Читать книгу You Have to Be Gay to Know God - Siya Khumalo - Страница 11

Coming Out

The dance around what I couldn’t know about myself intensified until I was twelve. I described this unknown demon grazing on illicit nerve endings in my body as my ‘forbidden self’ to the occupational therapist. When I dreamt that actor Austin Peck and I were about to set a bed in my grandmother’s house on fire at age eleven, bronzed dimples flashing as he smiled wildly at me, I knew this ‘forbidden self’ was growing stronger, more defiant — on the verge of being unleashed and consuming me.

It couldn’t be that I was gay, I told myself; surely, whatever cross this forbidden self-represented, it couldn’t be that. Hadn’t my praying and church-going inoculated me?

The evening two weeks before my thirteenth birthday, I watched a mini-series titled Family Album. It was based on a novel by Danielle Steel. In the course of the story, a character comes out as gay to his mom. She is shocked, but treads very delicately. She asks whether this is something new; the son shakes his head to say no.

That episode ended. I waited for the following week to see more. This was before you could binge-watch series. When the day came, I worked things out again so I’d have the TV to myself. The plot went something like this: Guy’s dad doesn’t know he’s gay, keeps trying to get son with girl, but suspects son’s new flatmate is homosexual. I cringed, heart fluttering, whenever the flatmate sauntered into a scene like he had the right to set everyone else on edge.

Oh dear: I recognised the friend as the son’s ‘forbidden self’.

Guy’s dad walks in on his son and the flatmate sitting on sofa, son’s head cradled in flatmate’s lap. Guy’s dad attacks flatmate; son defends flatmate/head-cradling buddy/possible lover/forbidden self. Putting two and two together, father renounces son.

For the first time in a long time, I allowed myself to feel. I was only opening myself up to a well-made television show, I reasoned. Even as a Christian who’d sworn to keep away from worldly things in accordance with God’s rules, I also believed God’s heart said that to truly watch a TV show, the viewer had to immerse himself in the story on its own terms. To do otherwise was cheating God, who sometimes revealed something of himself in other people’s artistic productions. So, I allowed myself to feel the white-hot anger bubbling up inside me; to give it words, to let it expose its contents.

The only place in the house where the TV antennae could pick up reception was the room the girls slept in. That was where I first allowed myself to think it was unfair of the father to reject his son because of who he loved when everybody knew nobody could help that. Even he had his affairs, and when his wife pointed out that he was being sanctimonious he still insisted to her face that his heterosexual indiscretions were not as bad as what his son was. What the actual fuck?

I projected myself into the story and realised I would be the boyfriend, the ‘forbidden self’ — except I wouldn’t just stand there but give the father a piece of my mind. I’d protect his son, like a boyfriend is supposed to, even if it cost my life. I’d tell the father that his son was the one thing he’d done right because while he had his rules as a father, his heart was missing. What kind of a God was he, and what fucking kind of love did he have for the world if he couldn’t understand this — if he still threw his son to the dogs?

And that’s when I felt it assault my heart — an all-devouring love, not for the gay character on TV in particular, though he triggered it. But a love that could heal any rejection.

But I wasn’t allowed to feel anything like that because it didn’t correspond with God in reality. I couldn’t fashion a God of my own convenience when the real one, the one from church, would have told me that if it was a guy who was catalysing these feelings then I was gay.

Shit! I remembered the boy on the bike. I looked at the character on TV, who was definitely gay. Moments after identifying with everyone in the show, I identified myself in real life. For the first time, I saw myself the way everyone else did. There was no ‘forbidden self’ fighting to surface through me; I was the forbidden self. And just as I’d tried to not surface, both those who loved me and those who were disgusted by me had been trying to keep me from surfacing as well. Those who loved me, lest I was exposed to a world where people were disgusted by me; those who were disgusted, lest I magnified the shame of those who loved me. Whichever way you turned it, I was a complete abomination; there was no part of me that wasn’t wrong.

I prayed I’d turn from gay to straight and un-meet this revelation about myself. If God couldn’t or wouldn’t pull off one of these two miracles, I prayed to die or that he’d understand my predicament enough to forgive me if I took my life sometime down the line. I didn’t even want to go to heaven; I just wanted to cease existing.

