—to be “weary of one’s own.” Khayone claims better access to the brands he sells than most. As a Puma employee, he is “paid” to trek the Fan Walk from the rail station, dine out, and visit nightlife in his “walking advert” attire. When asked about how this affects access to De Waterkant nightlife, he laughed:

Khayone: “Bouncers usually don’t ask questions when I’m dressed right. I’m sure they think ‘hey, he does well for himself,’ and I guess I do. They think I’ve made the effort to belong.”

These are different from brands in Cape Town’s designer fashion scene. Participants say “Africanist” ensembles of Zulu, Xhosa, and “Euro-American” styles paired with fine fabrics and “flashy” jewelry—Selfi, Momo, Molyneux, or “higher-ends at Woolies and Edgars”—are, as Thomas said, a sign of a “growing middle class” because, while they are not as expensive as American and European fashions, they convey “respectability and hard work.” Such signification, Khayone claimed in regard to V&A’s Edgars, shows one can actually “afford what they wear”—as opposed to “walking advert” attire. The raced and classed terms of this distinction are instructive: unlike brands connecting wearers to upwardly mobile black and coloured Capetonians, or gay men in other parts of the world, African Brands reify apartheid era race and class relationships, and as participants charge, signify one is “lazy,” still lives in a township, and lacks commitment to democracy.

This is captured in Thomas’ narration of Pride in 2011. Potential patrons were thrown from the queue because their black and coloured, clothed bodies demonstrated a “lack of effort” toward enfranchisement, class mobility, and—therefore—an inability to “pay a cover or afford drinks.” Branding is essential in this regard. While I observed branded, Africanist attire earning admission in De Waterkant, which Khayone indicated was not “always the case” for black and coloured men, no participants made it inside venues with “solid color sweaters, dingy pants, or non-label tanks” that they associated with African Brands. White men and visibly (or audibly) foreign patrons, however, were prioritized regardless of dress—often without needing to produce an ID. Fashion in these instances served a specific purpose: classed-race exclusion. Clothing is steeped in the particularities of the post-apartheid city, and because it signifies individual effort, it can conceal and excuse critical, structural differences. Participants’ experiences, however, show how dress and articulations of style can also reveal these differences and disturb the reductive evidence upon which multicultural iterations of Ubuntu rely.

“Making it” in Cape Town

Thomas celebrates moving to Cape Town, receiving a degree from a community college, finding employment, and having an apartment in the city. Through an acceptance of—and compliance with—such institutionalized terms of visibility, he now has a “party flat,” where he and his friends “pre-game” with music and wine, “change into their best,” walk to De Waterkant, and return with friends and potential lovers whom they “collect along the way.” Participants who make such commitments are empowered by their ability to assimilate and “be visible” in spite of their socioeconomic marginalization. First and foremost, “making it,” as used by participants to reflect on such success, sanctifies racial self-help, autonomy, and effort in spite of the residues of apartheid that continue to limit opportunities for community and visibility. “Making it,” as a survival strategy, however, is not a criticism of existing social order or demand for a more just distribution of wealth and privilege, but is a means by which one is recognized as a legitimate citizen.

When participants demonstrate such efforts, they are more likely to find transportation, gain admission to De Waterkant nightlife, and enjoy the romantic, sexual, and social benefits of the post-apartheid city. Shawn, a white gay man living in Sea Point, claims that he and his friends will only “keep company” with black and coloured men who “aren’t lazy” and can “keep up with them.” Shawn went on to say that “keeping up” had little to do with race, but was—instead—more of a statement on “how well one can dress” or “how much money he can spend at the bar.” Similarly, Jon, a white gay man in Bantry Bay, clarified that his choice to date only white men was “not about race,” but because he was “doing well” and did not want to get “tangled up with a black or coloured dude who needs money all the time.” While Shawn and Jon may articulate the politics of respectability through non-racial rhetoric, their comments on desiring the other convert exalting racialized figures (Han, 2015) to a public disavowal of white supremacy because racial transgression via desire asserts acceptance of a plural menu of sex options (hooks, 1992). It is also useful to note that Jon and Shawn reported little difficulty with admission standards as white men. Therefore, it becomes all the more imperative to consider how such respectability, and its impact on black and coloured gay men’s sexual and social opportunities, acts as material evidence of raced-class segregation.

