Adam Broomberg (AB): Starting with Defiant Desire, edited by Mark Gevisser who we have here, with Edwin Cameron. Matthew, what exactly is it that you wrote?
Matthew Krouse (MK): Going back to October 1990 -- I went to the Frankfurt book fair on behalf of the Congress of South African writers [Cosaw]. It was the first time for us. Mandela was out of jail, the ANC was unbanned and the Berlin Wall had fallen. We gays were suddenly not so threatened. A different world to the one we were used to. When I got there, one of the people I hunted down was David Fernbach, he ran Gay Men's Press. When I met him, he said, “I’ve met [the major gay activist] Simon Nkoli and Simon has promised me a book about gay life in South Africa, and he's going to edit it himself.” Well, I knew Simon because I had been Simon Nkoli’s neighbor when I was at university, and he and his partner Roy basically lived like a couple of doors down from me in a block of rooms only.
And I knew that Simon was never going edit that book. So, I said to David, “look, I'm from the Congress of South African Writers. And I'm looking for projects that they can take on.” And also, I was very excited by the idea of the ANC, in conjunction with the writers’ unions from Europe who were supporting Cosaw, backing the first publication from South Africa, which would be an all-inclusive gay and lesbian one. And the first. Of course, there had been gay writing published before in South Africa, but that was really the first one from a liberated South Africa. The Invisible Ghetto was the first one of its kind that included people of colour. So, it’s likely it was really the first anthology from Africa. But I heard later that Edwin (Cameron) and Mark (Gevisser) were getting together a similar publication of non-fiction only, through Raven Press.
On a given day, we made an appointment to meet at the Wits University club, because I think that Edwin Cameron was at Wits at the time. We had lunch in the Wits club, which was a real privilege, and we sat down to divide up the subject matter. Mark, I don't know if you remember,
Mark Gevisser (MG): I totally don’t.
MK: So I said, “okay, Cosaw wants to do a book, and you guys want to do a book with Raven.” But, I said, “let the literary establishment of the future government of the country be the first one to publish a book about lesbian and gay life.” And in fact, in those days, everything was gay and lesbian and I'm telling you I was a visionary because I said “lesbian and gay”. We just put the lesbians first and now it's LGBTQI etc; and we just take that L, first, as an absolute given. And in those days, it was G and L.
MG: When I was looking at your work, and particularly at your writing in Defiant Desire, you are the only person in the book who uses the word queer, which was quite visionary. I spent a couple of hours with Defiant Desire last night in preparation for today, just paging through it. I haven't looked at in decades, and read your story about the Arista Sisters [about a troupe of army drags]. But yeah, it's funny because, you know, in those days it was gay and lesbian.
MK: G&L really sounded like an insurance company or frozen fish. Like I&J. So, then we sat down and I said, “please let us do the first book. It's not going to be as good as yours because ours is going to be a grassroots publication that's going to have no real academic merit. But it's going to come from the ground up.” And I said to the people at the Congress of South African Writers, “let us make the first gay and lesbian book to show that the future government of the country is going to actually endorse lesbian and gay rights within the new constitution.” I knew Simon had agreed. I went to Simon and I said, “I've met David Fernbach, and I'm taking this project over.” And of course he allowed it.
And you guys said, “okay, we will allow you to make your book first,” because you were ready to go full steam ahead. And then you said, “but we've got a big problem though because you want to run the story of Simon Nkoli. And we want to run the same, the story of Simon Nkoli. And we cannot have two books with the same story in it written by the same person about the same subject matter.” A person that is so key to the lesbian and gay narrative that was unfolding. So, I came up with a brilliant idea, which was a good trade off, which was actually shooting us through the foot, as representatives of the ANC literary establishment. And I said, “Why don't we do it this way? I will take Simon Nkoli’s formative years. Okay? And run that as a story of how he came out and what his childhood was like as a black gay guy. And you take his life as an activist.” And that is why in those two books, those two stories have two distinct narratives.
MG: I have no recollection of that. That's brilliant. Yeah.
MK: And that's exactly how that happened. And we all ate lunch and said fine, and Edwin was very endorsing of it. And he said, “It's a very good idea for Cosaw, and in other words the ANC to publish the first book of gay writing from this country, in this manner. So that everybody sees the front runners are supportive of the struggle for gender equality.” So, we did it that way. And then you came to me to ask me for some proposals of what I would write for your book. And I wanted to write about being a dancing boy in the clubs in Hillbrow in the late 1970s, because of course that is what I did. And you were all like, well, are you really gonna manage to put out a whole essay about, you know, cruising the station platforms and dancing in the clubs? And actually I couldn't have done it.
