Finding my Own Way to Happy and Gay

By Barbara Castle-Farmer

As South Africa grew into democracy, so too did the author grow into wholeness and authenticity.
The challenges she met in the 60s are still those faced by gay people today... how to tell their folks, when to ‘confess’ to their friends, what to tell their employers, and more.
Should you be lucky enough to have a friend, a child, a brother, an aunt or a colleague who is gay the book answers many questions you might never dare ask.
And if you are already out and perfectly happy, then you may find that this is ‘your’ story. And you’ll have a good laugh remembering all the pitfalls and pratfalls you experienced along the way.
Although the book is set in South Africa, under the rule of an apartheid government, the coming out process poses the same hurdles, obstacles and crises no matter where you live. It's simply a case of ‘same circus, different tent’ and in spite of all the available reading it’s no easier coming out today than it was last century.
A comment often made by people coming to terms with being gay is that they feel isolated, as if they are the only gay person in the world. The distortion of the past and denial of homosexuality feeds this social and personal isolation. Without a 'history' gay people are denied a sense of self, a sense of worth and often feel they have no voice. This book puts matters to rights, with bells on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barbara Castle-Farmer
• Release date: Nov 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9780620632065

Barbara Castle-Farmer

Athough she trained as a journalist Barbara's father insisted she start out on something ‘safe.’ And so she caught the bus to her first paid job, which was with the Cape Town City Council as a draughtsman in 1965. She had a varied career changing jobs almost every year and including a variety of professions from receptionist, secretary, factory manager, insurance advisor, TV sales manager, and just about everything else short of prostitution. But finally in 1983 she found her long overdue place in the business world ... as a writer. She worked for Reader’s Digest in offices around the world, wrote freelance for magazines & newspapers and had loads of fun as an advertising copywriter for 25 years. Barbara works currently as a freelance copywriter and is published regularly in newspapers and magazines.

Book preview

CHAPTERS

Author’s Note

Chapter 1: Emperors, Kings and Drama Queens

Chapter 2: The Year I was Born

Chapter 3: Brownies Didn’t Cut it for Me

Chapter 4: But Horses Did

Chapter 5: Apartheid and Homosexuality

Chapter 6: Confusion Reigns

Chapter 7: The Way to a Man’s Heart

Chapter 8: Kill or Cure

Chapter 9: My First Love

Chapter 10: Hitching to Oblivion

Chapter 11: Pony Trekking and Hetero Sex

Chapter 12: My Foxy Awakening

Chapter 13: A Favour Returned

Chapter 14: A Watershed Night

Chapter 15: Homos, Robbers and Rapists

Chapter 16: Finding Friends like us

Chapter 17: Queer as a £3 Note

Chapter 18: Legless in Europe

Chapter 19: Setting up Home in the Closet

Chapter 20: Thoroughly Unenlightened 70s

Chapter 21: Getting to Know Me

Chapter 22: Getting to Like Me

Chapter 23: Was I Butch or Fem?

Chapter 24: As Camp as a Row of Tents

Chapter 25: Living the High Life

Chapter 26: Los Angeles and Gay Pride

Chapter 27: Coming Out to Strangers

Chapter 28: It’s Not Catching

Chapter 29: Affairs of the Flesh

Chapter 30: The Songs of Our Lives

Chapter 31: Awash with Other People’s Kids

Chapter 32: A Chance Meeting

Chapter 33: Parting is Not Sweet Sorrow

Chapter 34: Loved at Last!

Chapter 35: Gay Fact or Straight Fiction?

Chapter 36: Letters from Elmarié

Chapter 37: Hey I’m not Waving!

Chapter 38: How’d you Know you’re Gay?

Chapter 39: Lipstick Lesbians

Chapter 40: Useful Sidesteps

Chapter 41: A Finnish Outing

Chapter 42: The C Word

Chapter 43: Who Does the Cooking?

Chapter 44: Does God Love Gay people too?

