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Queering Apartheid: The National

Party's 1987 ‘Gay Rights’ Election
Campaign in Hillbrow
a
Daniel Conway
a
Loughborough University
Published online: 18 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Daniel Conway (2009) Queering Apartheid: The National Party's 1987 ‘Gay
Rights’ Election Campaign in Hillbrow, Journal of Southern African Studies, 35:4, 849-863, DOI:
10.1080/03057070903313210

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 Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 35, Number 4, December 2009

Queering Apartheid: The National Party’s 1987

‘Gay Rights’ Election Campaign in Hillbrow
Daniel Conway
(Loughborough University)

This article investigates the anomaly in apartheid history of the ruling National Party’s (NP)
fielding a ‘pro-gay rights’ candidate in the Hillbrow constituency during the 1987 whites-
only election in South Africa. The NP was aided in its Hillbrow campaign by the gay
magazine Exit, which encouraged its readership to ‘vote gay’ in the election and published a
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list of candidates who were favourable to gay rights in South Africa. The Hillbrow campaign
is intelligible when the intersections between race and sexuality are analysed and the
discourses wielded by the NP and Exit are spatially and historically situated.
The Hillbrow/Exit gay rights campaign articulated discourses about the reform of apartheid
in white self-interest and conflated white minority and gay minority rights, thereby
contributing to the NP’s justification for apartheid. The NP candidate’s defeat of the
incumbent Progressive Federal Party (PFP) MP for Hillbrow, Alf Widman, was trumpeted by
Exit as a powerful victory and advance for gay rights in South Africa, but the result provoked
a sharp backlash among many white gay men and lesbian women who organised to openly
identify with the liberation movement. The Exit/Hillbrow campaign problematises the
singular assumptions that are often made about race and sexuality in apartheid South Africa,
and illustrates how political, social and economic crisis can provoke reconfigurations of
identities vis-à-vis the status quo.

Introduction
The governing National Party’s (NP) fielding of an ostensibly pro-gay rights candidate, Leon
de Beer, in the Hillbrow constituency during the 1987 whites-only parliamentary elections,
would appear to be a spectacular contradiction of both NP policy and the NP’s
relationship with Afrikaner nationalism. The enthusiastic support of De Beer by Exit, a
national gay paper, and the campaign by Exit to create an identifiable gay constituency in
white parliamentary politics, are also remarkable, not least because participation in the 1987
whites-only election was condemned by the exiled African National Congress (ANC), who
called on whites to reject parliamentary politics and join the struggle for non-racial
democracy in South Africa. The Hillbrow campaign is intelligible when the intersections
between race and sexuality are analysed and the discourses wielded by the NP and Exit are
spatially and historically situated. That Hillbrow, a densely populated inner-city district of
Johannesburg, was the geographical focus for the ‘gay rights’ campaign was of vital
significance. As a district in which the Group Areas Act (GAA) was being openly flouted by
thousands of Indians, coloureds and Africans, Hillbrow was on the ‘cutting edge’ of
apartheid’s social, political and geographical demise.1 ‘Gay rights’ in the Hillbrow campaign
intersected with racism and formed the basis for a broader attempt by the NP to reconstitute

1 A. Morris, Bleakness and Light: Inner-City Transition in Hillbrow, Johannesburg (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand
University Press, 1999), p. 1.
ISSN 0305-7070 print; 1465-3893 online/09/040849-15
q 2009 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies DOI: 10.1080/03057070903313210
 850 Journal of Southern African Studies

white unity, buttress white minority rule and outmanoeuvre the government’s critics on both
the right and left. Analysing the Hillbrow campaign reveals a critical moment in the decline
of the NP government’s ability to control apartheid society and maintain white unity.
Documenting the NP and Exit’s campaign demonstrates how nationalist discourses can
co-opt hitherto marginalised sexual ‘others’ in an effort to preserve and rejuvenate the wider
political community and preserve the status quo. The case study examines the adaptability of
white supremacy in South Africa and its attempts to reformulate a political and social system
that was fragmenting. Revealing the intersections between race, sexuality and spatial control
also contributes to sexual citizenship studies, which conceptualise political agency in terms of
sexual, gendered and racial terms, and analyse the claims made by sexual minorities for equal
economic, legal and social rights.2 In ‘queering apartheid’, the discourses wielded by the NP
and presented by Exit showed that sexuality is a plural and contestable site of identity
formation that intersects with other tropes of identity such as race, gender and class.
As Berlant and Warner note, ‘[m]uch work in queer studies equates cultural politics with
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politics itself, bracketing or deferring the question of how oppression and sublimations
around sex and sexuality meet up with other kinds of violence and oppression – with
exploitation, racial formation, the production of female subjectivity or of national culture’.3
At issue in the Hillbrow campaign was the nature of South Africa’s transition to majority
rule and what the tenets of citizenship and the rights of the white minority would be in a future
non-racial dispensation. How would the process of change be managed and who would be
best placed to control it? Would there be minority or individual rights and how could
capitalism be preserved? These questions were refracted and expressed in the Hillbrow/Exit
gay rights campaign. De Beer’s defeat of the incumbent Progressive Federal Party (PFP) MP
for Hillbrow, Alf Widman, was trumpeted by Exit as a powerful victory and advance for gay
rights in South Africa, but the victory provoked a sharp backlash amongst many white gay
men and lesbians who organised to openly identify with the liberation movement. As such,
Exit and the NP’s campaign marks a ‘fascinating display in gay political power’,4 but also a
regrettable episode in the history of gay rights in South Africa. It ultimately proved, however,
to be a critical moment in the political radicalisation of white gay and lesbian groups. By the
end of the 1980s, the South African gay and lesbian movement was multi-racial and well
placed to lobby for the inclusion of sexual minority rights in a future democratic constitution.
The NP’s victory also failed to strengthen the application of the GAA in Hillbrow, which was
formally abolished in 1991. The article begins by exploring the construction of white racial
and sexual identities under apartheid. It then focuses on the demography of Hillbrow and the
GAA, and discusses the political circumstances of the 1987 election before analysing the
discourses evident in Exit during the campaign.