And then I said, “I had been an army drag. I was a drag queen in the army, endorsed by the army.” And it's so funny the stories of how, in these fascistic infrastructures, at the end of the day they appropriate queerness; and it's so similar to this idea, of course, of the Israelis pink washing [culture], if you want to push things in a certain direction. Of course, that you can appropriate identities to your advantage, even if it is something that, at the base, your system is against; and it is against what the system stands for, which would be sort of religious fundamentalism or right-wingism. And you guys were like, “okay, well, that is a story we want to run. What do you have?” And I said, “well, amazingly enough, I was an itinerant drag in the army, in a troupe called the Arista Sisters. We were doing a Fats Waller routine, and now, you know, I have the pictures.”
MG: It's so funny. I mean, rereading it last night, it's one of the things that really struck me about it, whereas -- and this is, I think, credit to you -- is this: it would it be so easy to claim your drag act as a form of subversion that was undermining the military patriarchal authority, the army. And, I'm fascinated reading it now that you didn't take the easy option of interpreting it, the easy and quite self-aggrandizing option of seeing it, that way -- of seeing it as sort of like your strike against it. It would have been so easy to do that. And yet you refrain from doing that, and rather understood the hegemonic power of the army. And I think that showed incredible maturity and wisdom, and I was actually quite struck by it.
MK: There were people doing real rebellion you know, and, I mean, we know that from [the aversion ‘therapy’ crimes of] Aubrey Levine, and we know that from the artist Steven Cohen, and I know of another artist who chained himself to a dustbin in order to prove that he was mad, for days on end until they threw him into the army mental asylum.
MG: I suppose I thought as I was reading your essay about two recent films, and I actually wondered what you thought of them. Moffie [‘Queer’ in Afrikaans] by Oliver Hermanas gives that version, you know, and then there’s Kanarie [about an army choir with gay characters], which to my mind is a much better film. It gives something similar to your experience. I just wonder how you respond to both those films having written the Arista Sisters essay.
MK: I haven't seen Moffie, but I've read the book and I've met the guy who wrote it. I was on a radio interview with him just after the book came out. I don't really remember why. For me personally, the reason why a lot of my work looks like it does is because my mother's Jewish. And my father's an Afrikaner. So I'm split down the middle, of my thoughts. My father is an Afrikaner with a Polish Jewish father, who assimilated because he came here alone at a very early age. He married an Afrikaans woman.
In the end, they all converted back to Judaism. The thing about it is that I've had this kind of like ping-pong relationship with my two identities over the years. I have a father, who sort of echoes my feelings for the fatherland, and then I have my Jewish motherland. And it's a funny thing, because my fatherland is Afrikaans and my motherland is Ashkenazi. So that's why this artwork looks like it does. It has this kind of ambivalent hatred towards the symbols of Afrikanerdom. After what colonialism brought out in Afrikaans people, which is, you know, the idea of volk en vaderland [folk and fatherland] and all that. But also, this kind of like love ingrained for the Jewish side.
So, I think there is an overcompensating of belonging in the narrative, because now [the Afrikaners] are afraid of looking too much like a separate community. Whereas the Jewish community itself identifies as a settler community, or as a refugee community, or a community that came from elsewhere, it cannnot be anything else. And so, there is that kind of antagonism that comes along all of the time, in people like me for example.
And one doesn't reason with the symbols and the cultures of fascism basically. And so, you know, when I watch Kanarie and all of that, I've tried to hold back the tears, not because I'm a man or anything, but because I don't want to cry for Afrikaners. It's like my own physical, human, natural repulsion against my father and his people, and everything they stood for, and how we were brought up. And those were the codes, the codes that informed us, that we hated. And even if people say, but you benefited, then, you were privileged. Nobody enjoyed Afrikaans class. Nobody enjoyed the Afrikaners around them. Nobody, nobody wanted to learn Afrikaans, we felt just like the black kids felt — and now we cut 40, 50 years later.
Because, you know, now I'm 60-ish. Now there's an interesting thing, because I'm identifying the state of Israel, for example, and world Ashkenazi Jewry as being a very oppressive force in the Middle East. And I don't go there, and I'm not from there, but I've been there and now I'm having to reckon with the other side of my identity and to say to those people, well, you're not like the Bubba [Jewish grandma] thing was, a soft and caressing culture, that was a very caring culture in my youth. Now I'm sort of like off with the state of Israel and its settler mentality, and the right wingers.
