Читать книгу You Have to Be Gay to Know God - Siya Khumalo - Страница 6

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.