Chapter 45: When One of Us Dies

Chapter 46: The Company of Dogs

Chapter 47: And we’re Not Sexist

Chapter 48: Cheap and Cheerful supper club

Chapter 49: Land Of Milk & Honey-coloured Lesbians

Chapter 50: One small Glitch in Paradise

Chapter 51: One Foot still In the Closet

Chapter 52: Married & Living happily Ever After

Afterword - 11 Things we wish Straight Women Knew

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Endnotes

~~~~

Author’s Note

"When I look back at the photos of Sarah as a little girl, I can’t help but feel sad. She was so pretty. In one she is standing in a dress and Wellington boots, looking such a picture with her blonde curly hair. In another, she is at school with her long hair in pigtails.

Now, she has come out as gay and I look at her - with her short hair and masculine clothes, - and wonder where did we as parents go wrong? I will always love Sarah, but I can’t help feeling that how she has turned out is such a disappointment.

I Can’t Forgive My Daughter For Being Gay - Published anonymously UK Daily Mail 2007 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-461597

I’m out, gay and proud ... most of the time. But I realised the other day, after accepting an unasked-for lift home and feeling obliged to lay my life bare to a stranger, that many people know nothing of the intricacies and obstacles of a gay life lived.

Mostly they form opinions (and prejudices) based on their own, often guilty, same-sex experimentation. Or sensationalised TV soaps and the news-selling reportage of those who would make us cause célèbres. Either that or we’re subjected to the half-baked ideas of well-meaning simpático friends who seek to understand homosexual relationships by aligning them with heterosexual norms and strategies.

The truth is that men are still from Mars and women are still from Venus and often happier on their own planets. The lives and lifestyles of ordinary, middle-of-the-road gay men and women are mostly undocumented. Our modi operandi unknown. We are who we are. No labels attached. No instructions included.

Recently (yes in the twenty-first century!) an openly gay male friend of ours was asked, during a visit to the local supermarket, So who’s the husband and who’s the wife? Admittedly the person is recognised as the village idiot, but she was probably just voicing what went through the minds but not out of the mouths of other people in the town.

Firstly we were astonished that this woman should feel his relationship was any of her business. And secondly did she really think that you could only be a couple if one of you played the role of a man and the other the role of a woman?

But yes, that is exactly what she thought.

And we have done little to enlighten her and millions of uninformed others. Most of us have simply chosen to fly under the radar, never raising our heads above the social parapet. We keep our lives and our stories private. And so the myths and mysteries prevail.

I’ve spent most of my life hiding my sexuality. Because as much as I like to tell myself that I’m well and truly out of the closet, there are times when I am hoisted on the horns of my own dilemma. Do I say something ... or do I zip my lip and let the moment pass.

What does this say about me as a gay person?

It says that almost my whole life has been a lie. I’ve not been honest with friends, business associates nor even my own family. Because I was afraid of what their reactions would be if I confessed to being gay.

After all, it wasn’t too long ago that we were stoned, cast out from our communities and cut off from the church for being homosexual. Gay bashing is still ‘sport’ for some testosterone-laden guys who feel their own masculinity threatened. And even members of my own family were loath to leave their children with me ... mistakenly believing that paedophiles and homosexuals were one and the same.

So, yes, I’m out of the closet but it’s been a long and often lonely road. And I haven’t shut the door behind me ... yet. So I thought I might make the journey a little easier for others by chronicling my 60-year ride out of the closet in a narrative covering the pitfalls and pratfalls of a lesbian life lived without regret.

And here it is

The narrative is set against the background of apartheid South Africa and covers such issues as telling my family, dealing with religious condemnation, falling in love, and answering the frequently asked question: How do you know you’re gay?

It begins with a bit of homosexual history and kicks off in 1948 when I was born.

As the country grew into democracy so I too grew into wholeness and authenticity. But it wasn’t all sliding along on buttered feet. There was angst and anguish along the way, battles won, hopes lost and many dodgy landings.

Should you be lucky enough to have a friend, a child, a brother, an aunt or a colleague who is gay I hope this book answers many of those questions you’d never dare to ask. While at the same time I believe it will give you a deeper understanding of people who are ‘different,’ allowing you to be kinder and less judgemental of minority groups. And most importantly I hope you have a laugh or two with me along the way. Because indeed being gay is about being happy too.

Back to Chapters