Whereas the Afrikaners around us, even though there's a lot of redress that still needs to happen, are now settling in. They're not the sort of like austere, dominating, symbolic culture of oppression that we had. Now they’re just another minority in South Africa, as we know, and Afrikaans is just another minority language. And so, these amazing differences are playing out. And I've stopped making art because I could make exactly those things from the opposite direction. You could make De Voortrekkers in Auschwitz. You know what I mean? And that would be like horrendous.
MG: Exactly.
MK: You can use those symbols, all that symbolism, to subvert in whichever way you can use symbolism against itself.
MG: I thought it'd be really interesting to fold queerness into that mix: there you are with your Jewish mother and your Afrikaans father and the oppression of Afrikaners, and you need to define yourself against that. And I was struck last night when I read, for the first time, your essay in Theatre and Change in South Africa [edited by Geoffrey V Davis and Anne Fuchs, Harwood Academic publishers, 1996]. I was struck by it, both in terms of your perception, and also in terms of historicity and at the end, the moment that you wrote, in your last paragraph, which reads:
“One thing is certain today, hundreds of lesbian and gay books get banned. It is almost as if, having missed a previous target, the censors have defined another. It is strange, but official homophobia appears to be replacing official racism and fear of communism. The banning of political ideas is being replaced by the banning of already otherised sexual identities. At the same time, homophobia in South African society is so widespread, that from no quarter will state censors ever be challenged on this note. This is alarming because it indicates, to me, that in many ways the struggle for human rights is far from over in South Africa. If the freedom to love is indeed part of that struggle, perhaps our has just begun.”
It struck me as a transitional moment, perhaps both in your own consciousness, but definitely in the country. I wonder if you could go back to that moment in which you wrote that. And then from there into the genealogy you've just described, of your mother and father.
MK: The book was published in 1996, the essay written earlier when the censor board seems to still have been very active. In the book Anne published dozens of pages of a banning order against us. When Kobus Van Rooyen was the head of the Publications Appeal Board, in the judgments they had described these performances and movies, over and over they said that the work that we were doing was homosexual in the extreme. They differentiated in terms of two types of homosexuality, in their own minds, which would be a sort of mild homosexuality and an extreme homosexuality. So, we were the extreme: Robert Colman and myself were extreme homosexuals, and that was the thing that needed to get banned.
MG: So then it's a little bit like Uganda: with the kill the gays [legislation]. What would get you the death penalty is homosexuality with aggravated circumstances.
MK: I was completely confronted by it. It drove me mad in those days. Once I read that it was like a red rag to a bull. I was absolutely furious with that guy. He was such a dick, Van Rooyen, and I suppose that, in my pursuit of those forms of cultural expression, as confused as they are, it was really to try to make a further insult to the system. But by going further and further, I was very afraid of it becoming too pornographic from my own point of view, because I wasn't a body beautiful, a sex machine, so we had to find a way of doing that stuff.
But at the same time, I was very enveloped in the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini and had read about Un Chant D’Amour by Genet, and thought that the whole thing needed to be done as a kind of alternative pornography, told from that perspective, because pornography was not allowed in the country. We had seen grainy, 10th generation video copies of major European films that were banned, originally sneaked secretly into the country in people’s luggage when they returned from overseas. And I thought, well, why not become an alternative pornographer? But we really couldn't get anybody to perform in those days, properly, for us. But we wanted to do an entire history of South Africa told through porn basically -- we wanted to do [the historical hero] Wolraad Woltemade, and we did the Great Trek, and we wanted to do the conscript in the Defence Force, maybe the Boer War and the Zulu Wars -- people through history.
So where did we go from there? In a way, I suppose, we had to try to find a system within which those things could function. And there was no way of raising money, and there was no way of winning people's confidence into those projects. And so, they had to be done on other levels. And with me, it was kind of like with a ballpoint pen. So, I started illustrating.
AB: What’s fascinating for me is -- and I understand the political impetus in making a series of films, which make history of South Africa a history of fucking and the history of settlers in South Africa -- the history of sex. But I'm interested to know about the history of homosexual fucking. I'm interested to know how that comes out of you. When you speak about how you couldn't act yourself because you didn't have the body beautiful. And I'm interested in how this decision to challenge, document and critique was linked to your own sexual identity and orientation.
MK: The thing was that I still thought of myself then as an artist, not as a documentarian. I think that that documentary is its own sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. It makes the job so much easier because you just have to go out there and predatorily choose your subject, follow it and harass it enough for it to become yours. But, looking back, I guess I felt that if we presented [real queer narratives] to the world within the great anti-apartheid documentary tradition, people may beef it up for the camera and make it artificial. Anyway, we'd had gay narratives rising out of the documentary tradition, and struggle narratives and women's narratives. But we thought it more honest to our feelings if we brought out artistic narratives in this way.