Apartheid and Identity

The articulation of gay rights in the pages of Exit from 1987 onwards reveals white
identities and boundaries in flux. The discourses demonstrate an incorporation of categories
that had hitherto been considered deviant and which were excluded by hegemonic white

2 R. Lister, ‘Sexual Citizenship’, in E.F. Isin and B.S. Turner (eds), Handbook of Citizenship Studies (London,
Sage, 2002), pp. 191– 207; A.R. Wilson, ‘The “Neat Concept” of Sexual Citizenship: A Cautionary Tale for
Human Rights Discourses’, Contemporary Politics, 15, 1 (March 2009), pp. 73 –85.
3 L. Berlant and M. Warner, ‘Guest Column: What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?’ PMLA, 110, 3
(May 1995), p. 347.
4 M. Gevisser, ‘A Different Fight for Freedom: A History of South African Lesbian and Gay Organisation from the
1950s to the 1990s’, in M. Gevisser and E. Cameron (eds), Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa
(London, Routledge, 1995), p. 62.
 Queering Apartheid 851

elites. This process was the result of profoundly and rapidly changing spatial realities.
Phillips has argued:
Apartheid was bent on establishing identities as immutable. It depended on and developed
through the intractability of categories that were embedded socially, and embodied physically as
the designated stigmata of its various subjects. Such zealous righteousness was born from a
certainty that had to be categorical, so that everything was fixed and lines were not blurred.5
The Hillbrow/Exit case demonstrates that the late-apartheid state could no longer maintain
these static categories and that the NP, in particular, had embarked on a process of
‘plundering’ identities in an attempt to ‘rejuvenate’ its disintegrating constituency.6 This was
part of a wider concern about the political fragmentation of the white community and the
consequences for minority rule if this continued. Conceptualising apartheid’s construction of
racial and sexual identities as singular, coherent and static is a common theoretical
oversimplification made about heteronormativity, one that configures heteronormativity as
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‘temporally and spatially stable, uninflected, and transparent. An uninterrogated positioning

of racial privilege and a single, rather than intersectional, axis of identity is assumed’.7 If the
state is conceptualised as ‘a set of processes that play out in specific work sites’, it becomes
important to accept and investigate nuances, contradictions and changing discourses and
practices across time.8 The Exit/Hillbrow campaign problematises the singular assumptions
that are often made about race and sexuality in apartheid South Africa, and illustrates how
political, social and economic crisis can provoke rulers to reconfigure identities in their
efforts to buttress the status quo.
Homosexuality had been a primary manifestation of deviance in Afrikaner nationalist
discourse and had been the source of ‘moral panics’ in white society in the 1960s.9 As Elder
notes, ‘[h]omosexuality between South Africa’s white men challenged State definitions of
race. . . . Within the South African case racial/sexual privilege is undermined when the white
male body becomes a locus of desire’.10 The apartheid state in the 1980s continued to be a
heteronormative entity, stigmatising whites who opposed apartheid as sexually deviant
(particularly those who objected to compulsory military service).11 The President’s Council
rejected any move to decriminalise homosexuality in its review of the Immorality Act in
1985, and voiced concern about the increased acceptance of homosexuality in its report on the
country’s youth in 1987.12 However, there was a plurality of discourses articulated by the
different components of the state. Even the South African Defence Force (SADF), which
ruthlessly stigmatised and abused suspected gay and lesbian troops in the permanent force,

5 O. Phillips, ‘Ten White Men Thirteen Years Later: The Changing Constitution of Masculinities, 1987–2000’, in
M. van Zyl and M. Steyn (eds), Performing Queer: Shaping Sexualities, 1994–2004 (Roggebaai, Kwela Books,
2005), p. 138.
6 Hooper uses these metaphors to explain the state and elite opinion-formers’ attempts to rejuvenate hegemonic
masculinity. However, the concept can also be applied to racial and sexual identities. C. Hooper, Manly States:
Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics (New York, Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 62.
7 J.K. Puar, ‘Mapping US Homonormativities’, Gender, Place and Culture, 13, 1 (February 2006), p. 71.
8 S. Herbert, ‘“Hard Charger” or “Station Queen”? Policing and the Masculinist State’, Gender, Place and Culture,
8, 1 (2001), p. 55.
9 K. Du Pisani ‘Puritanism Transformed: Afrikaner Masculinities in the Apartheid and Post-Apartheid Period’,
in R. Morrell (ed.), Changing Men in Southern Africa (Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, 2001), p. 167.
For an extensive discussion of the 1966 ‘Forest Town Raid’ and subsequent moral panic about homosexuality,
see chapters in Gevisser and Cameron (eds), Defiant Desire.
10 G.S. Elder, ‘The South African Body Politic: Space, Race and Heterosexuality’, in H.J. Nast and S. Pile (eds),
Places Through the Body (London, Routledge, 1998), pp. 161– 2.
11 D. Conway, ‘The Masculine State in Crisis: State Response to War Resistance in Apartheid South Africa’,
Men and Masculinities, 10, 4 (June 2008), pp. 422–39.
12 Gevisser, ‘A Different Fight’, p. 60; President’s Council, Report of the Committee for Social Affairs on the Youth
of South Africa (Cape Town, Government Printer, 1987), p. 48.
 852 Journal of Southern African Studies

accepted gay white men as temporary conscripts. The SADF, highlighting men’s role as
conscripts in its publicly retailed magazine Paratus, symbolised a plethora of masculine
identities, some of which (fashion designer, poet, musician) could be considered overtly
effeminate.13 The destabilisation of apartheid and the fragmentation of white unity created
the need to incorporate hitherto excluded whites in an effort to reformulate the white
community, isolate white dissidents and stave off further division.

The Group Areas Act (GAA) and Hillbrow

Hillbrow was (and remains) a densely populated area bordering Johannesburg’s central
business district, close to the Braamfontein campus of the University of the Witwatersrand,
and situated south of the city’s plush northern suburbs. By the late 1960s, Hillbrow’s high-rise
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apartment blocks, bars, cafés and nightclubs were attractive venues for younger white South
Africans, newly arrived white immigrants and those seeking to identify with subcultures
relatively removed from the moral confines of suburban white South Africa. The area also
had a significant pensioner and Jewish population. Morris notes that with a young, transient
and largely single population, Hillbrow had a ‘concentration of unconventional
behaviours . . . with many residents having no need or desire to conform to mainstream
life-styles, dress codes or bodily aesthetics’.14 It is unsurprising therefore that it would
become one of the first identifiable white gay and lesbian districts in South Africa. Indeed, as
early as the 1970s there were gay nightclubs and businesses in Hillbrow and, by 1982, the
newly formed Gay Association of South Africa (GASA) had opened its national office
there.15 Hillbrow reflected the changing nature of white society and became a space for
alternative, subcultural lifestyles. From the mid-1970s onwards, it also pointed to broader
social and economic changes in the country; in particular, its changing racial profile
represented ‘an early crack in the apartheid edifice’.16
The Group Areas Act, passed in 1950, was a fundamental tenet of apartheid governance.
Racism in South Africa was ‘premised upon the re-configuring of sexual-social relations and
attendant spatial processes’.17 This meant space itself was raced and apartheid’s political and
social norms required that this be strictly policed. The GAA was designed to ensure that urban
areas were racially demarcated and that residency for separate racial groups was enforced.
Landlords could be fined for breaking the Act and illegal residents evicted to maintain racial
segregation. The GAA also ensured that amenities and public services such as schools,
healthcare, and leisure facilities remained racially exclusive. The 1970 census suggests that
the GAA was enforced in Hillbrow, with only a minority of blacks present, most of whom
were legally entitled to be there as domestic workers for white residents.18 By 1983, however,
20 per cent of Hillbrow’s residents were not white and a decade later this figure had
dramatically increased to 85 per cent.19 For Gevisser, it ‘was the pioneering presence of gay
people living in Hillbrow that turned the area into a tolerant “liberated zone” of sorts, laying
the ground for it to become Johannesburg’s first deracialised neighbourhood in the 1980s’.20