~~~~

Chapter 1: Emperors, Kings and Drama Queens

While the entrenchment, within South Africa’s new Bill of Rights, of protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is an enormous step forward for lesbians and gays in [South Africa], it is not sufficient to ensure that such change will occur. One of the starting points for this study is the premise upon which the work of the [Truth & Reconciliation Commission] is based, that reconciliation and healing cannot occur in the absence of knowledge and understanding.

The Aversion Project 1999 - Human rights abuses of gays and lesbians in the South African Defence Force by health workers during the apartheid era. Mikki van Zyl, Jeanelle de Gruchy, Sheila Lapinsky, Simon Lewin, Graeme Reid

Us gay people have had a roller coaster ride since the beginning of civilisation. Because, indeed, we’ve been around since the dawn of time. Sometimes we were recognised as quite the norm; at others we were horribly persecuted. Sometimes ours was an accepted way of life and at others we were mercilessly tortured and often put to death.

Take for instance the ancient Greek and Roman eras, where erotic attraction and sexual pleasure between males was very much accepted. And Homer’s Iliad is considered to have the love between two men as its central theme, a view held since antiquity.

Way back then same-sex relationships between so-called free adult males and free adolescents were regarded as a social institution. These relationships were valued both as a means of instruction and a way of controlling the population growth … although, according to Wikipedia’s document on Homosexuality it was, occasionally blamed for causing disorder.

The Classical Greek philosopher Plato, together with his mentor Socrates and his student Aristotle, helped lay the foundations of Western philosophy hundreds of years BCE. In his early writings he praised the benefits of homosexual relationships and then, in later works, pushed for its prohibition. And if Plato was first for and then against, it’s not surprising that confusion still reigns around the acceptability of same-sex love today.

In the fourth century BCE Aristotle made a public observation that the homosexual disposition occurs in some people naturally ... and whether the individual so disposed conquers or yields to it is not properly a moral issue.

Homosexuality in China, referred to as the pleasures of the ‘bitten peach’, the ‘cut sleeve’, or the ‘southern custom’, has been recorded since approximately 600 BCE. So acceptable was same-sex love culture that it gave rise to strong traditions of painting and literature which all celebrated such relationships.

And the same went for Thailand where Kathoey or ‘ladyboys’, have been a part of Thai society for centuries, and Thai kings had male as well as female lovers. Kathoey were treated as a third gender in Thai culture and generally accepted by society. Thailand, interestingly, has never had legal prohibitions against homosexuality.

While in ancient Rome all the emperors, except for Claudius, took male lovers … with Hadrian being renowned for both his wall and his relationship with Antinous. Yet, while relationships between men and young boys were considered an ideal in Greece, the degree of passion Hadrian openly displayed for Antinous was considered unseemly in Rome. When his favourite died, Hadrian had been so overcome by grief that he is reported to have wept for him like a woman.

Then the Christian emperor Theodosius I decreed in 390 that passive males be burned at the stake, and Justinian, in 558, expanded on that to include the active partner as well, warning that such conduct could lead to the destruction of cities through the wrath of God.

Yet during the Renaissance Florence and Venice, in particular, were renowned for their widespread practice of same-sex love. Although the authorities, under the auspices of the Officers of the Night court, were prosecuting, fining, and imprisoning a good portion of that very same population.

In 1513 the Spanish conquistador Vasco Nunez de Balboa discovered that the village of Quarequa [in modern-day Panama] was stained by the foulest vice. The king’s brother and a number of other courtiers were dressed as women, and according to neighbours, shared the same passion. Vasco ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs.