A fortnight later, one week after my thirteenth birthday, I decided to tell my mother. I was in over my head and if God took me seriously on that third option it would only be fair if Mom knew the story behind my demise. One of the magazines in the house had a story about a gender non-conforming man. I took it to her and said, ‘I’m like him.’ I couldn’t say, ‘I’m gay.’ She replied, ‘I know.’

‘How? Since when?’

‘I’ve known since you were two. A mother just knows.’

‘When were you planning on saying something?’ I asked, absurdly wanting to say, ‘You’ve kept my attraction to guys a secret from me for ten years?’

Her view was God had sent me to shake up what no longer worked in our world. ‘Look, if you could turn straight and give me grandkids, that would be great! Maybe you’ll find that heterosexual spark in yourself. I’ve heard it happens! But, a gay son? God must have really taken a shining to me. Why else would I be so blessed?’ She reminded me that she’d named me Siyathokoza, an unusual and optimistic name, because she felt God had huge plans for me.

I looked at her and wondered whether her openness to loving a gay kid was what had let me slip into actually being gay. Had she never been that open to the possibility, I realised, I’d have never felt safe enough to discover the truth. Wait. Did reality scare me so much that I was willing to resent Mom for loving me and hate myself for facing the truth? That was no way to deal with this, I told myself.

Still, I bargained with the Almighty. I was not worthy to be called his son, but I was willing to be one of those awkward testimonials in church if he could perform a miracle to eclipse the humiliation of what I was with the glory of what he could do. I was willing to be his clown, a parody of what a ‘real’ man was supposed to be, as long as the punchline included my rescue from this. I couldn’t promise celibacy unless he gave me the strength to overcome the sexual urges I already sensed were an inextricable part of my humanity, but I also couldn’t see myself actually going ahead with gay sex. Wasn’t it disgusting? Everyone said so. I prayed God would never let me slip into that cesspit of depravity.

I hated that these were the kinds of prayers I had to send up to God, but it was what it was.

Mom went on to the unenviable task of preparing my father to eventually accept the truth about me. I would overhear them debate society and sexuality late at night. She also looked up the address for the Durban Gay and Lesbian Health Centre, handed me their details, and said, ‘Go, find your tribe!’ With said tribe’s help, part of me began the journey towards accepting I was gay while the other part searched for a spiritual trapdoor out of it.

My mother’s progressive streak has led to awkward moments, though. Getting the family TV to oneself isn’t an exact science. At nineteen, when I was watching The Sum of Us, she walked into the living room at the point Russell Crowe and John Polson’s characters were making out. As though that wasn’t embarrassing enough, she said, ‘Mawusuhamba uya eGoli, zama ukungafebi kakhulu. Ungadluleli emadodeni awu-4 ngosuku’ — When you leave for Johannesburg, try not to be too much of a slut. Like, don’t sleep with more than four guys a day.

Horrified, I let out a, ‘Mom!’ and could say nothing else. I was technically a virgin at the time.

‘What’s a technical virgin?’ someone I told this story asked me.

I replied, ‘You know when you’re at a buffet and you’re dieting, which means dying to try it? And before you know it, you’ve snacked a little here and a little there and you might as well have dished a full meal to start with? Technically, you haven’t had a full meal. But only technically.’

When I was in high school, a group of my grade’s black girls sat me down in science class and asked whether I was gay. They promised they wouldn’t expose my secret to anyone I didn’t want them to expose it to.

The moment I admitted I was, they asked a squillion questions all at once. I’d be looking at the one, formulating an answer for the other, while a third was waiting for a chance to get her question in edgewise.

‘Would you be turned on if a naked woman walked into a room and offered herself to you?’

‘Do you get hard when you see a guy you like?’

Another: ‘Wait — gays get hard? Like ordinary guys?’

‘How does that boy-on-boy erection thing work anyway?’

‘But ma-eh, is a gay guy the right kind of guy to ask about erections, first and foremost?’

One of the girls offered (jokingly or not, only God knows) to let me see her boobs. ‘They’re plump, firm and smooth to the touch,’ she promised, sounding remarkably like an infomercial.

‘No,’ I choked. ‘Thank you, but no thanks.’

