You Have to be Gay to Know God

By Siya Khumalo

"At about 5:20 pm on 31 December 2012, a colleague picked a steak knife from a cutlery tray. He yelled, ‘Angi-gay, mina!’ — I’m not gay! — and came at me with it." Siya Khumalo grew up in a Durban township where one sermon could whip up a lynch mob against those considered different. Drawing on personal experience - his childhood, life in the army, attending church, and competing in pageants - Khumalo explores being LGBTQI+ in South Africa today. In 'You Have to Be Gay to Know God', he takes us on a daring journey, exposing the interrelatedness of religion, politics and sex as the expectations of African cultures mingle with greed and colonial religion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kwela
• Release date: Apr 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9780795708473

Siya Khumalo

After being reprimanded at a genteel dinner party for “talking about religion, politics and sex in polite company”, Siya (Siyathokoza) Khumalo decided to wrestle with these taboo topics full-time. He is often interviewed on radio stations and on media platforms for his controversial, incisive take on current affairs, and has also been spotted on international pageant stages (runner up to Mr Gay South Africa) and club dance floors in places where he held beauty titles. He writes regularly for 'Daily Maverick' and other publications.

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PROLOGUE

Confession of Faith

At about 5:20 pm on 31 December 2012, a colleague picked up a steak knife from a cutlery tray. He yelled, ‘Angi-gay, mina!’ — I’m not gay! — and came at me with it.

I froze, the takeaway package rustling in my trembling hands. The kitchen staff erupted like a banshee choir into shrieks that he not hurt me. The bar-lady burst through the two-leaf swing doors to see why our chit-chat had turned to yelling. She saw; the colour drained from her face.

A sound I thought was him moving made me jump — it was the chopsticks my elbow had knocked off the counter, bouncing like drumsticks on the floor. I jumped again when I realised that jump could have startled him into stabbing me. My knees wobbled. I had the presence of mind not to reach for the counter for support. ‘I’m not gay! Don’t you ever think I’m gay. Do you hear me?’ he was yelling.

My eyes searched the room’s woks, its fridges and its crackling bug-zappers for something I could grab. Nothing. ‘Yes,’ I said, swallowing the hot gravel in my throat. ‘You’re not gay.’

He calmed down enough for the others to take the knife from him and pull him away.

We were waiters at a restaurant north of the Durban CBD. No customers had arrived because it was early in the shift. The takeaway order had come through over the mushroom-coloured telephone at the end of the bar. When the meal’s owner picked it up in person, nobody gave away that something had happened while we were wrapping it up. He was cheerfully wished a ‘Happy New Year!’ and sent off into the rainy night.

The colleague had arrived late and inebriated (a dismissible offence) as I finished wiping chairs in the dining section. But he’d worked well drunk before. ‘It’s too late to call one of the others to fill in,’ the manager had sighed wearily. ‘I’ll take this up with him after the shift. I must put an end to it.’

Seconds before, we’d been yakking in the kitchen. When I try to recall what we were joking around about, my mind goes numb. I do know those jokes weren’t malicious, about him or even gay-themed. Then wham! At knifepoint, I was reciting a creedal confession of his heterosexuality.

Afterwards, the manager spoke with me as I swept some dust up onto the scoop. ‘We can report this to the police,’ he said. ‘We can have him sent home. Whatever you feel is necessary. It’s your call.’

I thought of suggesting he tell the police captain who lunched at our restaurant about the incident. Beyond that, I didn’t want to open it up to strangers. I could imagine my colleague out on bail, drunk and angry again. I could hear some disdainful police officer dog-whistle say to him, You idiot, when you threaten to stab a moffie you do them a favour bigger than offering them your cock to suck on — you give them something to run here and whine about. Don’t threaten; just do. You pay the right money, case dockets get lost. But people you threaten? Not so much.