In Persia homosexuality and homoerotic expressions were tolerated in numerous public places, from monasteries and seminaries to taverns, military camps, bathhouses, and coffee houses. And between 1501 and 1723 male houses of prostitution not only paid taxes but were also legally recognised.

Henry VIII of England made sodomy punishable by death in 1533 with the publication of the Buggery Act¹. Until 1829 sailors in the Royal Navy were hanged for homosexual acts. And in some years more men were hanged for buggery than for murder!

In England in the 1600s an anonymous pamphlet appeared on the streets saying, The world is chang’d I know not how, For men Kiss Men, not Women now. And executions for sodomy were carried out in the Netherlands until 1803, and in England until 1835.

In 1637 in Plymouth Colony John Alexander and Thomas Roberts were examined and found guilty of lewd behaviour and unclean carriage one with another, by often spending their seed one upon another …

The first women believed to have been charged with lesbianism in America were convicted in 1649. Sara Norman and Mary Hammon, both married and living in Plymouth, Massachusetts were charged with lewd behaviour ... upon a bed. Hammon, aged around 16 years, was cleared of the charges. While the reputedly older Norman, was required to publicly acknowledge her unchaste behaviour. After which she received a warning that if there were any subsequent carriages her punishment would be greater.

In sixteenth-century Switzerland, women were drowned for lesbianism. Both women and men convicted of ‘sodomy’ in seventeenth-century Venice would be stripped, have a nail driven through their genitals then be burned to death outside the city.

In 1655 New Haven expanded its definition of sodomy, a capital offence, to include sexual relations between women

In the seventeenth century Benedict Carpzov, a Lutheran professor of church and criminal law listed in his Practica Rerum Criminalium the consequences of homosexual vice as Earthquakes, famine, pestilence, Saracens, floods, and very fat, voracious field mice.

In Massachusetts in 1782 Deborah Sampson, a descendent of Gov. William Bradford, was excommunicated from the First Baptist Church of Middleborough, Massachusetts, for dressing in men’s clothes and for behaving very loose and unchristian like.

The 1885 Labouchere Amendment made all male homosexual acts - whether in private or public - a prisonable offence. Lesbianism was not mentioned. The law was exported to the British colonies and not until 1967 was it repealed in the UK … and then only for men over 21.

The reason for lesbianism being omitted from that Amendment is widely rumoured to have been because Queen Victoria refused to believe that lesbianism existed. But it is far more likely that those presenting the amendment removed it (as the British House of Lords did nearly 40 years later) fearing that criminalising lesbianism would alert women to its very possibility.

After the revolution in China gay people were rounded up and shot, and homosexuality was, not surprisingly, declared officially non-existent. In Iran gay people were executed in Tehran in 1978 after the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power. Cuban homosexuals were incarcerated in re-education camps during the 1960s and expelled from the country in 1983. While in Chile the setting up of lesbian or gay groups was defined by law as an act of terrorism because it attacks the family.

Homosexuals were rounded up when the Third Reich seized power in Germany in 1933 and were among the first to be sent to concentration camps where tens of thousands died. Homosexuals were identifiable by a pink triangle sewn onto their shifts. They were subjected to sexual torture and humiliation. Many were gassed although the general policy was to work them to death.

But the fear of the masses for things ‘different’ persisted … in 2004 Robert T Lee of the Society for the Practical Establishment and Perpetuation of the Ten Commandments had this to say: The great heinousness of homosexuality does not stop with the nasty acts of gay or homosexual people, but also extends itself in many other ways into the societies. Homosexuals often like to have some kind of contact and influence on children. This is why they hang around Boy’s clubs, or become schoolteachers and why many of them in America work at Walt Disney. Many of them are paedophiles and want to recruit or teach children to accept homosexuality. And since homosexuality is at least equal to murder, this is equivalent to teaching children to become murderers.

So I wasn’t going to be the only gay person ever to struggle with my sexual identity. And I wouldn’t be alone in wondering if I should censure myself or kill myself … or whether I should have my clitoris surgically removed or just buy myself a new handbag and a pair of stilettos.