13 For further discussion, see D. Conway ‘Contesting the Masculine State: War Resistance in Apartheid South
Africa’, in J. Parpart and M. Zalewski (eds), Rethinking the Man Question: Sex, Gender and Violence in
International Relations (London, Zed Books, 2008), pp. 127–42.
14 Morris, Bleakness and Light, p. 1.
15 Gevisser, ‘A Different Fight’, pp. 32, 49.
16 Morris, Bleakness and Light, p. 10
17 Elder, ‘South African Body Politic’, p. 154.
18 Morris, Bleakness and Light, p. 6
19 Ibid., p. 3
20 Gevisser, ‘A Different Fight’, p. 42.
 Queering Apartheid 853

While Hillbrow’s undoubted cosmopolitanism lends support to this argument, the 1987
election campaign in the constituency contradicts it: racial mixing in so-called ‘grey areas’
such as Hillbrow was a fraught and highly contested process that turned such areas into ‘zones
of uncertainty and stress’.21 Indeed, local opinion polls conducted in 1986 and 1987 found
that a majority of white residents in Hillbrow were opposed to the removal of the GAA and
concerned about the increasing numbers of non-white residents in the area.22 Above all, the
rhetorical commitment to and actual enforcement of the GAA became a key means by which
the NP’s political hegemony was publicly acknowledged. As the 1980s progressed, the
fragmentation of the GAA symbolised and reinforced political disunity in white society and
indicated the impending collapse of apartheid.
The racial mixing of Hillbrow resulted initially from chronic housing shortages in Indian
and coloured areas from the mid-1970s that the state was unable to surmount. By 1986, there
was an estimated shortage of 44,000 housing units for Indians and 52,000 for coloureds.23
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In 1978, rent control measures, which kept the rental price of apartments in central
Johannesburg below market rates, were abolished. The immediate rise in the rental price of
property led to an exodus of white residents from districts such as Hillbrow and this, in
addition to a drop in white immigration figures in the 1980s and Hillbrow’s growing
reputation for racial mixing, created an excess of empty properties in the area.24 Many
landlords were willing to flout the GAA by letting apartments to coloured and Indian tenants
and did so at exorbitant prices.25 As early as 1980, the Housing Minister talked of the creation
of ‘grey areas’ where mixed racial residency would be tolerated, but the NP exhibited
contradictory and shifting attitudes to the GAA, reflecting deeper divisions within the party.
White public opinion was also sharply divided.26 Hillbrow’s location close to Johannesburg’s
central business district, combined with chronic black housing shortages and white under-
occupancy made the district a prime ‘grey area’.
In central Johannesburg, the Action Committee to Stop Eviction (ACTSTOP) was formed
by coloured and Indian residents to contest the state’s ability to enforce the GAA. In 1982,
ACTSTOP secured a stunning victory when the Supreme Court ruled that an impending
eviction of the Govenders, an Indian family, had to be halted and that all further evictions
were unjust unless the state could make alternative accommodation available.27 The
Govender ruling effectively made evictions under the GAA almost impossible. Ironically, the
judgement may not have been entirely unwelcome for the NP government, who were
straining to cope with the sheer number of illegal residents in areas such as Hillbrow.
The government was also increasingly aware of the negative publicity that evictions attracted
both internationally and amongst sections of the white population. In 1986, the laws
controlling the movement of Africans from rural areas into the city were reformed, which
added greatly to the number of black South Africans already flouting the GAA because of
housing shortages. Indeed, by 1993, 62 per cent of Hillbrow’s residents were black African.28

21 G. Elder, ‘The Grey Dawn of South African Racial Residential Integration’, GeoJournal, 22, 3 (November 1990),
p. 264.
22 Morris, Bleakness and Light, p. 61.
23 S.P. Rule, ‘The Emergence of a Racially Mixed Residential Suburb in Johannesburg: Demise of the Apartheid
City?’ The Geographical Journal, 155, 2 (July 1989), p. 201.
24 Morris, Bleakness and Light, pp. 16– 20.
25 Morris contends that the majority of residents in Hillbrow during this period had stable and well-paid jobs and
that coloured and Indian tenants’ ‘illegal’ status enabled landlords to charge high rents: ibid., p. 49. Multiple
occupancy of apartments by non-white residents also inflated rental incomes.
26 Ibid., pp. 32–3.
27 Rule, ‘Emergence’, p. 197; Morris, Bleakness and Light, p. 39
28 Morris, Bleakness and Light, p. 53
 854 Journal of Southern African Studies

The GAA may well have defied the logic of South Africa’s housing needs, been rendered
practically unenforceable by the judiciary, and even tacitly acknowledged as unworkable by
some members of the government, but its demise was by no means assured, nor accepted by
all whites. As Elder notes, ‘racial co-existence in grey areas [was] different to the residential
experience that South Africans [had] come to expect’, and some white residents had to
contemplate a rapid decline in the value of their property were the ‘grey area’ status to be
accepted.29 Other conservative forces considered any proposed diminution of the Act as a
betrayal of white South Africans and the de facto ending of white rule, a reality to be resisted
at all costs. As the 1987 election approached, the NP faced crises on many fronts, and the
GAA was just one, albeit very important, tenet of white minority rule that was disintegrating.