I couldn’t tell which decision would be better. ‘I’m okay with whatever,’ I replied, feeling like a lost child who’d peed himself and didn’t want strangers to know.

He peered into my eyes. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah,’ I lied, smiling light-heartedly, turning to pour the sweepings into the bin next to the bar. I think I even threw in a joke for effect: ‘We needed some New Year’s excitement around here.’

He left me to my work and silently gestured to the bar-lady to mix him a strong drink. ‘Everyone knows that you’re just you,’ he added. ‘You have your sense of humour but you never mean anything by it.’

Those well-intentioned words sent me going over every interaction I’d had with the colleague up until that night, starting from when I was a newbie and he was giving me shit. I physically lifted him up and put him some distance away from where I was so I could finish my work. Our colleagues had laughed themselves into a stupor.

Though my rational mind said it wasn’t my problem, another part of me needed to know whether I’d done something to provoke him. I believed in the unspoken promise that if I ‘behaved’ and passed for straight, the world owed it to me not to treat me the way it ordinarily treated ‘other gay guys’. That incident left me feeling betrayed and feeling guilty for feeling betrayed.

I had my first crush on a boy was when I was twelve. His face was a geometric flower of sharp jawlines and smouldering eyes that twinkled when he smiled. He was classically handsome, a young Indian version of the Welsh actor, Luke Evans. When I saw him, I froze like a deer before the headlights of his outrageous beauty. I needed for him to know he had lit up that part of me. But how could I tell him without freaking him out? I was in a limbo of perpetual yearning.

One high holy lunch break, I was looking at pigeons on one of the school buildings when I felt a pair of hands, his, grab and lift me up. ‘I wanted to feel whether you’re as light as you look,’ he explained, laughing. ‘You have lost weight!’ My head certainly felt lighter.

Other kids grew up and dated. I retreated into books and TV, choosing those over the Matric Dance. I’d spent five years looking at unreachable boys in different iterations of their school uniforms. I hate window shopping, so I wasn’t about to subject myself to seeing them in fancier outfits if looking was all I’d get from it.

I already knew which guys’ chest hair showed, almost glistening with perspiration, under their collars when they wore their shirts with the top buttons undone in summer. I knew who cut the hottest, sharpest figures in winter blazers and who the hot nerds were before nerds were hot. One guy in biology class wore metal-rimmed glasses and the girls ridiculed him because he collected snakes. I’ll spare you snake-themed puns and leave it at this: he was a smart, decent gentleman. Was it him I was thinking of when, asked to read from the textbook, I mispronounced ‘organism’ as ‘orgasm’? The class burst into laughter. The biology teacher had the decency to reply, ‘It’s understandable. You must have at least one orgasm in your lifetime otherwise you should spend the rest of your life meditating in The Himalayas.’

However telling my Freudian slips were, I had the presence of mind to stay far away from the rugby players and the obscenely short shorts on their maddeningly muscled legs. But every attempt at clamping down on those thoughts stirred phantom sensations — spinning zodiacs of breath-snatching visions; legs clamped on and around my throat while their angelic faces grinned down at me with delicious cruelty; constellations of bent joints, impossibly strained positions and embarrassingly needed no-holds-barred intimacy.

The most troublesome rugby players were those who doubled as hot nerds. They not only picked up that I liked them, but far from following respectable custom and humiliating me about it they drew me in to sophisticated mind-games with piercing gazes and whispered innuendo — just for shits and giggles.

As puberty developed the guys further, they adopted girlfriends who grazed very fussily at those luscious pastures. For reasons then beyond my comprehension, some of the girls felt comfortable confiding in me about their relationships with those guys. I suspected they knew about me and were playing the same game as the hot nerd rugby players.

‘After I told him how upset I was and that I never wanted to see him again, he took me in his arms and kissed me. What the hell is up with that, Siya? After he stood me up for our first date, and kept me waiting on our second, he thinks he can make it up with a kiss?’