That may have taken a back seat in favor of the tremendous newsworthy value of the situation in which we lived. Everything sort of deferred backwards to reality, as opposed to establishing its own reality. I think, where things have established their own reality, artistically they've been very good. William Kentridge, to start from the top down, is a case in point. You have self-made artists with their very own jealously guarded themes and characters, whether it's Felix Teitelbaum [Kentridge’s repeated character in his early films] and the whole mythology that he's spun around his visual codifications and symbology.
And then you have Mary Sibande, and she's got [a domestic worker character called] Sophie, where she's made that character her own, and it's the great-grandmother, and she was the domestic worker, and she wears the Victorian dress. That sort of services the one artist and then becomes part and parcel of their identity as an artist. So, I think to my credit I was kind of like in the beginning doing something similar, and managing to spin a mythology around myself, which was to my good fortune and involved one further step, which was that I was going to do it through alternative pornography. And that was going to be my claim to fame.
AB: Can I press you on that? Can you say a little bit more about how you were spinning a mythology about yourself? Like, if you could read yourself the way you read William and Mary, what would you say?
MK: At an event sometime in the late 1980s a person came up to me, who’s become an influential curator, and she said to me, “you remind me of a real wartime artist. You're an artist in this, in a state of war, because you're doing all the things that wartime artists do.” I had banners we’d painted up at rallies for COSATU [Congress of South African Trade Unions]. I was like, you know, at the head of some banner painting committee.
And that's how I thought of myself. But at the same time, there was another consciousness. So, there were more streams that existed within the artwork at that time, and you had to be all of those things. I had to be a Jew, I had to be an Afrikaner. I had to be a member of the communist party. And I was queer. And somehow all of those identities had to come together in one person, and in one work of art, but it was not possible. So maybe you can look at them now and you can say, “yes, we can see where the gay exists, and we can see where the Jew exists. And we can see where the Dutchman exists. And we can see where the communist exists.”
Because, in fact, if you break those things down now, 40, 30, or 20 years later, you can actually see what those elements are, and you can see how I was kind of like navigating them, and since I've stopped making art, I'm not longer doing it. So, I can say you can see an artist struggling with all those identities, trying to sort of express them and find an outlet for them. In those days, the prime concern was not making money from art. And that was what I was thinking to say to you today, was that there was a different sense of what art meant and how it was created. In other words, your first priority wasn't to find a commercial gallery to flog your stuff, or to find a stage on which to make money through ticket sales. Of course, perhaps all of that would have helped one in one's life.
But the main priority was to get to on with the job of being an artist and unsettling people in the course of making art. And that unsettlement was the reward one got, at the end of the day, you know, and not a monetary award in any way. You didn't seek funding, or residencies, you didn't seek out anything. In fact, it was really a situation where if people offered you big dividends for your art you turned it down because that was not the cause of art at all. And the less you had, the more you did. So that was the sexiest identity that we had in those days, was the down and out. There was nothing sexier in the world then, than a down and out, dirty artist from both sides of the barrier: the skanky queen, that was the sexiest queen that we could think of.
Those sorts of dirty queens, Andy Warhol had at any rate immortalized, those people he'd made superstars in his movies. And on the other side, the skanky heroin addicted rent boy, you know, was the sexier rent boy. I mean, nobody was talking about gold jewelry and yachts. You know what I mean? If somebody said, “Well, he's so gorgeous. He's like in Miami on a yacht,” you'd say, “eh, it doesn't have to kind of exist.” We wanted the dirty boys in the gutter, because we wanted to be in the gutter with the same guys. Now, how do you spend a day, a week, a month as I did with [Nobel Laureate] Nadine Gordimer, because she was my boss and I was her amanuensis when she got her Nobel prize? She even said to me at once, “I don't know how you think the planet would carry on existing if everyone was homosexual. Where would the children come from?”
Uh, you know, like how would humanity survive if everyone was gay? And in those days, it was really long before gay marriage and gay adoption and, you know, surrogacy and all of that, or even just gay parenting. And I sort of like thought, I don't really know what comeback line to make over here. Like, what do I say to her? I think I probably said something like, “well, you know, we exist anyway.”
AB: May I make just one comment just echoing a lot of what you said. Matthew, it has been so surprising for me, speaking to you over the last few days, the amount of self-deprecating you have. I was astounded to find in the Arista Sisters [essay in Defiant Desire], it's almost like ahead of its time, in terms of identifying queerness, not just in terms of homosexuality or the dirty or the clean, whatever it is you say, but that you speak about the effect on wives. You speak about the notion of drag being used, employed to assert gender stereotypes. And it's not only why I agree with Mark actually, because it's not necessarily about the sexuality. It's about inclusivity, or the lack of it, and the lack of diversity and the kind of normative roles. And everything else is pushed out. So, I think it was incredibly ahead of its time and more critical than you are giving yourself credit for.