Respectability must be carefully maintained through practices that display one’s successful efforts toward assimilation. Simon, a gay black man and recent graduate from the University of Cape Town, claimed that while he has moved to the city, completed a post-secondary education, and secured income that sustains the demands of De Waterkant nightlife, he must continue to “hold his own.” Holding one’s own includes conspicuous displays of privilege and consumption—all of which further communicate that one has “made it” and can continue to “make it.” Participants referred to such an epitome as a sequence of efforts—from never wearing a clubbing outfit to a venue more than once to toting the latest smartphone or spending more than others on drinks—to prove their respectability and subsequent financial stability.

The global gay ideal is a medium through which black and coloured gay men communicate they have made it and can hold their own. As a component of “No Effort, No Entry” standards and the ideal they institutionalize, such brands signify a range of commitments allowing one to mark themselves as a legitimate, post-apartheid, gay subject. Black and coloured men who strive for such respectability use American and European brands to counteract the controlling discourses that can limit visibility. When placed in conversation with broader social, economic, and spatial constraints, clothing also shows commitment to democracy and multicultural notions of Ubuntu. Black and coloured gay men use clothing to perform being previously disadvantaged because it simultaneously commits to the above discourses and, as a display of privilege, can be changed or arranged to maintain an appearance that one can hold “his own.”

The terms of success, equality, and visibility that define how one becomes a respectable gay subject are not as accessible as advertised. When participants who try to identify with the vestimentary demands of De Waterkant cannot “make it,” many face significant financial and emotional hardships. Jovan, a gay black man from Khayelitsha, recounts his experiences with respectability and De Waterkant nightlife. He completed a “university education,” “found a job in the city,” and spends a great deal of “time and money on clothing”—all efforts required to fashion the body as a good, post-apartheid subject—but he still cannot afford to move from his township or access De Waterkant nightlife, which, he claims, is not always guaranteed when one is “dressed well.”

As I sat on his bedroom floor, watching him sift through “clubbing gear” in his closet, Jovan reflected on how he “spends his last” on outfits, covers, and drinks when it “doesn’t make a difference.”

Ah, I remember this jacket. Zara, I think. I skipped lunch for two weeks to afford it. But I’ve only worn it once. Some people might not notice, but my buds would. I just can’t keep up with them. I’m always paying for their drinks and showing them a good time, and when I can’t pay, they’re gone. I try. I really do, but sometimes I hit a rough patch. I could sell my closet to a thrift store, but then where would I be? Right where I started. Nowhere—but here. (Jovan)

Queer cultural labor in De Waterkant

Jovan’s disenchantment illustrates how contradictory experiences can yield eccentric and potentially ruptural discourses on cultural and sexual citizenship. Silo, a black Zimbabwean-immigrant, for instance, criticized a dance club in De Waterkant for significantly increasing cover charges for events—particularly Cape Town Pride—when an atypical population of black and coloured men from the townships (attempt to) stay overnight in the city. He argues “covers make a statement on the kind of person the club wants representing its services”—a person who participates in practices that “demonstrate one’s effort to have a career, work for money, and budget for a night-out in the cover.” Landon, a gay coloured man from Mitchell’s Plain, makes a similar analysis of Pride and how admission standards operate in De Waterkant: “all these terms and false promises work together for a single purpose—to change or forget us.”

Participants recounted ways to challenge and disrupt such terms. Landon, for instance, complies with the dress required for De Waterkant venues, but—upon entry—he becomes an unexpected representation of what a gay coloured man “looks like.” After our interview, Landon invited me to join him and his friends at a dance club on Somerset Road. Landon’s American-brand jersey and slim, “dressy” jeans granted him admission, but once on the dance floor, he began shedding clothing. As he danced with guys, often white, and they grew closer and made physical contact, he would remove his jersey and hand it to one of his friends (with whom, I later learned, he takes turns watching their clothing), revealing a “no-name” and “drab” sweater that would not comply with the club’s admission standards.¹⁷ While he admits that covering “cheap” sweaters with jerseys is a strategy for admission when he cannot afford a “polo or button-down shirt,” Landon claims that such events also “toy” or “play” with his partners’ expectations of how he should dress and—ultimately—show that he can still be gay and gain admission to De Waterkant nightlife even if he has not made it.

