Status Updates From Lost and Found in Johannesb...

'As apartheid collapsed and the new society began to form itself through the violent years around 1990, Edgar and Phil found their places in the new mixed gay bars of Hillbrow. Edgar loved the Skyline, while Phil preferred the more sedate Champions, opposite Park Station...'

Brings back memories.

The violation of one’s home and hearth is the primal settler anxiety, deeply embedded in white South African consciousness, epitomised by the image of the oxwagon laager corralled against the savages beyond.

In Portrait with Keys, Ivan Vladislavic describes Johannesburg drily as ‘the Venice of the South’, because ‘the backdrop is always a man-made one. We have planted a forest the birds endorse. For hills, we have mine dumps covered with grass. We do not wait for time and the elements to weather us, we change the scenery ourselves, to suit our moods. Nature is for other people, in other places.’

He had read online that same-sex marriage was legal in South Africa and so he had found his way to Cape Town and applied for asylum – unlike Emile, on the basis of his sexual orientation: ‘I am gay,’ he told the Home Affairs official, a black woman.
She was incredulous. ‘But there are no gays in the rest of Africa,’ she said. ‘We only have them here in South Africa.’’

‘350 in mass sex orgy!’ This was the headline of the Rand Daily Mail that landed at our front door on 22 January 1966, when I was one year old. A ‘queer’ party had been raided in Wychwood Road, in the Johannesburg suburb of Forest Town; nine men had been arrested for ‘masquerading as women’ and one for ‘indecent assault on a minor’. It was, of course, a garden party...

If even the ‘Venus de Milo’ was suspect in South Africa, there was no hope for Tim Curry of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but somehow the distributors managed to find a loophole that allowed the film to be screened for a few weeks while the banning was under appeal.

Do you remember those times when you looked up from a page and the world was different?

Who is able to say, of his childhood, what was a cause and what a symptom? We explain ourselves – to ourselves and others – by constructing emblematic moments which we cure in formaldehyde and onto which we mount our adult identities like so many butterflies in the cabinets of our childhood.

'The people who walk Johannesburg daily are not flâneurs at all, but migrants, or workers, to whom the city still denies the right to public transport. Each time they walk it is not only a weight on their feet but a slight on their dignity: the stories their feet tell, unlike those of the idealised flâneurs imagined by Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin, are often ones of pain and dislocation. The rest of us drive.'