Because gay people, it seems, have been a cause of confusion to themselves and the world at large since forever.

Back to Chapters

~~~~

Chapter 2: The Year I was Born

Beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American medical writers first attempted to define the troubling spectre of the lesbian. As a central part of this endeavour, medical professionals tried to pinpoint the lesbian’s status in the intellectual hierarchy of the era. Given the assumptions of the time that masculine intellect was superior and that lesbians were masculine, medical writers had to respond to the possibility of a ‘superior’ lesbian intellect. The resulting tension between prevailing medical images of the lesbian as both ‘degenerate’ and ‘intellectual’ played a significant role in the explosive controversies surrounding women’s higher education, and in debates about the proper place of homosexuals in society.

The Masculine Degenerate: American Doctors’ Portrayals of the Lesbian Intellect, 1880 -1949 Margaret Gibson; Journal of Women’s History Volume 9, Number 4

I can’t say there was anything significant about the year 1948 that caused my mother to give birth to a gay baby daughter. Or why that same woman also gave birth to three un-gay sons. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in India; popcorn was sold on a mass scale for the first time; the game of Scrabble was introduced and, in South Africa, the Nationalist Party came into power and institutionalised apartheid.

So nothing with particularly gay overtones there.

I also can’t say when I knew for sure that I wanted to be with a woman in the biblical sense. I can’t say that if something had been different I’d be straight. I was just living my life, one day at time, rising differently to each challenge as it presented itself.

So, recently, when Jeanette Gillespie, a straight friend of mine, grabbed my hand across the table in a very quiet restaurant and wept that her daughter was gay I was a bit taken aback.

We’d had a delicious starter of springbok Carpaccio followed by slow-roasted duck with the most amazing raspberry coulis. And it had all gone down extremely well, as things do when relaxing in the company of a good friend. Or so I thought.

A second glass of local Pinotage had just been poured for us and our order for dessert of potted chocolate tarts was on its way to the kitchen. Suddenly tears spilled out of her eyes and streaked her cheeks, she grasped my hand and blurted, Lynn’s turned gay! Why … oh why? Please tell me Barb, what did I do wrong?

Jeanette was obviously under the impression that, because I was gay, I’d know why her daughter had turned gay. What a laugh. As I said, I hardly knew my own root cause so why would I know Lynn’s.

I did a quick mental flick through my memory-bank to see if I could find a terrifically enlightening answer. But nothing came to mind and I was startled into in silence.

Jeanette dropped her head into her hands and sobbed. I mean she’s never had any really serious boyfriends, but she’s only 23 there’s still time. Now she says she’s moving in with that friend of hers, Trish. You know the one she’s always going off somewhere with? And Trish was married and has two children ... only got divorced a year ago, when Lynn came back from the UK...

I wasn’t surprised to hear about Trish. She and Lynn had been school friends. Very close school friends from what I’d observed over the years. There had been months when neither hide nor hair was seen of Trish. And then there were times when she was at every function the Gillespie’s had ... almost more family than the family itself!

In fact I well-remembered going to Trish’s wedding a few years earlier. Lynn had been ill and couldn’t attend ... and Trish had cried more at her own wedding than I’d ever seen anyone do. Yet I’d never added an egg and come up with a cake until now.

Trish had produced two adorable little boys less than a year apart. Had she been hoping to cement the marriage I now wondered. And Lynn had suddenly gone for an extended stay with family in England.

I’d known the Gillespies for years. But there were nothing that might point to why I was gay, why Jeanette wasn’t, and why her daughter was. All I knew was that I was gay. How I came to be this way ... well your guess is as good as mine.

Jeanette whispered between sobs, glancing around nervously and putting her hand up to shield her mouth, D’you think it was me, I mean, was it something I did that made her gay? And then frowning asked, Is it because she can’t find a man? followed by a gasp and, Did Trish take advantage of her do you think?

Well we gay people have to stick together at all times so