While such strategies may interrupt evidence of what it means or looks like to “make it,” its performance is still enacted in spaces structured by the violent policing of race and class. Landon’s dance partners may be resistant to his wardrobe switch, thus risking conflict, the attention of club bouncers, and removal from the premises. Such moments may also invite threats of physical violence from patrons who—after a few drinks—may be more inclined to partake in their own form of vigilante justice and, as one participant warned, “punish” those who cause a scene. Landon shared a particularly disturbing experience when, after shedding his jersey in the restroom, two white guys whom he had seen laughing—possibly at him—approached, offered a drink, and tried to lure him from the club for sex. When Landon refused, he was held against a wall while they poured a drink in his mouth. No one seemed to notice or care, he says, until his friend intervened and pulled him away. It was not until he and his friend left and began looking for a “safe space to wait until the first bus” back home that he passed out. Landon’s drink had been drugged, and if it had not been for his friend, he claims, he could have been taken from the club, raped, and/or killed.

Landon’s experience demonstrates the risks of upsetting conventional fashion and the complexities of race and class they convey and sustain. Participants recounted similar events, from moments of overt racism, sexism, and physical violence, to microagressions during interactions with bartenders and fellow patrons in De Waterkant. Navigating club admission standards, and styling the body with regard to those terms, therefore, requires attention to the risks of oppositional strategies in a given time and place—particularly for those who have not made it. This may mean that more capacious forms of subjectivity, and the opportunities associated with visibility, are performed by subversive conformity. For example, Lucas, a gay coloured man living in Salt River, has “made it.” He has a flat, a “well-paying” career, and a closet “to show it.” While he celebrates his success, he also knows how “hectic and nearly impossible” this can be for other gay men coming from the townships. As an experiment in oppositional strategies, he uses his flat as a “hub” for his friends who still live in the townships, where they can stay overnight, borrow clothes, and carpool with him to the city, thereby giving them a chance to participate in conventional fashions and ways of being in De Waterkant.

Lucas and Landon show how the cultural labor involved in conventional fashions, and the terms of effort upon which they rely, can be upset and used in different ways. When Landon played with the expectations of his dance partners, he made unapologetic proclamations as a gay coloured man who had not “made it,” but, nonetheless, was (still) gay and out in De Waterkant. Lucas’ refusal to recognize his entire subjectivity in the hails of dominant publicity exposes the intersecting complexities that shape experiences of gay identity. Landon and Lucas instead perform “queer cultural labor” (Bailey, 2013) by working with the labors and practices of sustaining community to disrupt conventional notions of fashion and identity, and—in effect—revise, expand, and generate formations that blur the lines between the ideal models that sustain multiculturalism. This work uses, yet exceeds, the divisive logics of appointed time to envision a new vestimentary system that retools present fashion codes and enables queer aesthetics¹⁸ through which Ubuntu’s becoming in a multicultural democracy can be productively rethought.

Ubuntu’s becoming: Toward a queer aesthetic

While Landon’s experience with “being drugged” is certainly frightening, it does not deter his desires for visibility. If anything, he said it encourages him to “make new memories” and further motivates him to “be a part of something.” Such experiences lead him and others to reimagine how gay visibility can be achieved and used. Clothing that earns admission to De Waterkant nightlife for black and coloured men, in other words, might communicate a certain kind of subjectivity, but residues of unmet promises and unfulfilled dreams continue to haunt choreographies of style. Such wearing of dress not only exceeds the conventional logics of fashion and (gay) style in Cape Town, but also violates the conditions of possibility for Ubuntu multiculturalism when the affective surplus not contained or satisfied by the realities of partial enfranchisement is harnessed to articulate multiple ways of “being” and “being part of something.”

Black townships stage the transformative effects of such articulation. While many discourses frame black townships as “the closet” or an anathema to a free gay life in the city, participants show how these spaces are lively, contested laboratories for re-making nightlife and the parameters of Ubuntu. This is evident in Gugulethu, a black township where, as Lasan, a self-identified “field volunteer,” claims, residents and organizations coordinate “free and safe services” as alternatives to the raced and classed terms of city nightlife. Patrons, local stores, and residents transform unpaved roads and adjacent fields into temporary nightlife spaces where community “DJ’s” set 3–4 cars’ radios to the same station, general stores open as full-service bars, and people gather under flickering lights to create an energetic dance floor where “black, coloured, white, gay, and straight couples dance and have a good time together.”