The 1987 White Election

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The 1987 election took place against a backdrop of unprecedented crisis and white disunity in
South Africa. A State of Emergency, imposed in response to the widespread uprising against
apartheid in black townships from 1984 onwards, remained in place; the economy was mired
in recession; and South Africa faced an almost universally hostile international community.
The NP’s campaign encompassed seemingly contradictory messages, emphasising the
party’s security credentials in the face of a supposed terrorist and Communist insurgency
while also maintaining it was genuinely ‘reformist’. The NP portrayed the official
parliamentary opposition, the liberal PFP, as being weak on security and either naı̈vely or
malevolently furthering the prospects for revolution by associating with Communist and
other radical elements. The NP also sought to undermine the PFP’s claim that they were the
only party that could peacefully negotiate political change in South Africa.30 The existence of
compulsory conscription for all white men and the pervasive militarisation of the media,
education system and corporate world ensured widespread white public identification with
the NP’s construction of a threat and of the fearful consequences of not meeting it.31 The PFP
struggled to counter this tactic and faced internal divisions about the legitimacy of
conscription and about expressing hostility toward apartheid in both principle and practice
while maintaining a distance from the outlawed ANC and the mass civic organisation, the
United Democratic Front (UDF). The PFP’s electoral prospects were further damaged in
1986 when its leader and deputy leader, Frederick Van Zyl Slabbert and Alex Boraine,
resigned from the party and as MPs. Branding parliament an ‘irrelevance’, and the whites-
only electoral system a ‘prostitution of democracy’, Van Zyl Slabbert and Boraine sought to
engage openly with the ANC and other parts of the liberation movement.32 White student
groups responded to the call of the ANC to boycott the 1987 election and the University of the
Witwatersrand was the scene of protests and rioting during the campaign.
The NP could use security to stigmatise white liberals and their representatives in
parliament, but there were deep divisions within the NP, and Afrikanerdom more broadly,

29 Elder, ‘Grey Dawn’, p. 263.

30 D. Welsh, ‘The Ideology, Aims, Role and Strategy of the PFP and NRP’, in D.J. Van Vuuren et al. (eds), South
African Election 1987: Context, Process and Prospect (Pinetown, Owen Burgess Publishers, 1987), p. 98.
31 G. Cawthra, Brutal Force: The Apartheid War Machine (London, International Defence and Aid Fund for
Southern Africa, 1986), p. 42; D. Conway, ‘“Somewhere on the Border – of Credibility”: The Cultural
Construction and Contestation of ‘the Border’ in White South African Society’, in G. Baines and P. Vale (eds),
Beyond the Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa’s Late-Cold War Conflicts (Pretoria, Unisa Press,
2008), pp. 75– 93; P.H. Frankel, Pretoria’s Praetorians: Civil-Military Relations in South Africa (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 132; D. Geldenhuys, What Do We Think? A Survey of White Opinion on
Foreign Policy Issues (Braamfontein, South African Institute of International Affairs, 1982).
32 Welsh, ‘Ideology, Aims, Role’, p. 96.
 Queering Apartheid 855

that were less easily countered. The second plank of the NP’s 1987 election campaign was
its reform agenda and purported ability to manage the pace of constitutional change.
‘Reform Yes – Surrender No!’ was a key NP slogan in newspapers and on billboards.33 It
was this reformist trajectory that was dividing both white society and the NP itself. In 1982,
a group of senior MPs had left the NP and established the Conservative Party (CP) in protest
over PW Botha’s proposed constitutional changes.34 These changes involved granting
Indians and coloureds limited political rights, and removing aspects of ‘petty apartheid’
by, for example, opening certain sports events and luxury hotels to all races.35 The GAA
was a key focus for the verligte (liberal) and verkrampte (reactionary) wings of the NP and
within wider white politics. As early as 1984, the CP pledged to ‘clear up the Hillbrow
cesspool’ by enforcing the GAA in the area if elected.36 The 1984 Constitution created a
parliamentary system with separately elected white, Indian and coloured Houses. This
meant the government had to consider new constituencies when devising policy and the NP
were well aware that ruthless application of the GAA in certain areas would (and indeed
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did) provoke the ire of its partners in the other Houses, thereby jeopardising the new
constitutional arrangements.37
Opinion over the future of the GAA divided NP MPs, the national government and the
municipalities, and the wider white society.38 The leader of the NP-controlled Johannesburg
municipality told the press in March 1987 that the GAA had ‘failed’. However, the national
NP leadership pledged to take ‘drastic action’ to impose racial segregation using the Act in
the election campaign two months later.39 The government did have some room for
manoeuvre given that the President’s Council was investigating the future of the GAA and
was not due to report until after the election. However, pressure from CP candidates focusing
on the GAA and the ‘sensational journalism’ that portrayed life in districts that had become
racially mixed made the NP’s emphasis on the Act of critical importance in potential ‘grey
area’ constituencies such as Hillbrow.40

Hillbrow and Exit

In Hillbrow, Morris claims that the NP fought a ‘blatantly racist’ campaign during the
election.41 However, the campaign was, if anything, ostensibly about gay rights, and the
racism covert. In March 1987, the Hillbrow-based gay magazine Exit had written to
the PFP MP Alf Widman enquiring about his attitude toward the decriminalisation of
homosexuality in South Africa and his views about the wider issue of gay rights. Widman
initially declined to answer, explaining he would have to clarify the PFP’s official policy
on the matter. When Widman did respond, albeit in a private capacity, he stated that he
considered sexuality a personal matter and not the responsibility of the government.
This response was insufficient for Exit, who concluded that the MP had ‘waffled and
hedged’ and the magazine launched a campaign to unseat him and elect his NP rival, Leon

33 D. Van Vuuren et al., ‘Introduction: Perspectives on an Election’, in Van Vuuren et al. (eds), South African
Election 1987, p. 1.
34 C. Charney, ‘The National Party: A Class Alliance in Crisis’, in W.G. James (ed.), The State of Apartheid
(Boulder, Co, Lynne Rienner, 1987), p. 12.
35 M. Mann, ‘The Giant Stirs: South African Business in the Age of Reform’, in P. Frankel et al. (eds), State,
Resistance and Change in South Africa (Johannesburg, Southern Book Publishers, 1988), p. 54.
36 Morris, Bleakness and Light, pp. 42– 3.
37 Ibid., p. 64.
38 Ibid., pp. 58–61.
39 Ibid., pp. 58, 44.
40 Elder, ‘Grey Dawn’, p. 263.
41 Morris, Bleakness and Light, p. 61.
 856 Journal of Southern African Studies

de Beer.42 De Beer used Exit’s pages to advocate non-discrimination against gay men
(lesbians were never explicitly mentioned)43 and Exit lobbied for its readership to vote for
De Beer. Exit expanded this campaign to include all parliamentary candidates standing in
the election and sought to create a noticeable gay constituency in white politics who
would ‘Vote Gay’ by electing the candidate who had expressed support for gay rights.
However, the newspaper devoted disproportionate attention to Hillbrow and De Beer.
A post-1987 editor of Exit recalled:
Like most gay people in the constituency, I would never have voted Nat. But it was an exciting
moment for us. Here was this handsome, charming man [De Beer], and he was talking in favour
of gay rights. It was the first time any candidate was prepared to stand up openly and support gay
rights.44