‘How dare he!’ I’d snap. Then I’d thirstily ask, ‘What was it like?’

‘He held me in his tender arms …’

I’d think, I’ve seen the guy you’re talking about. How can his arms be tender when they look so hard and yummy, with those veins clinging so lightly to those beastly bulging biceps …?

‘His lips on mine were so firm …’

I’d be thinking, But they look so soft!

‘You know the kind of kiss I’m talking about, Siya? Have you ever kissed like that?’

I’d pull my drooling jaw back up to the rest of my face and reply, ‘Of course!’ while berating myself in my head: Siya, look at your life! Why can’t you be stood up and have it made up with a kiss like that?

‘Oh yeah?’ The girlfriend of whichever guy I liked would flash me a killer smile before asking, ‘Who’s this lucky lady you’ve been kissing like that?’

‘… Someone I would never stand up!’ I’d reply, my voice ringing with truth.

‘Exactly, Siya. You’re such a sweet guy. Unlike these jerks. For a moment, I suspected you were … never mind. I’ve got a friend who’s looking for a man. Are you sure you aren’t single?’

‘No, it’s okay, I promise I’m not looking for a girlfriend. Focusing on the books, hey.’ More accurately, I was focusing over the books at some of the boys in class, and on the books when I scribbled journal entries complaining that Satan took too long to come at me with all the worldly temptations and fleshly pleasures I’d been warned to guard myself against. But I could imagine the devil’s reason: the longer he made me wait, the more gusto I’d sin with when I was unleashed. That, or I wanted those pleasures so badly, I was already a confirmed sinner and there was no need for him to waste any of his resources on proving it.

Up until the night at the restaurant, I was a ‘good’ gay, complimented often for not being as ‘bad as the other gays’ who were ‘over the top’ about their sexual orientation. I’d been complimented also for not being ‘that bad’ a black person. I never whined about apartheid and I ‘spoke so well’. Another co-worker paid me both ‘compliments’ at once when he explained that I wasn’t really gay; the problem was I’d mostly known black women. But seeing I wasn’t ‘that bad’ a gay or ‘that bad’ a black, all I needed to find my heterosexual spark was one night with a white girl because ‘white girls have class’. The issue was one of taste.

He and I once saw a mixed-race couple cross the street. The man was Indian; the woman, white. He remarked that no white man would ever date that woman again because she’d been ‘chowed by that Indian oke’.

I don’t share these stories about my colleagues for judgment’s sake. When we weren’t whipping out knives or racial slurs at one another, we were developing a shared sense of unconditional acceptance. It was what it was.

PART 1

CHAPTER 1

SCHOOL

It was a sunny second break one afternoon in Grade 10 when I realised some older boys were whispering behind my back. Sensing malice, I snuck away into a crowd of fellow students. One of those boys broke away from his friends and, taking decisive strides, followed me into the crowd I was trying to blend into. He pushed through the other students, reached his hand down and groped me. He then finished off by feeling around between my legs and swiping up, slowly.

I smarted, the sensation of his fingers clinging to me.

Imagine you’d been in some boys’ midst for years, secretly yearning to be made real by attention you never wanted to want — and that’s what’s dished up for you by some creepy bully who thinks you are a joke; who humiliates you with a cruel parody of your longings in front of the world. Good job! It wasn’t the first incident like that either, just the first after many years.

He was flouncing back to his friends with an exaggerated swish in his walk; they were laughing themselves silly. I was their punchline.

Despite blood rushing to my ears, I could pick up what everyone was saying about me:

‘He isn’t gay … is he?’

‘I’m sure he is. Why else would that guy have done that to him …?’

A girl turned to look at me and asked, ‘But you are gay, aren’t you …?’

‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength,’ the churches I went to said. By Matric, I’d figured that was the stupidest thing I could do. God and the homophobes had different ways of inflicting their violence, but they belonged to the same WhatsApp group and he was the administrator.