MK: A friend always says to me, the good thing about your humor is that you laugh at yourself and, you know, I do know how to laugh about stuff, and I know how to put myself down, and I know how to put myself down cleverly enough in order for people to think that it is like some of the mainstay of my character. And they just sort of start building me up in the process. So don't worry about that. That's part of my strategy in the way I deal with people.
AB: I just want to ask you one thing, now that you mention William [Kentridge]. This is how I have perceived you, since I was 17: is that you can't help but be yourself. And there were times when you were your own worst enemy, because actually the place you held struck a generation younger than you in terms of renegade filmmaking, and a kind of militant filmmaking. I think the fact is, in the way I perceived you, is that you couldn't help it. You came from the wrong side of the tracks, whereas William and Roger [Ballen, for whom Matthew worked for years recently], have had the freedom to build a pretense of the narrative over time. And whereas you were literally at the coalface.
MK: But that doesn't mean that those characters, those ideas and real feelings can't arise from privilege.
AB: I want to move on to this series of books. I’ll flip through them quickly: Flames of fury, When the Clouds Clear et cetera.
MK: Those are the Cosaw books illustrated by myself with Andrew Lord. They were the first books the organisation published, and two of those poets subsequently became the country’s poet laureates. I also edited and co-designed the first book by the remarkable rap poet Lesego Rampolokeng.
AB: And among the works in your archive there a section called Choral Verse -- it's almost like concrete poetry.
MK: In 1988 or 1989, roundabout that time I'd been banned many times, and was very disillusioned then and thought, well, you know, there's not going to be any way that I'm going to be able to do late night cabaret with Robert Colman for the rest of my life, dressing up and going mad and making everyone irritated. So, I really did look for a more constructive creative outlet, in order to try to say something about the circumstances of the day. And the interesting thing about it was that it was really me kind of like being my own little cultural NGO if you want.
I got together with my friends and those friends now, you know, have become the people they are: director Andrew Worsdale, actors Lionel Newton and Dan Robbertse, writer Irene Stephanou and Giulio Biccari who is the cinematographer who shot our films. And I sat down and wrote, I was really trying to understand the agitational edge of propaganda performance. I started to read a whole lot about it: Augusto Boal, and others in the trade union movement in America, in Yiddish theatre. And that's what first got me interested in Yiddish, returning to my mother's language, because they spoke to us, with her mother, in Yiddish. So, I made a group called the ReAction Group, which was going to just be a group that did Soviet style choral verse.
It was my fantasy of a sort of an Eastern bloc style – a kind of propaganda verse. And so we managed to get onto many platforms: at COSATU rallies we did some, and at cultural gatherings, we did some at End Conscription Campaign concerts. The audiences could be very loud and militant but we sat very still and then went up and declaimed with a lot of shouting.
MG: We should move on to the films. I can talk about how I first encountered those films and how it expanded my understanding of you. I was outside the country in the 1980s, and when I came back to South Africa in 1992 weren't you at the Mail & Guardian newspaper offices?
MK: I was working in that building for the Weekly Mail Film Festival and then the Out in Africa lesbian and gay film festival.
MG: You were around and you were at the film festival, and I met you and it was very interesting. Just even in engaging with you sort of professionally and socially -- your journalism and identity was a very interesting concept to my Johannesburg northern suburbs, gay identity. And, we had the Jewish identity in common. And it’s interesting to hear you talk about relishing the streets and dirty sex, you know, in that Warholian way. It’s very interesting to me because I had come from New York, and I'd really had my own activist stars if you like, mainly for Act Up.
Even though it was downtown and it was Manhattan, it was a lot about being the radical political gay, but the good gay. We went and watched edgy drag, or critical drag on the lower East side. And I wrote about it as, as a theatre project and I loved it, in the Village Voice. But my activism was about demanding treatment and learning to know more about treatment than the scientists. And the iconography was about being very sophisticated geographically as well. It was much slicker than the visual language of your war art, if you like.
And then to come back to South Africa, and to have to encounter that side of Jo’burg and queerness through drag performance, like Sharon Bone whose work was extraordinary. It was challenging to me in interesting ways. And the way I found a place for it in South Africa is that I dived into GLOW [Gays and Lesbians of the Witwatersrand], and I became very involved in organizing the first Pride march, which happened a few months after I came back. And I became close to Simon, wrote speeches with him. And a lot of what he said in those years was all about being the good gay, right? Being the good gay, fighting for your rights, the Edward Cameron gay.
