South African
Splendor
By
Brendan Lemon (Editor)
Out Magazine - October 2002
A trip to
gay-friendly Cape Town reveals to Brendan Lemon why its
physical beauty and cultural contradictions make it
endlessly fascinating.
Cape Town used to be a place
Americans went to feel smug, where we could congratulate
ourselves for having, at least officially, shed the racist
ways that were still law in South Africa. These days, it's
the Capetonians who are feeling a little superior, for while
their country struggles with poverty, unemployment, and one
of the world's highest AIDS rates, they live in a city that
is highly livable (think Los Angeles 30 years ago), a region
that is stunningly beautiful (Napa Valley without the
traffic), and a nation that, almost alone in the world, has
enshrined equal rights for gay men and lesbians in its
constitution. All this in an economic climate that, with the
relative strength of the dollar against the country's rand
currency, means meals in the top restaurants are $25 per
person and oceanfront two-bedroom flats can be had for a
hundred grand.
At the end of a recent,
cape-concentrated visit, arranged by the wonderful gay
luxury travel company DavidTours, I felt ready to proclaim
the country the most interesting in the world right now, in
much the same manner that I think Berlin is the most
intriguing city. The comparison may strike you as strange.
Because of its cold weather and often cynical populace,
Berlin would appear to be nothing like the openhearted cape
with its Mediterranean climate. Yet apartheid, the brutal
system of racial separation that went into effect in 1948,
is much like the Berlin Wall, according to Cape Town's
resident Dame Edna, Evita Bezuidenhout: "Officially it
ceased to exist, but in the minds of millions it's still
there." The fact of having to accommodate rapid change
within living memory means that South Africans, like
Berliners, are still sorting out their feelings; they're
adjusting. This provisional, transitional status makes each
place a fascinating mixture of nationalities, races, sexual
combinations.
During my drive into Cape
Town from the recently renovated airport, I was a little
disappointed to notice how modern the most conspicuous
buildings were. Unlike some other great cities with a
mountain-to-sea setting Hong Kong and Sydney, though not Rio
Cape Town doesn't thrust forward with glittering examples of
modernist or postmodernist building. Its old town with its
Dutch colonial Castle of Good Hope, its British colonial
Town Hall, and its Victorian St. George's Cathedral, where
crusading Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu once breathed
fire is not immediately visible, though well worth strolling
through.
It was not some edifice from
Cape Town's colonial days but the Victoria and Alfred
Waterfront, along the Atlantic, that initially aroused my
delight. A working harbor rich in restaurants, it is
anchored by an excellent shopping center that opened a few
years ago and a hotel, the Table Bay, that debuted in 1997.
At the superbly run Table Bay, where I stayed for two
nights, I relished outstanding wine and seafood and
excellent service, but most of all I was stimulated by my
view: facing the Atlantic and Robben Island, the former
prison that once held Nelson Mandela, South Africa's
president from 1994 to 1999 and its most famous citizen. As
I gazed across wind-whipped water to this shrine to
struggle, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, I
experienced one of my week's many reminders that I was a
lucky man looking onto a place of moral and physical
deprivation.
Contemplation of the harbor
furnished other reminders.
In the early days of the
Cape Colony, gay men were drowned there; the fate of
lesbians reflecting the typical neglect of women's lives
isn't recorded. And during the apartheid era, which
officially ended in 1994, the state was similarly tough on
gay and lesbian activists, although its treatment of us had
little of the scope and severity of its treatment of blacks,
Indians, and "coloreds" (people of mixed European and Asian
heritage).
Today, however, the city's
conspicuous gay community is thriving, particularly in
summer. A local attorney with whom I dined one night at
Rozenhof, an excellent, gay-managed restaurant with sinful
desserts, encouraged me to return during Cape Town's wildest
season, summer, the height of which is from mid December
through early January. That is when the city turns into a
mecca of sleepless nights and beach-baked days, when the
traffic, manageable by American standards, swells with
visitors from throughout the world. The gay clubs,
concentrated around Somerset Street near the waterfront,
emit a tom-tomic disco throb and revelers "perv out." At
that season, international scenemakers instigate a whirl of
exclusive parties, underlining the way the circuit has gone
truly international. For peripatetic gay Americans, Mardi
Gras now means not New Orleans or even Rio but Sydney;
August not Provincetown or Fire Island but Mykonos; and New
Year's not South Beach but Cape Town.
Hanging out in Cape Town's
gay district, however, reminded me of the dangers of
monoculture. You begin believing that the whole world pivots
around the color of Cher's hair or Britney's bustier. But
spending at least one night among the tribe is essential.
Tiaan, my South African guide, took me to Bronx, which in
New York may be the least glamorous borough but in Cape Town
is the liveliest club. I was there on a packed karaoke
night. Like Star Search hopefuls, a parade of young
contestants waited for their turn to Garland the mike. Some
straight interlopers snogged next to us, and a lesbian
couple filled me in on the town's sapphic scene: Cafe
Manhattan hosts a women's night on the last Thursday of the
month; otherwise, interactions are quite private.
The rest of the gay village,
with its compact grid of streets, contains the usual
amenities: a bathhouse, outdoor café, even a male
brothel. As notable as the fleshpots are the area's real
estate developments, spearheaded by Village & Life Ltd.
