"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.
Оглавление
Siya Khumalo. You Have to Be Gay to Know God
Foreword
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
The Flame
CHAPTER 2
Awakening
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
Marching In and Out of Time
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
As Above, So Below; As Within, So Without
The Mbeki Conundrum
CHAPTER 6
Dying of Politeness
Women’s Bodies
CHAPTER 7
Leviticus’s World
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
Tribalism and Toxic Masculinity
The Parallel Between Patriarchy’s Sons and Political Subjects
Chapter 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
African Leaders Dine with the Roman Soldiers
Signing up for Black Criminality
CHAPTER 18
Epilogue
Endnotes and Citations
Acknowledgements
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You Have
to Know
.....
I also cultivated a stoic indifference to everything. I avoided speaking to Josh, though his registration class desk was seven and three-quarter tiles in front of mine where the summer morning sunlight made his hair look like a bronze spun silk cap above his bottle-green blazer. I repurposed him from The Flame into The Muse. He unknowingly ignited raw, passionate essay-writing in me. I was screaming at him with every sentence, holding the pen in my fist like it was a chisel to his heart where I etched my unspoken words. For Shakespeare, I would not just answer the question about Macbeth’s plot to murder King Duncan. I would argue that everything foreshadowing this assassination proves Macbeth was out to betray his king all along — that he was born a traitor.
This made my teachers sit up and take notice. ‘Your writing is quite refreshing,’ the History teacher would say.