And you were a different kind of gay. And my understanding of the good gay, and what the good gay did during the Struggle is what Simon did during the Delmas Treason Trial, what Sheila Lapinski did at OLGA [Organisation of Lesbian and Gay Activists], you know, being part of the structures of the Struggle. And, you know, doing the good gay is what you did at Cosaw as well, making The Invisible Ghetto. But there's another kind of resistance that I didn't know about. And that I came to understand. You will remember this better than me when your films were unbanned, which was sometime in the early 90s, they were exhibited at a festival. And that's that's the first time I had seen them.
MK: It was at the Limits of Liberty Film Festival. And there was a rightwing protest when they showed it. There were police helicopters in the sky. And then there was a journalist who had ribs broken. The AWB [rightwing fanatical organization] had declared the protest in Braamfontein.
MG: So I witnessed all of that. I saw all of that. I was there and I saw your films, and I was amazed at the trouble that your films could cause like, even in ‘93, somewhere around then. But I was amazed at the films as well, because they showed me the idea of a different kind of resistance to apartheid; there were people coming out of the closet and saying, “I'm as much of a freedom fighter as you are, therefore you need to respect me.” That's in a way the Simon model, and the model that I was trying in order to recruit good northern suburbs gays. And there were you showing another way of doing it. But I found that kind of was, I think, my first understanding of political queerness, and its importance in the South African context.
AB: I encountered Matthew at the age of 15, when I used to go out every Saturday night, and the only places to go out dancing were the gay clubs in Hillbrow and nearby which, as we know, is where there was more density than anywhere in the world. There were many nights when we would spend there, dancing, and you with your tongue in my ear.
MK: I don't remember dancing while I was doing that. That's the part that I'm sort of like trying to kind of remember.
MG: They are safe spaces allowing diversity. I think that that image of you at the time was quite renegade in terms of the films and their kind of tactics filmically right?
MK: Yes. The, the point is that it’s a great pity that there's one film that's finished and largely forgotten, and another that's been unfinished for over 30 years and has never been seen. The interesting thing about them is that the myth, the notoriety does precede them. And that's fine. I'm comfortable with that, and I know that there are other films that do that, like Flaming Creatures by Jack Smith. How many people have really seen it? I never saw Genet’s Un Chant D’Amour until everything was unbanned in about 1994. And many of the underground films that have been made in the history of underground filmmaking are more about the possibility of the existence of that kind of film rather than its actual material essence. Like Sleep – Warhol’s five-hour movie with John Giorno who’s a great poet. How many people now have really watched that? But, you know, in terms of filmmaking and alternative or underground films: these acts of filmmaking have taken the medium and made it progress within its contexts. And even though the very nature of those films and those artworks may be dubious, and you may not even have seen them all, or you may not even understand why they're good, and why they're important, the fact that is that they push barriers outwards and make people make other things that make them better, and make them go further. I think that maybe the thing to explore is how much a movie like Moffie would exist, or Kanarie, or all of those stories about the army would exist had we not been those people who pushed those narratives further in the first place? In other words, we are the people who did it. And there's not only me. I mean, there were a number of people around the place who did that. Steven Cohen was one of them. There were plays like Somewhere on the Border that did it, got banned. And they all make reference back to those moments, particularly in Afrikaans, in radical Afrikaner art, which is actually quite good if you take it from Vöelvry and the Gereformeerde Blues Band onwards, and if you take into account Shifty recording studio and their work in the Afrikaans language and with Afrikaans style, in alternative rock. All of that stuff was actually quite barrier breaking.
And it is reminiscent of some of the stuff that happened in East Germany when the wall was still up. It was also kind of like edgy and loud, sad and brash. And so, I'm part of that thing -- I'm part of that Vöelvry moment, and that's a good place to be even now within the cultural context in which we live. It's a slightly overlooked entity, except for the people who it was intended for.
MG: That's fascinating, the way, just given what you were saying earlier about, you know, how you defined yourself as a child and rebelling against the Afrikaans father, and your Jewish mother. I'm thinking about the fact that the radical tradition, that you wouldn't imagine, is that it works in that Afrikaans radical tradition.
MK: Actually, I'm glad to say I’m earlier than all of those Afrikaners. And maybe, you know, some of it happened in English, but we did Verwoerd, and we did De Voortrekkers, and we did The Soldier and all of those are Afrikaans. In essence, they are in Afrikaans, even where they're in English. Even when you see them in English, you say, okay, well, these are Afrikaners, but they're in English because that's how Hollywood functions anyway. You have Nazis speaking with American accents.