De Beer and Exit did indeed openly support gay rights, but any analysis that ignores the
significance of the GAA, the nature of the rights advocated and the fact that the debate was
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confined to white politics is highly disingenuous. Discourses of ‘gay rights’, in the context of
the Hillbrow campaign, were related to the recreation of Hillbrow as a white area and an
endorsement of the NP’s vision of limited constitutional reform and the preservation of
apartheid.
Exit was freely available in the bars and clubs of Hillbrow and was sent to the
membership list of GASA (Exit was in fact the successor to GASA’s newsletter, Link/Skakel).
GASA had been established in 1982 to advance gay rights, but had been expressly apolitical
about wider issues in South African society. In practice, this apoliticism meant focusing only
on white gay rights and operating within the confines of white society, ignoring any critique
of apartheid or association with black South Africans. GASA’s members were almost
exclusively white men. Until 1987, Exit had continued this apolitical focus, even in the face
of the Nkoli affair.45 ANC activist Simon Nkoli became a ‘ready-made hero’ for the
international lesbian and gay and anti-apartheid movements when he came out as gay during
his treason trial in 1986. GASA initially ignored the significance of Nkoli’s public stand and
refused to support him when he was later charged with murder. Gevisser writes that this was a
‘revealing indicator of how entrenched GASA was in the apartheid perception of extra-
parliamentary activity as criminal activity rather than the only available means of black
protest and resistance’.46 Exit’s foray into politics during the 1987 election campaign was
therefore a departure from its hitherto gossipy and social events focus, but remained faithful
to GASA’s purview of gay rights for white South Africans and of avoiding broader political
issues regarding black liberation. Exit’s post-election editorial claimed ‘our aim was to make
it a one cause campaign, on the pattern of many overseas efforts of a similar nature. That
meant we had to back just one important issue, and put other considerations somewhat to the
side’.47 This new politicisation was paradoxical given the wider context of South African
politics and society in 1987, and as Davidson and Nerio argue:
The clamouring of politicians to address the issue was at once empowering and disturbing to the
lesbian and gay community. If gay voters were to reject the overtures of the pro-gay candidates,
the community might be giving up an opportunity for unprecedented visibility. However, if they

42 ‘Key Nats Say Yes, Old Prog Waffles, Schwarz Positive’, Exit, April/May 1987. I am grateful to Antony Manion,
Archivist of the Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of the Witwatersrand, for sourcing this material.
43 S. Croucher, ‘South Africa’s Democratisation and the Politics of Gay Liberation’, Journal of Southern African
Studies, 28, 2 (June 2002), p. 318; Gevisser, ‘A Different Fight’, p. 48.
44 Henk Botha, cited in Gevisser, ‘A Different Fight’, p. 62.
45 G. Davidson and R. Nerio, ‘Exit: Gay Publishing in South Africa’, in Gevisser and Cameron (eds), Defiant
Desire, p. 227.
46 Gevisser, ‘A Different Fight’, p. 56; Croucher, ‘South Africa’s Democratisation’, pp. 318– 19.
47 ‘Output: The Power of the Cross’, Exit, June/July 1987.
 Queering Apartheid 857

were to respond, they would be validating a political system from which most South Africans
were excluded, and that a record number of white progressive South Africans were boycotting.48
Exit attracted bitter criticism from gay and lesbian groups who did associate with the
liberation movement and the campaign would prove to be GASA’s swansong. The
organisation eventually imploded and was superseded by non-racial gay and lesbian groups
expressly allied with the liberation struggle, such as the Cape Town-based Organisation of
Lesbians and Gays against Oppression (OLGA).49

South Africa as a Country of ‘Minorities’

One of the NP’s primary claims was that South Africa was a country of racial ‘minorities’ and
that only the NP could protect the rights of ‘minority groups’. White residents of Hillbrow
would have been acutely aware that they were rapidly becoming a minority racial group in the
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district, and Leon de Beer’s frequent claim that the NP protected ‘minority groups’, and his
incorporation of gay white South Africans as one of these ‘minorities’, both sought to
reassure whites fearful of losing wider political, social and economic power, and offered
a new and unprecedented political status to gay white voters. Exit described De Beer as a
‘New Nat’, from the verligte wing of the party, with progressive views on ‘other issues as
well’.50 De Beer, a 27-year-old bachelor and former police officer, had been a member of the
PFP whilst at university in Stellenbosch. ‘Being gay is a personal thing’, explained De Beer
on Exit’s cover page. ‘I am here to look after the interests of my constituents, whether they are
gay or straight. And minority groups need protection’.51 The NP’s parliamentary candidate
for the neighbouring constituency of Yeoville, Hein Kruger, went further by saying he
believed ‘discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, sexual preferences or any other
matter may not be tolerated’.52
These claims, emanating from NP candidates, could be regarded as preposterous or
motivated entirely by electoral expediency. However, the claim about protecting minority
rights, and the rejection of race as a basis for NP policy, were entirely consistent with PW
Botha’s leadership. Botha had long denied any charge that he was personally racist, seeking
to explain apartheid as a means for protecting civilised government and capitalism.53 The
configuring of South Africa as a ‘country of minorities’ who needed protection was a constant
mantra of Botha’s. The inclusion of white gay men as another minority was not necessarily a
contradiction of NP policy in these terms, and even reinforced it. In his post-election
interview with Exit, De Beer explained that he wanted ‘to make it clear that the National Party
is a party that naturally believes in protecting the rights of minorities . . . I think that we must
build in mechanisms to protect the rights of minority groups’.54 ‘Gay rights’ as articulated by
Exit and the NP’s candidates in Hillbrow and Yeoville simultaneously extended and
reinforced the NP’s claim to be maintaining white rule protecting the interests of white voters.
The reconfiguring of the white community to include gay whites had particular resonance in
Hillbrow because of the high percentage of gay voters living in an area whose status as a
‘white’ district was threatened.

