Gay Stellenbosch - Cape Welands District Municipaly - Wtern Cape - South Ai

Contents:

• GAY AND GAY-IENDLY HOTELS STELLENBOSCH
• MOVG BEYOND THE GAY METROPOLIS: LSONS LEARNED OM STELLENBOSCH
• GAY NIGHTLIFE STELLENBOSCH
• GAY CLUB STELLENBOSCH
• GAY STELLENBOSCH (CAPE WELANDS DISTRICT MUNICIPALY, WTERN CAPE)
• GAY BAR STELLENBOSCH
• ‘STELLENBOSCH IS LIKE A GAY DISNEY LAND’

GAY AND GAY-IENDLY HOTELS STELLENBOSCH

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MOVG BEYOND THE GAY METROPOLIS: LSONS LEARNED OM STELLENBOSCH

I was at the bar that eveng to meet up wh my gay iends sce was a Wednday, which was when we would ually ngregate there. The ment exprsed by one young, whe, Aikaans man to another ma me qutn how a space that was by no means a gay space and that was populated by an overwhelmgly whe and maly straight crowd seemgly “offend” the two men.

Was therefore possible that a space I would view very much as a heteronormative space was fact experienced as “too gay” (or not straight enough)?

GAY NIGHTLIFE STELLENBOSCH

Footnote 1 Much of the bat ncerng the issu are rived om the experienc of largely whe gay men and their relatnship to nsolidated physil and symbolic space(s) Wtern ntexts. As Harry Brt, a gay polil lear San Francis, once mented many years ago to the soclogist Manuel Castells, “when gays are spatially sttered, they are not gay, bee they are visible.

I am not sure how many of the gay people many s later and thoands of away Stellenbosch on that Wednday night would have agreed wh Brt’s claim. We may wish to ame a potential disagreement first relatn to the fact that the gay people who were that bar on that Wednday Stellenbosch were not entirely spatially nsolidated; the prence of signifint numbers of heterosexuals pots to that.

Yet at the same time, the gay people the bar that night were not entirely spatially sttered and therefore visible; spe large numbers of heterosexuals the tablishment that night, there was still a feelg for some heterosexual patrons that the bar was ed “too gay”. In this mentary, I wish therefore to nsir both Brt’s ment and the ment by the two men a bar one Wednday light of the experienc of gay men, and gay whe men Stellenbosch more specifilly, and their place a partially homonormalised urban settg. There are very nsirable limatns this aim, for pivots solely around gay whe men and uld seem out of step wh a ntent that is neher majory whe nor gay.

GAY CLUB STELLENBOSCH

However, as discsed the ncln to this terventn, this narrative might also provoke vtigatory imagatns to rethk lived gay reali other urban Ain plac and spac. Suatg this ReflectnMany years ago, I started on a journey of thkg through the geographi of gay male exprsns of inty urban space South Ai (Visser, 2002, 2003a, 2003b, 2008a, 2008b, 2010, 2013).

GAY STELLENBOSCH (CAPE WELANDS DISTRICT MUNICIPALY, WTERN CAPE)

This was driven by the notn of how gay men particular created dited plac and more broadly spac that uld act as a foil agast often hostile and sometim vlent heterosexual environments. In Wtern ntexts, the bat social scienc stretch back to the 1970s, although their practice they have been evint for much longer (Doan, 2015; Hugh, 2006; Wat & Markwell, 2006) earlier vtigatns at the begng of the 2000s tracked the emergg empiril reali of nsolidated “gay space” and the notn of Cape Town as “Ai’s Gay pal”. My tert this vtigatory nex followed on om my amic journey, which began London wh s very well-tablished gay scene, which was then refoced to Johannburg wh the seemg emergence of a gay leisure no (which never fully veloped the same way as plac such as Soho London but rather took on their own trajectory—see, for example, Khuzwayo 2023 this issue), then to Cape Town, then to Bloemfonte durg my time there, and fally to Stellenbosch.

GAY BAR STELLENBOSCH

Some of this was owg to changg legislatn, changg ways which gay liv are clud or not some parts of society, and how those inti are lived and (re) ntrast to my earlier work on Cape Town and the very well-rearched De Waterkant gay village particular, this vtigatn is ncerned wh Stellenbosch as a space that do not share the gay velopment trajectory followed by other plac that I had prevly studied but which rather likely has far more mon wh a number of other urban plac around the world and potentially across the Ain ntent. In this terventn, I set out to explore some them of “gay visibily”, which, the end, circle back to the remarks of the two young men the bar.

‘STELLENBOSCH IS LIKE A GAY DISNEY LAND’

Rather than ph the directn of post-stcturalist and nstctnist crique, I am stead terted how the power relatnships of gay vers “straight” have been renegotiated such that gay normative acceptance now gtur towards somethg perhaps more visible but still heavily pennt on race and class posns.

The pot I wish to make is that this new formatn do not occur fixed and dited “gay space, ” as some of the earlit work on the relatnship between sexualy and urban space the global North suggted. By way of ncln, I revis a amework I explored several years ago, namely that of homonormativy and homonormalisatn, to nsir not only how such termology remas sometim tethered to rearch on regrsive out for dividuals wh same-sex sire but also the productive potentials for such a amework to unrstandg the plexy of the relatnships between sexualy and space future rearch.

Even if only the clichés of famo gay artists associated wh the universy and the town is any measure, there were ample exampl of gay liv lived. This leads me to the next and foremost, there is a need to acknowledge the fact that gay visibily Stellenbosch is void of dited geographil or urban studi. Firstly, plac of nsolidated gay space never veloped Stellenbosch, and sendly, there has never been geographil or allied scholarship at Stellenbosch Universy that would have remotely foced on the geography of gay/queer sexualy (Visser & De Waal, 2020).