I got an anti-God and anti-religion campaign going. For my English oral, I gave a talk on how the human religious impulse was probably evolution’s way of letting us form a transcendent basis for our base survival instincts. Our souls were not dust motes dancing in a cosmic spotlight that illuminated us with its love; rather, we were mortal creatures frozen in the headlights of the onrushing car of our animal instincts. We were doomed to die no matter what we believed about it.

My classmates were scandalised, one spluttering in response that my whole speech was ‘hogwash’. And this was to be expected, I calmly reasoned. What they were feeling, I’d felt.

The Flame

I first met him in Grade 8. You and I will call him Josh. He reminded me of Robbie Williams, the singer. Josh was a green-eyed, brown-haired bohemian tucked in a green school blazer, innocent, as though he hadn’t seen everything that follows schools and blazers. Oh, parents, lock your teenagers away, I thought.

Given that everyone was attracted to him like a moth to a flame, I’m not sure how I squeezed my way into his social circle and past another guy who also happened to be called Siya. I would never confess Other Siya’s real sins; that, I could possibly go to hell for. That our names were similar caused not a little confusion. Other Siya was also gay and interested in Josh. He and I formed a love-hate friendship, an unspoken peace treaty over our mutual interest.

But Other Siya and Josh were in the cross-country running team, despite what I’d imagined was the former’s questionable athleticism. They were also in Drama together, despite what I’d imagined was Siya’s tepid talent in that arena. Come to think of it, the number of occasions Other Siya spent with Josh grew exponentially each time I looked the other way — that, he was superbly skilled at. Was this not a clear violation of the unspoken agreement on Josh — shared custody, equal visiting hours, the usual? At least I’m above doing anything as pathetic as rearranging my whole life for a guy, I thought as I scribbled my name down on the cross-country sign-up list.

‘You’re going to be glad you joined,’ the teacher in charge of the sport was assuring me. ‘It’s a great team. We’ve got lovely people.’

‘I know. I’ve met some of them,’ I replied, hoping my transparent face wouldn’t betray me. The coach was super-Christian. Probably gay, too. Too bad he was a good boy, my hormones figured. When you took that whole teacher thing out of the equation, he was quite handsome. Stop it, Siya! the voice in my head said.

‘Running is a great sport,’ he continued. ‘The important part is focusing on your core.’

‘I can hardly wait to start,’ I replied. I could see how running after Josh would be a great sport. I’d glimpsed his shirtless core in Grade 8 next to the pool, frantically taking memory pics. What are you judging me for? Instagram hadn’t been invented, and I was a teenager.

Other Siya had no idea what hit him. What I lacked in long-distance running stamina, I made up for in catching up to his agenda and occupying more of Josh (or at least, Josh’s time) than he did. I acted nonchalant about this achievement, as though cute guys always spoke to me without having to be kidnapped and tortured first.

My family was surprised when I picked up running as a discipline and stuck to it. ‘Is he on drugs?’ they must have wondered. ‘Is it compulsory for him to run?’

I went with it. ‘Yes, it is!’ I said. ‘It’s is a white school, fam. You can’t just sit there and not do a sport.’

‘What?’

‘Well, it isn’t compulsory but they want us to become well-rounded, balanced people,’ I explained, knowing full well I’d never be nor cared to be a well-rounded, balanced person.

I was out to my mother and two of my sisters. I told Mom and the younger one about Josh, downplaying his participation in cross-country lest they put two and two together. Still, they figured I liked him probably even before I did. I thought I’d mentioned him once or twice, but they later insisted I’d spoken about him. All. The. Time.

By Grade 11 I’d gotten tired of standing in spotlights where nothing good happened anyway, so I left the light of Josh’s flame. I wasn’t going to be that gay black guy pursuing that straight white boy because then I’d be my own prank; it wouldn’t be someone else doing it to me. Also, Other Siya played dirty. Strangely, that’s when Josh started seeking me out. He would sometimes even evade my namesake to talk to me.