This privately held tour and hospitality company, founded in
1994, has been coordinating the management and renovation of
the area's former slave quarters, which in their charm and
paint-box array of facades suggest Key West crossed with the
French Quarter. The company's jewel, on the top of the
neighborhood's hill, is De Waterkant House, a beautifully
restored nine-room Cape Georgian hotel.
One could be quite content
in Cape Town to explore its old quarters, its shops, and its
cliffside panoramas, or to splash on its beaches: The gay
ones are Clifton No. 3 and Sandy Bay; at the latter clothing
is optional. Or to linger in its restaurants, which are
famous for Cape Malay cuisine, a reflection of former
Indonesian slaves and of the fact that unlike the rest of
the country, where black Africans are the predominant group,
here the colored form the largest contingent.
But the cape's true glory
lies in the magnificent coastline of the peninsula just
below the city and in the surrounding wine country. I wound
my way down the peninsula's Atlantic side to the tip: the
Cape of Good Hope nature reserve. My guide kept up an
informative commentary about the various coves and beaches,
about the wildlife (bonteboks, elands, zebras), and about
local legends. At the Cape Point lighthouse, reached by
funicular, I carved my initials into stone, and in its
parking lot I laughed at the antics of baboons. Watching a
couple of the males fight over a piece of food, I thought of
two guys I'd observed in the Bronx bar the night before, who
seemed to be amiably chatting up a third, cuter bloke, until
the hottie put his arm around one of them and caused the
other suitor to hiss, "I saw him first, asshole!"
The wine country, about a
half-hour drive to the northeast of Cape Town, is a
patchwork of fertile valleys and dramatic mountain ranges.
In the air of prosperity you think of Falcon Crest, only
instead of having Jane Wyman stand guard, the estates are
ruled by dynamic men and women with Dutch Afrikaans names
like van der Stel. It was a Governor van der Stel, in fact,
who founded the region's most famous community,
Stellenbosch, in 1679. Now a university town full of
blond-god students (why hasn't Abercrombie done a campaign
here?), and Cape Dutch, Georgian, and Victorian
architecture, it also contains one of the loveliest small
inns I've ever stayed at: the Lanzerac Manor. The hotel's
deluxe rooms and facilities utilize the estate's
300-year-old manor house and outbuildings. In the Lanzerac's
Governor's Hall restaurant I feasted on tender beef,
ostrich, cape salmon, and the estate's delicious wine.
Several of the patrons had prim coifs that reminded me of
Evita's do; the next morning, however, the hall was filled
with gay couples and honeymooners.
Although I ate well
everywhere in the cape, two meals stood out. At the
Constantia Uitsig restaurant in the lap of Constantiaberg,
just outside Cape Town, I had one of the blissful days of my
life, an all-afternoon lunch organized by two wonderful
South African acquaintances, a meal drenched in six
varieties of local grape and notable for such dishes as foie
gras, Norwegian salmon, and a chocolate dessert so rich that
even I, a confirmed sweets lover, couldn't finish it. The
meal was capped by sparkling wine, causing me to think of
the queen mum's remark when, after a day awash in Dubonnet,
sherry, gin, scotch, and wine, she was asked by a footman
around midnight whether she wanted anything further to
drink. "No," she replied with a straight face, "just bring
champagne." The afternoon was further enhanced when the
restaurant's amiable, opera-loving owner, Frank Swainston,
joined us, and by a visit to the adjacent cricket
pitch.
The other great lunch was
consumed at Langa, the oldest black township in Cape Town.
When South Africa's notorious "pass laws," which confined
blacks to certain areas, were in effect, the township housed
only men; when the laws were abolished, it grew to include
entire families. Though the township infrastructure has
improved since 1994, with new concrete houses sprouting up,
there remain vast squatter camps with a communal standpipe
for water and shared toilets. At Langa our luncheon was in a
private home, which a brightly kerchiefed woman ran with
supreme hospitality. Lunch was served buffet-style: a dozen
dishes of which a savory mince pie, or bobotie, and sautéed
pumpkin salad were my favorites.
The two meals were testament
to how profoundly divided the city and country still are; as
Bezuidenhout says, "The walls have migrated within." Yet the
resilience of Capetonians and their ability to absorb the
rapid pace of change of the past decade are impressive. This
absorption was brought home one afternoon after I strolled
through gardens along the parliament house and stopped for a
moment at a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the English imperialist
who was once the prime minister of the cape colony and who
fancied good-looking male secretaries, at least emotionally.
With thoughts of Rhodes on the brain I turned into a nearby
museum, where an exhibition called "Positive Lives," of
photos dealing with AIDS, was on display. One of the
pictures was of a London urinal where two gay men were
cruising each other lasciviously. As I looked at it, two
pretty, impeccably uniformed young black girls, about 10
years old and part of a school tour, suddenly glided up
beside me.
"Do you think they're going
to do it?" one of the girls asked her friend.
"Maybe," the other replied,
"but they won't have much time."
Nothing about the moment not
the display of subject matter, not the degree of adult
sexual awareness, and certainly not the content of my
nonchalant long chat with them would have been as likely in
the era before they were born.
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