She looked at me, head tilted. ‘You are gay,’ she decided. Whenever we broke the news to anyone, she’d use the line from the Brenda Fassie song to end the discussion. ‘Indaba yakhe i-straight: ayidingi ruler’ — His story is straight-forward; no ruler required to straighten it. She’d have the hint of a smirk from the cleverness of her pun.

‘How do you know?’ some of the guys she said I could trust would ask her.

‘He refused to let me show him my boobs,’ she’d say, bounding them up and down just a little through her shirt.

‘What?’

‘I even said he could feel them if he wanted.’

‘And he said no?’

‘Exactly!’

A glare at me. ‘You stupid man! Ingrate!’ Then a moment’s thought. ‘It must be true. Siya is gay!’

Many of the girls were disappointed that I had no experience with boys that I could tell them about. Because they wanted details. Pictures, if possible. The one with the boobs mentioned she’d felt embarrassed at being turned on by guy-on-guy action when Jesse Metcalfe’s and Ryan Phillippe’s characters hooked up on Desperate Housewives. I played it very cool as she spoke about this. Time and data bundles have been spent on a most futile quest to find said scenes on YouTube. I think she mixed up actors’ and characters’ names. ‘I felt bad,’ she recounted, ‘because I was turned on. It was so hot. All that man. All that muscle.’

I wanted to reply, ‘Now imagine how I feel’, but I don’t think they had to imagine. I probably always looked thirsty.

One or two of them weren’t as thrilled about my sexuality, though they had the decency to be respectful in their tone and delivery, keeping the secret within the (growing) circle of ‘safe’ people. They insisted that gayness was unAfrican, but they balanced that with the belief that ostracizing me would also be unAfrican. So, they had to figure out how to help me through my ‘confusion’, and wondered what the cure for this ‘white man’s perversion’ would be. One suggested traditional ritual, another, prayer. ‘No’, said the first. ‘Prayer and the white man’s god aren’t as strong as what Africans had all along. The issue was that the white man had uprooted Africans in the first place …’

I’d turn left and right as I listened to these discussions, trying to get a word in edgewise. I became a topic but less and less as a participant with own views on my own experience, which were conflicted anyway. But it was my conflict; that’s the thing I wanted to hold on to more than anything else when I was pulled into those discussions. I was the only person who knew what it was like to be inside of my particular story.

I became a learning subject, hovering through many of their school day periods because the discussion that dominated the background conversation was sex. And when teenagers talk sex, they turn the topic around. As much as I loved attention, I didn’t want any for being an alternative to their ‘normal’ expectations. But just as I’d become a learning subject, I also became to some a project — something to be fixed or tweaked not because I’d gone out my way to trouble anyone, but because I’d existed wrong in their world, and owed it to them to exist the right way.

One classmate spoke to me while we were travelling home on the train, saying if it were true that I was gay, he’d be disappointed. He’d heard people talking. Did I have a girlfriend? Why had nobody seen me with a girl or heard me talking about girls to prove my heterosexual masculinity? ‘Are you gay?’ he kept asking.

‘No, I am not,’ I lied and the wondered how many times someone can say, ‘I am not’ before denial is all that’s left of them.

‘Siya, it’s no big deal,’ someone might say. ‘You were doing what you had to do.’

Only, it’s not that simple because when you’re something to be denied, you start acting like it. You develop a double life, the hidden part misshapen by the shame that drove you to the shadows.

If I could hide the fact that I was black, would other people be okay with my denying it? Fellow black people would see it as a negation of them too — blackness as something to be escaped, denied or erased. Yet many of my fellow black people will welcome a disclosure of who I am to the extent that it validates their existence, and never to the extent that my existence is as validated as I need it to be. I can be there for their part of the struggle, but they won’t be there for mine.

Even the cousin I’d heard disparaging the gay guy came forward to say he knew I was gay. ‘If anyone gives you trouble for it, come tell me about it,’ he offered. ‘I’ll sort him out. You are one of us.’

‘Oh, thanks,’ I said, half-tempted to give him a list from school days. While I wasn’t sure how to feel about it, I’d never expected to be on the good side of a shit-sorter’s shit-sorting tendencies.