‘They’re efficient these days,’ I would remark, looking up from my circle geometry homework as he approached.

‘Who is?’ Josh said. He’d be dumping his big black-and-green backpack on the bench from which he’d occasionally hurled his Nokia 3310 at the Matric garden wall, for fun.

I replied, ‘My Namesake’s Department of Access to You, that’s who’s becoming efficient. I was just wondering whether to bother applying for permission to say hi — but here you are, in the flesh! Guess the country isn’t going to the dogs, after all,’ I muttered, punching numbers in my calculator. The wrong numbers, because I was suppressing my anger. I wrote the answer down anyway. Theta is 17°.

‘I need to talk to you,’ he replied.

I snapped back with, ‘Talk about what?’ loudly enough for bystanders on our side of the Matric students’ garden to turn and look. Yes, it was small of me but I had to cut that thing. The English teacher had told the girls in our class, ‘You must run away from a man until you catch him.’ I wasn’t a girl, but I liked men and I took great notes. So much as I hated running and liked what I was running from, I would run, properly. If anything was going to happen, he was going to have to come out and put the work in. And I just didn’t foresee something like that happening anytime that year.

The evening after our next running meet, I climbed off the bus that dropped us back at school. I’d asked my parents to pick me up because we would be getting back late. I was walking to my dad’s car when I heard Josh call out for me. At first, I wanted to pretend I didn’t know whether he was calling for me or Other Siya, who shouldn’t have been too far away. But I suppressed my pettiness and instead turned to tell him he’d have to make it quick because I didn’t want to keep Dad waiting.

Josh said he wanted to clear something up.

‘What’s that?’ I asked, blinking innocently. There was no one within earshot.

‘Siya, are you gay?’ he asked.

My eyes shifted to the moon. I could feel my pulse in my toes, in the running socks I hadn’t changed out of and the school shoes I had changed into. I hadn’t showered; my sweat had dried on my skin on the trip back. And he was standing really close. There was no one else around us except Dad in his car. If Josh did something funny like shove me for being gay, Dad would see. Who knew? Maybe Josh had spoken to someone who said I was and he had to sort it out, or people would assume he was gay too.

He leaned forward, pressing into my personal space-zone where he sucked up all the oxygen. I’d have to give him mouth-to-mouth if I wanted to stay alive. The English teacher had also said, ‘A kiss upstairs is an application for a job downstairs.’

‘And do you like me?’ he was asking. ‘Like, really like me?’

Who else could torment me and my hopes as much as he could if I answered his question truthfully? But seeing I didn’t have enough oxygen to dance around the issue, I said, ‘Yes. I am and I do.’ Feeling stark naked, I thought, Siya, which school are you moving to after this?

‘I felt I had to ask,’ he said abruptly, his voice sounding like an auditory hallucination emanating from the moon, ‘because I’m gay and I think I like you too, Siya.’

I don’t remember the trip home or waking up the next morning. In every fairytale ever told, the beautiful maiden knows what to do once she’s caught her prince’s eye. But the English teacher never told the girls in class what they were supposed to do after catching the men they’d been running from; she ended the most useful tangent she’d ever gone off on to pour her considerable wisdom into teaching Shakespeare. Shakespeare!

After getting my hopes up that high, Josh found someone else online as though nothing had happened. ‘It’s nothing personal,’ he said, except it was because it was literally over before it began.

We were running at Crawford La Lucia or at some similarly affluent hotbed of masculine beauty when he confessed to hating running more than I did. He had joined because another boy he had a crush on also ran. That boy had his eye on some girl, which was why he ran. Ordinarily, I would have cringed at bigotry but because sometimes God’s prejudice worked in my favour, the crush Josh had pursued in the running team was straight and homophobic. I suppressed a laugh at the image of us chasing one another down a running trail of unrequited affections.

I’d been seeing