Conventional fashions are reworked in these (con)temporary spaces. While certain brands may signify efforts toward “making” it in De Waterkant, those brands in black township nightlife are, according to Han, a gay black man from Khayelitsha, signs of one’s “experiences and belonging.” When asked about these experiences, he gestured toward the crowd and quipped, “just look at what these guys are wearing!” Indeed, the clothed bodies dancing and laughing in the square were different from those usually seen in De Waterkant. Worn shoes caked in township mud, paired with frayed, cut-off jeans, were often accompanied by vibrant polo shirts or conspicuously branded sweaters, topped by athletic hats and flashy sunglasses. The latter, Han suggested, were a defiant nod to “Perceiving Freedom,”¹⁹ an installation on the Sea Pointe promenade depicting a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses—ostensibly referencing “Prisoner in the Garden,” a photograph of a similarly clad Nelson Mandela at Robben Island Prison—as a sign of black and coloured (economic) possibility. Criticism of its implications, along with glasses accompanied by “ratty or less fashionable” clothing, generates a material and discursive ensemble that, as Kamo, a gay black man living in Mowbray, says, enables a “style that starts conversation while allowing you to afford and enjoy glasses.”

Such confluence of experience, desire, and discourse affects what Ubuntu means and looks like in black townships. When participants were asked about “Ubuntu” and its function in township nightlife, many tied it to recent conversations surrounding racism, classism, and “empty promises” at Cape Town Pride.²⁰ Clothing, Han says, “gets people talking when nothing changes with gay city life.” Similarly, Kamo argues that styles in black township nightlife show how “race and class continue to affect (our) experiences with being gay.” This Ubuntu reveals the intersecting experiences otherwise flattened by multiculturalism positing universal “gay equality,” and its enactment in everyday spaces, like street blocks in black townships, demonstrates how fashion’s mutable materiality can not only fuel “Ubuntu communities in becoming” (Waghid, 2014a), whose productivity reimagines life and—indeed—the world anew, but also queers space for such forward-looking aspirations. The aesthetic and spatial anomalies therein materialize confluent experiences as embodied evidence of navigating multicultural democracy. The result, as Kamo went on to say, is the essence of “Ubuntu” and, for him, queerness:

I think Ubuntu is movement. It’s the struggles we face as gay black men, how we overcome those struggles, and how we make it work. It’s part of being South African—living and creating as we speak. It’s how we survive, and if you ask me, it’s how we become queer. (Kamo)

Fashioning Ubuntu and becoming queer

This article has shown how legible evidence of gay equality is institutionalized and used to police clothed bodies in Cape Town. Participants indicate that clothing is invested with discourses that signify effort toward becoming a successful, post-apartheid, gay subject. Vestimentary commodities that connect gay men to an “imaged transnational community of lovers” (Boellstorff, 2005) are fetishized as signs of such success, while more affordable African Brands are read as evidence of black and coloured unwillingness to take advantage of gay and racial equality. This is due—in large part—to persistent socioeconomic inequality and the inability to afford cost-prohibitive commodities. “No Effort, No Entry” standards screen clothed bodies as material evidence or willingness toward enfranchisement, and they reveal how classed-race segregation fashions the gay friendly and non-racial democracy broadly circulated in tourism media.

A focus on the “rainbow generation” shows how young gay men play a crucial role in fashioning Ubuntu. The spaces in which a gay friendly democracy is documented are predominantly frequented by young men, whose birth indebts them to a teleological vision of a state in which they are obligated to be appropriate cultural and sexual citizens. The dreams of democracy, then, are born(e) on the shoulders of the rainbow generation, whose participation in civil society shapes popular representations of Ubuntu. These men, however, confront uneven topographies of wealth and privilege, which necessitate queer temporal vernaculars that repurpose time-imbued categories—like fashion codes—to navigate the terms of a multicultural democracy. Participants for this article embrace the affective intensities of a fragmented life, lived at junctures of past and present, to curate accessible, vitalist futures that simultaneously include and transform.

As participants reiterate style, imaginatively mix dress, and fashion the contexts in which they live, they perform a queer aesthetic that provides a glimpse of something more. This syncopated choreography is composed of confluent dress parts that materially evince the multiple determination of subjectivity—in spite of discrete models that flatten the complexities of identity. The discursive content of Ubuntu in this context, then, is not the reductive tenets of a multicultural democracy, but instead the copulation of different experiences, identities, and ways of being revealed by the insights of intersectionality. The confluence of different dress parts signifying these intersections, and the disruptive, forward-looking, and, as Kamo might say, “queer” styles and spaces it enables, is one way Ubuntu becomes among black and coloured gay men. This intervention in African Studies, drawn from Women of Color Feminisms and Queer of Color Critique, presents hopeful itineraries for a “Rainbow Nation,” built by its rainbow generation, that are animated by the labors and potential of becoming queer.