By Nina Goosen
In the 1970s, being queer at Stellenbosch University (SU) meant using secret messages and covert signalling. While this remains a fact for some students in the modern day, the QueerUS society has created a space where queer students can meet and be celebrated.
Life in the closet
For Justice Edwin Cameron, a retired Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, former SU Chancellor and former SU law student from 1972 to 1976, being openly queer was unthinkable. Discovering other queer people was a matter of confiding in someone you knew was queer, and covert signalling, the act of secretly telling someone without others noticing, often through language that they would only understand if they were also gay.
He spoke about his experiences at SU in an interview with Die Matie on 30 June this year. “I had a best friend. We discovered that we both had queer tendencies. We had outrageous conversations, deeply secret,” said Edwin Cameron.
Laurie Gaum, Minister for the Dutch Reformed Church and former SU Theology student who graduated in 1990, only confided in a pastoral psychologist in the Faculty of Theology. “I was mostly moving in church circles which, of course, weren’t as open,” said Gaum in an interview with Die Matie.
One anonymous SU alumna, who is lesbian and started her studies in 2018, said in an interview with Die Matie that in her time, interests in media like Carmilla, Supernatural, Sherlock, Dr Who, anime and Adventure Time signalled queerness.
Today, people still experience problems with appearing openly queer. Marceline Moolman, a transgender woman living in Stellenbosch, said that when she was once walking to Stelmark, a man walked past her and said “Look, a white m***ie.” While working at her job, she said she was threatened with violence and called “an abomination” and a “freak of nature” by a customer. The person was made to leave the premises and barred from coming back.
Organised queer events
In 1999, Les-Be-Gay was established by Jeanine Cameron to combat homophobia on campus, support gay and bisexual students and personnel at the university and to create an organisation based on principles of tolerance and anti-bigotry (Die Matie, 1999).
“The question [was] not why we must found such an organisation, but why not?” Jeanine Cameron said to Die Matie.
One story of adversity is told by Jesse le Roux, PhD student of South African fascism at Maynooth University, in his master’s thesis done at SU and published this year.
According to the thesis, Les-Be-Gay arranged for their joining fee to be labeled as “something arbitrary” on student fee statements. This was important to make sure closeted students could join without being outed to their family. Representatives from some Christian student societies challenged this decision, trying to push for all society sign-ups to be fully labelled, according to the thesis.
The name, Les-Be-Gay, was later stylised as “Lesbigay” to include bisexuality, and the name was fully changed in 2018 to QueerUS. Today, QueerUS hosts events such as movie nights, picnics and sokkies. They hold “safe space” events, where anonymous members can discuss queer issues.
Tyron Adams, a BEdHons student in Development and Democracy, the outgoing chairperson for QueerUS, said that the society’s goal this year was to build something greater than just a social space. “We envisioned a vibrant force, both on campus and across the broader South African community, declaring that heteronormative ways of thinking, being and loving are not the only realities our students live by,” said Adams.
Last year, they held the Queer Spotlight Awards, where Hakeema Matinka, completing a MA in Philosophy, received an award for Social Justice. She was on the Students’ Representative Council (SRC) on the Women and Queer Empowerment Portfolio between 2021 and 2024.
A current platform where queer students engage with other queer students pseudo-anonymously is the QueerUS WhatsApp group. Die Matie reached out on the group to find people to talk to about queer culture and received a response from Jaden, a third-year BCom (Financial Management) student.
“There is no such thing as queer culture. To be queer is to dissolve culture, to break it, to deterritorialise it, to fracture its very foundations and expose its hypocrisy. This is the only way queer [people] can achieve even the faintest glimmer of revolutionary ends.”
Alumni thriving
Even when the university couldn’t be the place for them to be out, due to cultural and legal barriers, Edwin Cameron and Gaum came out after university. They went on to have great impacts on the queer community of South Africa.
When Gaum was outed publically in 2005, he was suspended from his position as a minister for the Dutch Reformist Church. Gaum won his appeal and recovered his status as minister.
He saw another victory for queer people in the church in 2016. The Dutch Reformed Church reversed its 2015 decision to allow same-sex marriages and allow gay ministers who were not celibate. Gaum and several others took the church to court and the decision was ruled as unlawful. “In 2015 there was a great decision in the Dutch Reform Church to include gay people and they reversed that decision. We took them to court and won.”
Edwin Cameron came out in his late twenties, and soon became involved in queer activism. He helped organise South Africa’s first pride march in 1990. According to him, and his profile on the Constitutional Court’s website, he and Kevin Botha, another queer rights activist, made submissions to the South African constitution for queer equality to be included.
Edwin Cameron also contributed to AIDS/HIV awareness, such as educating the National Union of Mineworkers on AIDS/HIV in 1988.
So what is queer culture?
Some residences and commuter student communities, such as Minerva, hold celebrations during South African Pride Month in October.
Events held by QueerUS show that queer culture on campus has become more open today. Edwin Cameron said in an interview with Die Matie queer culture “puts a question on dominant culture”. He added, “If dominant culture has oppressed queer people for so long, we should question dominant culture. We should have solidarity with the oppressed, marginalised and dispossessed in the world.”