48 Davidson and Nerio, ‘Exit’, p. 228.

49 D. Fine and J. Nicol, ‘The Lavender Lobby: Working for Lesbian and Gay Rights within the Liberation
Movement’, in Gevisser and Cameron (eds), Defiant Desire, pp. 269–70; Croucher, ‘South Africa’s
Democratisation’, p. 319.
50 ‘Key Nats say Yes’.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.
53 H. Murray, ‘Interview: PW Botha’, Leadership SA, 2, 3 (Spring 1983), pp. 11–21.
54 ‘Gay Rights MP Speaks After Victory’, Exit, June/July 1987.
 858 Journal of Southern African Studies

Exit asserted that it had taken ‘the first steps toward a party political awareness of gay
people’ by creating a ‘gay power vote’.55 The paper had written to all candidates standing in
the 1987 election asking them to indicate ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to whether they supported the idea of
legislation decriminalising homosexuality. The letter, reproduced in Exit, quoted research
undertaken by clinical psychologist Dr Louise Olivier and published under the auspices of the
South African Human Sciences Research Council. This research concluded that 18 per cent of
South Africa’s population was gay. Olivier also audaciously claimed that ‘gays do not mind
which government is in power, as long as they are acknowledged as a group. Their sexuality
is at the top of their priorities. I believe they will vote for the candidate who can guarantee
their rights’.56 Exit focused on individual candidates who either would or would not endorse
its campaign, and reported that it had been inundated by letters and telephone calls of support
from voters nationwide.57 The paper published a table that listed all constituencies and
parliamentary candidates, indicating which had replied ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘no reply’ to its letter.
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Readers were encouraged to ‘Vote gay or spoil your paper’, the latter by writing ‘GAY’
across the ballot paper.58 Only ten per cent (42 in total) of parliamentary candidates replied,
of whom 35 (23 PFP, ten NP and two Independent) indicated they would support gay rights.
In its election issue, Exit editorialised:
It is surprising that so few PFP candidates have replied. Its leaders have seldom hesitated to speak
their minds openly and supportively – with the exception of Mr Widman. It is also surprising that
Nationalists, traditionally regarded as homophobic, have come out in support of gay rights. It is
indicative of the change in attitudes in society.59
The leader of the Conservative Party had replied saying he did not want gay votes because he
regarded homosexuality as ‘not an acceptable practice’.60 The CP’s candidate in Hillbrow,
Gaye Derby-Lewis, refused to comment.61 The paper declared that Hillbrow could ‘be key
for rights’ and that many voters had defected from the PFP to support the ‘young rebel Nat’.62
In the event, 16 of the candidates who had responded positively were elected to parliament,
including De Beer, who won by a slender majority of 89 votes. Exit’s campaign raised the
question of whether a white gay constituency had been created in South Africa and also of
whether the newspaper had been the catalyst for the PFP’s defeat in Hillbrow. Whatever the
realities, however, the post-election issue of Exit was triumphal.
The election of De Beer in a hitherto safe PFP seat was certainly an achievement. Exit
claimed that the ‘power of the gay voting block was apparent in the election’, and that De
Beer represented ‘the great white hope for gay rights’.63 Indeed, the paper held that the

55 ‘Editorial: Gay Power Vote’, Exit, May/June 1987.

56 ‘Spoil Your Paper, Thousands Set To Vote Gay’ and ‘Here Is Your Election Guide’, Exit, May/June 1987.
57 ‘Spoil Your Paper’.
58 ‘Here is Your Election Guide’.
59 ‘Editorial’.
60 ‘HNP, CP Say No’, Exit, April/May 1987.
61 ‘Mother Gaye is Mum if it’s Exit’, Exit, April/ May 1987.
62 ‘Hillbrow Can Be Key for Rights’, Exit, May/June 1987.
63 It later transpired that De Beer’s victory was illegitimate. Alf Widman unsuccessfully contested the outcome in
court immediately after the 1987 election, but a subsequent police investigation resulted in De Beer, his electoral
agent and an official in the Department of the Interior being convicted on 90 counts of electoral fraud. The
charges related to voters being removed from the electoral roll without their knowledge and 68 voters’ addresses
being fraudulently changed to make them eligible to vote (some of De Beer’s own family fraudulently voted in
Hillbrow). However, of the 48 false ballot papers presented to the court, only 24 were votes for the NP; 23 were
for the CP and 1 was for the PFP. Therefore, although De Beer had clearly been involved in artificially increasing
his vote, it was not conclusively proven he had won because of it. De Beer was sentenced to two years’
imprisonment in 1988. See ‘MP Will Not Oppose Widman Application’, Star, 9 June 1987; ‘De Beer Starts Two
Year Jail Term’, Sunday Times, 19 February 1989; ‘How We Nailed Fraud MP’, Sunday Times, 4 December
1988; ‘Judgement in Hillbrow Fraud Case Reserved’, Citizen, 4 October 1988; ‘Court Told How MP Juggled
 Queering Apartheid 859

PFP would have retained six seats that had been lost in the election had their candidates
replied to Exit. Exit’s post-election interview with De Beer touched more on the
application of the GAA in Hillbrow than on gay rights however, which indicates the
importance of this issue to residents of Hillbrow. It is revealing that Exit would choose to
focus on the GAA and not, for example, on the means by which De Beer would pursue the
enactment of gay rights, or on the exact content of those rights, which was what the entire
campaign was purportedly about. The interview was conducted by an anonymous
interviewee and by Lulu Avender, one of Exit’s regular columnists. The interviewees
turned to the GAA in their second question, to which De Beer replied that the ‘National
Party’s fight in Hillbrow went on a ticket of law and order . . . We are going to get rid
of the criminal element, regardless of race, so that civilized people can live in peace’.
The GAA ‘is a prickly affair’, continued De Beer, ‘which must not be seen in isolation.
Scrapping the Act has other political implications. This is my problem.’ De Beer expressed
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his concern that black residents had caused ‘overcrowding’ in central Johannesburg, but
‘you cannot get rid of them overnight’. De Beer’s response embodied the NP’s
ambivalence about the GAA, which the government wanted to reform but also considered
important for the stability of the country’s wider political and social structures (ensuring
de facto white power remained). De Beer elaborated on his election statements, saying,
‘The NP has always stressed group rights strongly . . . One must always protect minority
rights’.64 The interviewer then confirmed that this included gay rights. Exit’s focus on the
GAA in the post-election interview and De Beer’s conflation of gay rights with group or
minority (white) rights, which was already a fundamental tenet of NP policy, reveals not
only the significance to Exit’s stance during the campaign of the GAA and its
disintegration in Hillbrow, but also the attempt by De Beer to incorporate gay whites into
the NP’s support base.
Some commentators interpreted the 1987 election results as a ‘spectacular’ victory for
the NP – a ‘massive vote of confidence’ by the white electorate.65 The NP had increased its
parliamentary majority, but its share of the vote had contracted. Most significantly, perhaps
half its Afrikaans-speaking supporters had deserted it for the CP.66 For the PFP – replaced
by the CP as official opposition and losing key seats like Hillbrow – the election was a
disaster that was blamed on the NP’s focus on security issues and on large numbers of PFP
supporters having either emigrated, defected to the NP, or boycotted the elections
(especially in university constituencies).67 The exiled ANC and the UDF reacted to the
election with concern, concluding that ‘whites are scared’ and that the NP’s strategy
consisted of nothing more than appealing to whites’ ‘fear and greed’.68 The white electorate
had shifted to the right and although the ruling bloc was clearly fragmenting, this was not
necessarily increasing the probability of peaceful transition to a non-racial democracy.
Indeed, the UDF, like the Commonwealth Group of Eminent Persons before it, was deeply
worried about the contraction of a white moderate or ‘middle ground’ and the prospects this