MG: Now that I’m reminded of your background, and I think about your account of going to the censorship hearing in Pretoria for Famous Dead Man [in Theatre and Change in South Africa], I get your response to the anger of the people there, but also to the language in the banning, which Adam just put up on the screen, like there is a way that you would be seen as a liberal Jew, while you were seeing the thing as, and well, my Afrikaans father…
MK: In De Voortrekkers he’s the man with the hammer, who carries the coffin.
MG: Oh, I didn't know that.
MK: He hammers the doll to the cross,
MG: Which is basically, you know, killing the child. Right? So you had your father, you’re the child the father killed.
MK: When I told him I was gay, he was not nice at all. He said terrible things to me, when I was young, but then in the end he forgave me. And in fact, more recently he was on his body corporate in his apartment building, and there was a troublesome woman. And she said to him, “Oh, are you Mr Krouse with the moffie [queer] son?” And then he said to me at lunch, “can you believe that this woman said to me, ‘are you Krouse with the moffie son?’ How does a person say that?” And he said to me, “I'm sorry to even say that to you, that she had said this. But, if you see her walking in the passage of the building, I just want you to know that this is what she said to me.” And he was very hurt. So, you know, we've taken 45 years to get there. Now he's fine.
And he was in the movie, and he knew what was going on. And he said, “okay, I'm in it and I don't want to know anything more.” He knew we were up to something, but he didn’t want to know anything outside of his part. The two sequences were filmed on different days.
AB: I’m really intrigued at your perception, because you know, around that time James Phillips [rock musician who acts and sings in Shot Down] was like the Jim Morrison of South Africa -- the political Jim Morrison. And I’ve got to say something: when I saw Shot Down [Directed by Andrew Worsdale and written by Worsdale with Krouse, Colman, Jeremy Nathan and Giulio Biccari under the pseudonym Rick Shaw], which I haven't seen for 20 odd years, I actually wept because, to see James performing, to see the landscape… I think that's part of why I approached you, because I think it was a very formative, emotional time, right? And I think there is something to be said, that there was a link with your work to the popular culture of the time, like even a Jim Jarmusch style of indie filmmaking. And, then there's this crazy stuff on some of the tapes where you guys were auditioning people. It looks like Andy Warhol.
MK: Let’s talk then about how Shot Down came about. Firstly, you know that Shot Down is not my movie, it's Andrew Worsdale's direction. He was given a Fulbright scholarship to go and study at UCLA, you know, the Mecca of filmmaking, and came back with a vague idea of what he wanted to do. He had to produce a Master’s film. He was exploring, and in the meanwhile, I had gone to the army, and then I'd been banned along with Robert Colman. Andrew had traveled, and got to stay away for as long as he could. And when he came back, he needed to do this film and I'd had all of this experience. And he kind of like jumped at those experiences and said, “okay, well, the first thing that we're going to do is, we're going to document this interesting stuff that's happened to you.”
And I thought, “Great, I'm going to be the subject of a documentary.” I was politically angry, and feeling so famous. And, in those days, famous just meant famous in Braamfontein. Basically, people recognized you and you could go around famous in Hillbrow also, because you'd been in the newspapers. So, he then started to cook over and say, hang on a second, all of these entities could make this kind of like very different type of film that would include real performances, and would include the idea of a man who comes back to Johannesburg with not much agenda other than to make a film. Like himself. And he gets drawn into a bad right-wing cop intrigue. So that's how the thing sort of like wrote out, with me being myself in it.
And then Robert Colman came along as the lead, and workshopped his character around the issues of the day. And then we wrote a black theatre group to counteract the white theatre group, because we thought, well, you need these two streams to show the different experiences of what it means to be a white activist/performer and a black activist/performer, and a man who is caught between these two worlds. It's not very well articulated in the film, but it's good that it's poorly articulated, because it means that you have to go through this tremendous process with this character of trying to understand his point of view, and the way he resides within these two worlds. And the way that his mind has been hijacked by the cops. The film got made because the movie director Darryl Roodt, who was being produced by Anant Singh at the time, helped Andrew to connect and, in the beginning, there was some attempt in the writing to iron out the cracks, but basically Anant went with the crazy process and gave the money.
And in the process of all of that, we'd had some travails with De Voortrekkers. The script [written earlier by Krouse with Jeremy Nathan and Giulio Biccari] had been seized by the police in a house raid when I was away, still in the army barracks. And we all agreed that we had to make the film, if only to fuck to over the people who took the script, so that they could see that we actually managed to make the film. We were told that on that day, when they found the script, amazingly enough, they also found a photograph of me lying naked on some monument, and they vowed to come back. That’s how real it was.
