Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

12 “Strangers on a Train”: Sexual Citizenship and the Politics of Public Transportation in Apartheid Cape Town

12 “Strangers on a Train” Sexual Citizenship and the Politics of Public Transportation in Apartheid Cape Town William L. Leap Prologue: On Familiarity and Its Dangers “Homosexuality” as we know it in today’s South Africa is closely tied to the recent history of apartheid. As the following discussion will show, the technologies of apartheid—discrimination, displacement, enclosure, removal—regulated geographies and identities of male-centered, same-sex desire, just as they did for geographies and identities associated with other domains of everyday experience. At the same time, South African “homosexuality” has also been influenced by international media and other communication, by travel and tourism, and by forms of sexualized globalization discussed elsewhere in this volume. Even during the periods of greatest restriction, North Atlantic understandings of male same-sex desire and identity circulated widely within and across South African boundaries of color, race, and class, such that today’s visitors to Cape Town, Durban , or Johannesburg will find much in the South African “urban gay scene” and in associated South African narratives of urban gay history that seems pleasantly familiar. To be sure, these details of global familiarity need to be documented, and so do their basis in transnational circulations of, for example, sexual citizenship and sexual subjectivity. But reading South African “homosexuality” entirely in terms of such external influences is unwise, because it essentializes, and thereby 219 erases, local understandings of same-sex identities and practices when it is those understandings—and their connections to apartheid–that need to be in the foreground of the analysis. As the discussion in the following sections will suggest, attention to local understandings is especially important when analysis explores a topic as “familiar” as public sex, and when the sites of sexual activity are as “familiar ” as railway station restrooms. Apartheid, Railway Station Restrooms, and Public Sex Since 1996 I have been collecting life story narratives and other data to explore the differing forms of urban gay experience that have emerged in metropolitan Cape Town in recent years. Life story narratives and personalized descriptions of Cape Town’s urban terrain are two of the sources of data in this project. Frequently , and in some ways prominently, gay men’s life stories I have collected provide detailed descriptions of sex between men (usually the narrator and one or more “others”) in railway station restrooms. The activity even has its own label in South African gay English—cottaging—a term that, by fusing location with forms of erotic practice, distinguishes the activity from the male-centered erotic encounters that take place at other public locations in the Cape Town metropolitan area.1 The railway station restrooms in question here are located inside the station’s walled compound and are often adjacent to the station house (where the attendant sells tickets and answers questions about train schedules and destinations). In theory, during the apartheid years, railway stations provided separate restroom facilities for Whites, Coloureds, and Blacks. But instead of physically separate structures, many of the stations effected the segregation by erecting a wooden divider topped with barbed wire and separating what had previously been a larger facility into two smaller, racially discrete (White and non-White) domains. There was no concierge at the doorway (as is the case for some European railway station restrooms) and because railway guards were usually more concerned with maintaining racial segregation on the railway platforms, they did not keep the restrooms under constant patrol.2 The absence of constant supervision, combined with the relatively confined space of the railway station and the natural alibi the comings-and-goings at any railway station provide for men who go there specifically looking to have sex, made the railway station restrooms attractive sites for cruising and, absent mutual decisions to go into the bushes surrounding the outside of the station wall or elseWILLIAM L. LEAP 220 where, attractive sites for male-centered erotic exchange. Under such arrangements , White men interested in same-sex encounters could easily meet other White men with similar interests, and the same was true for men of color meeting other men of color on the other side of the partition. Moreover, if they were willing to squeeze underneath the partition, to push the barbed wire aside and climb carefully over the top, or simply to wait until the guard’s back was turned and walk through the adjacent restroom door, meeting and having sex with other men...