Footnote 63 continued
Votes’, Sunday Times, 19 June 1988; ‘Hillbrow MP on Poll Fraud Charges’, Citizen, 19 October 1988. I am
grateful to Tom Schumann, Librarian of the South African Parliament, for sourcing this information.
64 ‘Gay Rights MP Speaks’.
65 P.H. Kapp, ‘The Historical Background to and Significance of the May Election’, in Van Vuuren et al. (eds),
South African Election 1987, p. 22.
66 R. Schrire, Adapt or Die: The End of White Politics in South Africa (New York, Ford Foundation, 1991),
p. 95.
67 Welsh, ‘Ideology, Aims, Role’, p. 96.
68 Cory Library, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, Document 259, Grahamstown Democratic Action Committee
(GRADAC) Series, Records of the United Democratic Front, Report of the National Working Committee
Conference, 29 and 30 May 1987.
 860 Journal of Southern African Studies

raised of racial civil war.69 Given this wider context, Exit’s contention that the election
outcome was a positive step for gay rights appears quixotic, but De Beer’s post-election
interview is again instructive: ‘The National Party’s policy has changed so much lately that
the moderate voter feels equally at home with the Nats . . . At the end of the day the Progs
[PFP] come across as a bunch of wishy washy liberals mainly based in the northern suburbs,
and that is what it is. We have to be realistic about politics’.70 In her concluding response,
Exit’s Lulu Avender concurred that ‘The Nats have got room to talk’.71 Exit’s support for
De Beer had reflected a wider belief in white society that the NP’s reform process was at the
right pace, that its definition of ‘progressiveness’ was more palatable than the PFP’s, and
that it alone could manage reform in whites’ self-interest.72 This was a particularly pressing
issue for voters in Hillbrow where apartheid governance had come under pressure because
of the flouting of the GAA.
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Post-1987 Backlash
Despite Exit’s triumphalism, there was a sharp backlash against the paper’s stance from
key figures in the white gay and lesbian movement in South Africa. Edwin Cameron, a
human rights lawyer, described Exit’s behaviour as ‘a debasement of the gay cause and
a profaning of its responsibilities to the South African gay community as a whole’.73
The post-election issue of Exit published a letter from the University of the
Witwatersrand’s Gay Movement (WGM) expressing their ‘profound disgust’ with the
paper: ‘To us, gay rights are one facet of the struggle of universal human rights, rights
which are denied the majority of South Africans’. Exit was clearly only interested in
‘white gay rights’ and its claim to speak for the entire gay community smacked entirely
of ‘arrogance’, the WGM insisted.74 Julia Nicol, an activist in OLGA, wrote in Exit that
‘for gay people to cast a vote in favour of the racist repression of twenty-four million
people in order to advance what they regard as their own best interests, is a moral
outrage’.75 The editor responded that the paper had never claimed to speak for the whole
gay community, that it opposed racism and sexism, and that he had evidence that
members of the WGM had voted for De Beer. The backlash against Exit, its exclusive
focus on white politics, and its advocacy of gay rights at the expense of broader political
issues would prove to be the most significant and lasting outcome of the 1987 election
for the gay rights movement in South Africa.76
In the wake of the 1987 election, Exit announced that the ‘gay electorate is now
planning to pull out the stops’ and urged its readership to vote for the PFP so that the party
could capture the Johannesburg Council in the forthcoming municipal elections. This
dramatic change of partisanship was most likely a result of the backlash the paper had
experienced for supporting the NP in Hillbrow, but it did not return to the campaigning
zeal it had exhibited during the 1987 parliamentary elections. Exit continued to be used

69 Commonwealth Group of Eminent Persons, Mission to South Africa: The Commonwealth Report
(Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986), p. 139; S.M. Davis, Apartheid’s Rebels: Inside South Africa’s Hidden War
(New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1988), p. 87.
70 ‘Gay Rights MP Speaks’.
71 Ibid.
72 Kapp, ‘Historical Background’, pp. 23–24; L. Schlemmer, ‘Assessment: The 1987 South African Election in the
South African Political Process’, in Van Vuuren et al. (eds), South African Election 1987, pp. 322– 4.
73 Davidson and Nerio, ‘Exit’, pp. 228–9
74 ‘WGM Stand Clear’, Exit, June/July 1987.
75 ‘Outrage’, Exit, June/July 1987.
76 Ibid.
 Queering Apartheid 861

as a forum for council and parliamentary candidates to place advertisements aimed at white
gay voters in central Johannesburg. These advertisements sought to incorporate gay voters
into the white body politic and candidates offered competing and increasingly fragmented
definitions of group and individual rights. By 1989, 50 per cent of eligible white voters in
central Johannesburg had left the area and the parties struggled to canvass support.77 In the
1988 local elections, three NP councillors for central Johannesburg sponsored an advert
explaining that
Gay People have normal rights. They deserve to be part of the democratic process. Gays are an
essential part of the economy. Without them it would collapse. A lot of attention is given to other
minorities, but gays are more important. There is no gay vote. It is a normal vote. You are
ratepayers. Why hide in the closet?78

The claim that gay voters were ‘essential’ to the economy and to ‘ratepayers’, could be
interpreted as configuring sexual citizenship in capitalist terms and ‘normalising’ gay
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rights by conceptualising gay men as consumers who benefit the market. This neo-liberal
premise for incorporation and the capitalist ‘normalisation’ of gay men have been
observed in other national contexts.79 The reference by the NP to ‘gays’ being ‘more
important’ than ‘other minorities’ also alluded to the NP’s emphasis on white voters and
white gay voters in Johannesburg as opposed to black South Africans. The NP’s appeal to
gay voters reflected the demographic realities of the inner-city white electorate, which was
in sharp decline generally, compelling the parties to incorporate new constituencies into
their support base.
In the 1989 parliamentary elections, the NP again fielded a young male candidate in
Hillbrow, Tony Wasserman. Wasserman placed an advert in Exit also premised on the claim
that gay white voters were a ‘normal’ part of the body politic: ‘Don’t use Gays in Elections!
Gays are Citizens and voters like anyone else . . . Vote for a man who believes in human
rights for all’.80 The Democratic Party (the renamed PFP) recaptured the seat in the election
(although the party’s share of the vote was less than the NP and CP’s combined vote in the
constituency). Their candidate, Lester Fuchs, had argued thus in Exit: ‘Gay people are
treated by the Nats as common criminals, with total disregard for their individual rights.
Gay people are equal under the law according to the DP, thus entitling them to equal
treatment as worthy citizens of South Africa. Now where will you put your X?’81 The 1989
election was the last whites-only contest and saw the NP’s national share of the vote fall
below 50 per cent for the first time in decades.82 Within months of the election, PW Botha
resigned as State President and the process of democratic transition had begun. G.C. Engel,
the DP’s candidate for nearby Bezuidenhout, also defeated the NP’s candidate. Engel’s
advert in Exit said, ‘We don’t believe in gay rights, we believe in all rights. Don’t vote NP
– it’s their very legislation that criminalises you at their discretion. Gays pay taxes. Serve in
the SADF. Contribute towards the economy . . . We plan to put this before parliament’.83
This argument reflected both the DP’s demands for a political dispensation in which all
South Africans, regardless of race, had basic human rights, and a desire to ‘normalise’ gay
voters and incorporate them into the body politic. Lester Fuchs did indeed table a Private