They said, we're coming back for this guy because he wrote this script. It was in my room. I think they had an intelligence person with them who read the papers that they found in our house; that's how extensive they were. And later when we wrote Shot Down, we reckoned that we'd be able to make De Voortrekkers [by incorporating into the feature film plot] and they wouldn't be able to do anything.
The whole night, before the preproduction for Shot Down began, Andrew and I hammered out the script that would become the shooting script, on an old typewriter, I guess on a lot of bad speed. Generally, I wanted more queerness in the film, some gay sex, more of the gay underground in the movie.
And Andrew actually blocked that. He kept on saying, not in an entirely negative way, “that's not the film I want to make,” because I suppose he wanted to take the film as a calling card, back to Los Angeles and to say to people, “I'm a South African filmmaker, and I've made an anti-apartheid movie,” not a movie of gay men -- although there are a lot of queer undercurrents happening.
AB: How does that exist in the film?
MK: We're all there basically, even though the main character has a heterosexual relationship in the movie. And I mean, that actually asks the question of what queer representation is anyway? Do you have to be Robert Mapplethorpe and do the whole fisting thing in order to be faithful to your queerness? But this was the South African culture of the 1980s. And it's not a concern now in my life, really. It was a concern then, because I was taken over by the communists and then put into the Gordimer camp. And they said, okay, well, this is what we’ll do. And that's how the gay book The Invisible Ghetto came about -- I didn't want to forsake my own mission in life, basically.
AB: There’s a story that you wrote, that both Mark and I have very vivid memory of that I read at about the age of 16. It describes the hand of the black gardener coming through the blinds and jerking off the schoolboy on a hot afternoon when he was in his school uniform [it appeared in the small anthology Porno Literature edited by Christo Doherty, 1989]. My question to both of you is, do you think there is a place in the history of the Struggle for the dirty? We know that there is a place for the good.
MG: The notion of a place in the history of the Struggle hinges on the question: what is the Struggle? Who decides whether there's a place in the history of the Struggle? It suggests that there's somebody who has ownership of that. Who will decide whether the dirty gets in or not, and the dirty is there. I wrote the lengthy introduction to Defiant Desire. And the “dirty secret” is in Defiant Desire, certainly in the piece that I love the most, written by Linda Ngcobo with Hugh McLean, and which is called Those Who Know Me Say I’m Tasty. But it's interesting to me that in the book I give an introduction called A Different Fight for Freedom. I'm very impressed with myself, that I wrote such a coherent piece of history when I was in my mid-twenties. And I do write about that, you know, the moffie scene in the Western Cape. I do write a little bit about banned plays. But I think that I have come to understand, more as I've grown older, the significance of the outsider identity, and the kind of subversive nature of the outsider identity, than perhaps I did when I was in my twenties.
But to offer some self-critique in the spirit of Matthew, when I read it back, when I read A Different Fight for Freedom, is that as a kind of quote-unquote official historian of the gay movement in South Africa, I didn't allow enough for the difference of detractors and, say, Matthew’s films.
AB: It's just interesting when you read the censor board finding that “De Voortrekkers is 85% undesirable. That was the censors’ conclusion. And when I read that, I was like, what about the other 15%?
MK: There was an insider/outsider debate that used to rage in the late 80s and early 90s. Nowadays, to be well-behaved is called heteronormativity. And we were unmoved when the idea of gay marriage arose. We wondered, which gay wants to be married? I was like, absolutely buggered by the idea that gay people would fight for gay marriage. I think that we took it for granted when we were growing up that gay people just didn't want to be like the others.
Even in gay households where we knew that there were gay couples, we felt they needed to be different and needed to operate on another level. However, I will say that the Struggle, with a capital S is its own sort of organism, that would be very eager to incorporate or absorb anything that it can use. And I know because I worked there, you know, for so many years, and that's a fine thing. I didn't have a problem with that. So that, if struggles for equality and freedom can consume difference on a level, and give it its space, its cultural space, and give it its human rights, a space to exist, then it's a fine thing. And I think that that's to the credit of the so-called South African Struggle, that it was able to actually incorporate the lesbian and gay struggle and bring it into the constitution, which is the freedom which with which we live now, even though it may not totally manifest itself in everyone's lives.
It is there as a base, as the foundation stone upon which we enjoy the freedoms that we have, to be the dinge queens, to be the horrible, ugly drags. To be the junkies that we found ourselves being, and the subversives -- so that we can't get arrested for doing all that.