Every year the Big Queer Summer Pool Party (BQSPP) is the hottest ticket on the Queer Calendar in Cape Town. The party is thrown by a fabulous lesbian couple who are friends of mine. In 2018 it was the fifth annual BQSPP. This was my third time attending. The only reason I missed the other two is because I was abroad. The party is so hot that I contemplated coming home for it. The party is open to Queer people only. The Queer people invited DJ at the party (because Queers are good at EVERYTHING), and a lot of fun was had by all. The party also raises money for LGBTI organisations. So every year there’s a contribution made on behalf of the BQSPP to an LGBTI organisation in Cape Town.
The party takes place at the height of summer in February. February is the perfect month in Cape Town. Every year the party hosts select a person to give a speech at the beginning of the party. This is important of course, considering that many of us LGBTI people in South Africa are not yet free. There’s still a long road to travel with regards to LGBTI Rights in this country. This year, 2018, I was selected to give the opening address at the party. I was not sure how to proceed with the speech at first because it’s a party, and I am more of an academic (even that we are not sure about). Was I suppose to go light or go serious? Since I’m academically inclined I went serious.
For me, the BQSPP is an opportunity to revel in my Queerness and the Queerness of others in Cape Town. It is an opportunity to come in community with other Queers as only Queers can. Since there are no straight people, it’s an opportunity to be as free as you want to be without judgment. My speech focused on loving ourselves and embracing the Queer in us without reservations. To embrace the fluidity that is offered by Queerness. The BQSPP is also an opportunity to dress as Queer as you feel. This year I wore a fabulous red lace number made by Yvette Couture.
Below is the speech I gave at the party, and also the pictures that were taken at the party. Enjoy.
Freedom
I have grappled with the notion of freedom for most of my life. I suppose it’s probably impossible to exist in South Africa and not grapple about what freedoms really means. I have come to realize that my research into same-sex marriage is also about freedom. Does the legalization of marriage lead towards more liberation of LGBTI people?
My formative years were in the “building of democracy “ years. I was incredibly affected by the post-1994 elections and the Nelson Mandela ethos of freedom. I think that as South Africans we talk much about freedom. But we don’t practice it. We also talk of freedom in a political sense, which is important, but we often don’t live it. Freedom – it only really matters when you can live it. Also, it’s not real freedom when many of us are still in chains.
I feel so lucky that I’m queer. I feel so lucky that I’m able to see the world through a queer perspective. A perspective that I think straight people can benefit from.
I think that at times, we, as queer people fall into the traps of the heteronormative society we live in. So when I was asked to say something here, at the BQSPP, I thought here is a room full of queer people but hat do you say to them? You say, because we live in a world that demands that we fit into little boxes. We ourselves are always at risk of being corrupted by the heterosexual system. A system we need to be vigilant about at all times.
So In the spirit of freedom I implore you to be imaginative in the fashioning of yourselves. Let your imagination run wild in creating yourself. Let there be no boundaries in the ways that you create who you want to be.
Some are beginning to mock it, but I was really moved by Thabo Mbeki’s “I am an African” speech at the adoption of our incredible Constitution in 1996. It moved me because it speaks to this futuristic idea of self-reinvention. Mbeki says, “Africans are determined to define for themselves who they are and who they should be.” For me Queerness has always contained the idea of reinventing. And so for me the African Renaissance that Mbeki spoke about is intricately intertwined with Queer ideas of reinvention.
So I encourage you to create a sexual self that is without boundaries. A sexual self lead by desire. I encourage you to think with desire and to listen to your desires.
In order for you to be successful at re-imagining yourselves the demand is that you lose yourself and all that you believe in. To forsake the self, and negate parts of you that were at once important to who you are. Only in the loss of self do you find yourself. It’s about stepping out of the boundaries of what you know into the creative world of imagining.
The blue prints about how life should be a left behind by gender structures, compulsive heterosexuality, colonialism, apartheid, and many other things, are inadequate for the re-imagines Queer life. Our imagination in fashioning our lives in the 21st century and beyond in post colonial Africa needs to be without boundaries. The human potential is infinite and if we are to prosper as Queers, in fact as a country, and by god as a continent, we cannot limit the possibilities of innovative self-identities.