77 Morris, Bleakness and Light, p. 62.

78 Advertisement, Exit, October 1988.
79 L. Duggan, ‘The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism’, in R. Castronovo and
D.D. Nelson (eds), Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalised Cultural Politics (Durham, NC, Duke
University Press, 2002), pp. 175–94; Wilson ‘The “Neat Concept”’, p. 79.
80 Advertisement, Exit, June/July 1989.
81 Advertisement, Exit, August/September 1989.
82 Schrire, Adapt or Die, p. 127.
83 Advertisement, Exit, June/July1989.
 862 Journal of Southern African Studies

Member’s Bill before the House of Assembly (along with fellow DP MP Tony Leon) in
1990 aimed at the decriminalisation of homosexuality. This Bill was unsuccessful, but it
was perhaps apt that the MP for Hillbrow was the initiator.

Hillbrow and the Demise of the GAA

The changes in the racial make-up of Hillbrow and the political struggles surrounding it were
indicative of the wider crisis of apartheid. Hillbrow was not just an identifiable white gay
area, but an area where the spatial realities of apartheid were collapsing. The influx of Indians
and coloureds into the district from the late 1970s, and then of Africans from the mid-1980s,
was a vivid symbol of the implosion of apartheid:
The racial transition in Hillbrow was significant beyond the immediate neighbourhood; it
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indicated the ability of the government to maintain apartheid had become more and more
untenable economically and politically and that in order for white domination to endure, the NP
had to adapt and modify its apartheid policy around urban space and race.84
The NP’s overture to gay whites in Hillbrow disclosed the contradictory pressures that
verligte reform had created for the government. Unable decisively to enforce the GAA, the
NP vacillated between threats of Draconian retaliation against those who flouted urban racial
segregation and de facto acceptance of this flouting: ‘the government had lost the ability to
act in a definite, conclusive, fashion’.85 White opinion registered in polls taken in Hillbrow
between 1986 and 1989 similarly showed remarkably shifting and contradictory attitudes
toward the GAA.86 Kraak cites evidence of a ‘most grotesque racism’ in the gay clubs of
Hillbrow indicative of a wider racism and myopia in the white gay community and its nascent
organisations.87 The appeal to gay white men, particularly when based on a conflation of gay
rights with the preservation of white minority rights against the supposed threat of black
majority domination, offered the NP an opportunity both to stabilise its support base by
assimilating new constituencies to its cause, and to address the pressing problem of mixed
race residency in central Johannesburg. That this tactic was ultimately unsuccessful
demonstrates the failure of NP-designed reform to stabilise the system.
In late 1987, the President’s Council recommended the recognition of ‘open areas’ where
the GAA would not apply.88 However, the GAA remained a key battleground between the NP
and the CP. Leading up to the 1988 municipal elections, the government proposed the
Group Areas Amendment Bill, which would have overturned the Govender ruling, made the
eviction of those who flouted the Act compulsory, and imposed significant monetary and
custodial sentences on landlords breaking the GAA. There was sharp opposition to the Bill
even from NP supporters and it was effectively dropped when it became clear that Indian and
coloured parliamentarians were prepared to end their participation in the tricameral
legislature should it become law.89 In 1989, the government passed the Free Settlement Act,
which adopted the principle of recognising ‘open areas’. The byzantine means by which a
district could be classified as an ‘open area’ resulted in only one area (not Hillbrow) being
recognised as such. The government was ‘[p]rocrastinating constitutional collapse’90

84 Morris, Bleakness and Light, p. 332.

85 Ibid., p. 12.
86 Ibid., pp. 61–2.
87 G. Kraak, ‘Homosexuality and the South African Left: The Ambiguities of Exile’, in N. Hoad et al. (eds), Sex and
Politics in South Africa (Cape Town, Double Storey, 2005), p. 123.
88 Rule, ‘Emergence’, p. 201.
89 Morris, Bleakness and Light, p. 63.
90 Elder, ‘Grey Dawn’, p. 264.
 Queering Apartheid 863

in attempting to assuage the fears of whites living in ‘grey areas’. The inevitable was accepted
in 1991 when the GAA was repealed.

Conclusion
This account of the targeting of white gay voters in Hillbrow, and of the role of Exit in trying
to foster a gay constituency in white politics, contributes to our understanding of gay and
lesbian history in South Africa and reveals the sometimes fraught path gay and lesbian groups
travelled before identifying with other forms of oppression and with democratisation. This
case also demonstrates that ‘there is nothing inherently or intrinsically anti-nation or anti-
nationalist about queerness’, and that ‘while queer bodies may be disallowed, there is room
for the absorption and management of homosexuality’ in certain historical contexts.91 Above
all, the Hillbrow/Exit case underlines the importance of conceptualising racial, sexual and
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gender identities as intersectional and plural, and articulated and embodied according to
contingent circumstances. Afrikaner nationalism was avowedly homophobic and the South
African state heteronormative. But as Charney explained, the NP’s behaviour was rooted in
‘ever-deepening crises of accumulation and hegemony’92 that were themselves predicated on
wider crises in white apartheid governance necessitating a reformulation of white
subjectivities and the incorporation of hitherto excluded groups if NP rule was to continue.
The intractable undermining of the GAA in inner-city Johannesburg confronted the NP with a
dual crisis fusing the spatial application of apartheid with an issue that drew acute hostility
from right-wing nationalists. Conflating gay rights with white minority rights, while rejecting
race as a signifier, gave the NP the political opportunity to resolve these acute tensions, yet
did nothing to address the wider challenges of the housing shortages and the domestic and
international hostility toward white minority rule.

DANIEL CONWAY
Department of Politics, History and International Relations, Loughborough University,
Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU, UK. E-mail: d.j.conway@lboro.ac.uk

91 Puar, ‘Mapping US Homonormativities’, pp. 86, 72.

92 Charney, ‘The National Party, 1982–1985’, p. 6.