Unusual Souvenirs

Sitting atop my dresser are a shot glass and a rug made from plastic bags and scraps of wool. They, as well as a lingering cough, are mementos of what will surely remain one of the most extraordinary Tuesdays of my life. It began in a gas station parking lot, where Mfundiso and I chatted in my (locked) car and waited for our group to assemble. It was shaping up to be an aggressively wet day, which did nothing to make less bleak the tiny houses and rutted roads of Gugulethu. When the rest of the group had packed their soggy selves into the back of the Atos, we set off to meet the young gay man who was to be the subject of our film.

A few wrong turns later, we found ourselves perched on chairs in a bare living room while its owner went to fetch Shane. Shortly thereafter, our subject sashayed in wearing embroidered cowboy boots, skin-tight pinstripe jeans, a furry white scarf and expertly applied lip stick and rouge. He lit a cigarette, popped a hip, and started telling us about his life.

Not for the last time that day, I chided myself for not having a camera rolling—Shane’s flamboyant entrance and impromptu monologue seemed a heaven-sent opening for our film. Indeed, they may have been calculated as such; no one had told Shane that we were planning to film him the next day. No one contradicted him when he said we were shooting that day either, so with no preliminary research and a plan that changed every fifteen minutes, I shot my first documentary. Our shoot consisted of us (me) driving Shane to visit various family members and interviewing them about their lives and relationships with him. It also took place mostly in isiXhosa and Afrikaans, and in a context so far removed from my own that I found myself shutting up and taking orders without question. This in itself was a unique experience; I don’t lightly relinquish my stake in a creative process nor my share of responsibility for its product. I quickly realized, however, that I could best serve this process as observer, WFC bankroller, and chauffeur.

A word about driving in the townships: don’t. Streets bear names infrequently, stop signs are rare to nonexistent, and the potholes were deep enough to pose a serious threat to my little Hyundai. And while I admire the entrepreneurship and Nascar-esque skills of the unlicensed “cockroach” taxi drivers of Gugulethu, I do not want to share the road with them. Without exaggeration, I am both stunned and grateful that my friends, my car and I survived that day unscathed.

But, thanks to divine intervention and my hitherto latent defensive driving skills, we not only survived our day with Shane but witnessed a series of encounters both unsettling and inspiring. My group members and I had approached this project armed with stories of the homophobic horrors of the Cape Flats and were surprised again and again to find Shane so totally unafraid to be himself. He sauntered down the grim, potholed streets of his childhood neighborhood as if on a Milan catwalk, blowing kisses and waving to people he knew. Everyone (including me) was “sweetheart,” “darling,” or “sweetie pie; life in Gugs was “amazing” and he was “having a great time.”

His ebullience is inspiring, as is the network of friends and family members who buck the homophobic culture of the Cape Flats to love and support their flamboyant, irrepressible son, stepson, cousin, nephew, etc. We visited the sister of his long-dead mother and filmed the two of them laughing and snuggling in her double bed while she chided him to keep his feet off the comforter and played her favorite soap in the background. We visited Shane’s stepmother, who maintains a relationship with him although his sexuality contradicts her reading of the Bible and she is no longer living with his father. It is Caroline’s rug that sits on my dresser—R15 well spent. It was also Caroline who made fake breasts for Shane out of water-filled condoms for a school costume contest—which he won—and half-wonders if she is to blame for his sexuality and life style. And, when a cloudburst made filming impossible in Terra’s tin roofed shack impossible, we hauled four cameras and seven strangers to Shane’s cousin’s house, who relocated her napping husband into the other room and let us film the interview in her lounge.

It was three o’clock by the time we sat down to film what was to be the emotional center of the documentary. Friend and fellow participant Thulani interviewed Shane and his father Joe together, addressing the first in English and the second in isiXhosa. They spoke of Shane’s childhood, of his emerging sexuality, of their relationship, and of the deaths of Shane’s mother and sister. Finally, with great sensitivity, Thulani steered the interview towards a story we hoped to have in the film but dreaded hearing.

About eight years ago, Shane was gang-raped in an abandoned house in Delft, the township where he grew up. He believes this is how he contracted HIV. Leaning against the kitchen doorway, I wept as quietly as I could. Shane and I wiped our teary eyes at the same time, and then he motioned for a cigarette. Simcelile lit one of his own and I placed it in Shane’s shaking fingers as Thulani asked Joe how his son’s diagnosis has affected him. Had I been able to understand isiXhosa, I would have wept even more to know that this was the first Joe had heard of the rape.

We had heard of it the previous day, when our group member Terra proposed Shane (her friend and roommate) as a subject for our film. According to Terra, Shane doesn’t get regular medical attention and has no idea how far the disease may have progressed. He smokes and drinks as much as he can afford to; the glass on my dresser is that which he used to down three gigantic Black Label beers and then left in my car. Neither behavior helps combat an immunosuppressive disease like AIDS, despite Shane’s insistence that he will not let it beat him like it did his mother, sister, and many friends.

Furthermore, some of his stories simply do not check out. He has no birth certificate and cannot apply for a passport, yet claimed to have traveled to Belgium with an old boyfriend. Such inconsistencies confirmed my feeling that Shane sometimes lives not so much in defiance of but in denial of the grim borders of his reality. Many friends to whom I told the story agreed; they concluded that Shane must have been lying about the rape. Perhaps it’s true, but I won’t add my disbelief to the load of challenges given a gay, HIV positive man to bear through the potholed streets of Gugulethu, little though it would weigh. It’s simply not for me to decide; my window into his life was far too brief for that. I am only sorry that neither my film editing skills nor my words can render that window as elegantly and as clearly as I would have them do. You'll just have to come to Cape Town.



Shane and Joe share a cigarette at lunch.



From left to right: Terra, Thulani, Simcelile, Asandiswa, and Mfundiso (all of which I can pronounce) editing at New Africa. My laptop is the one that looks like the back of a hippie's van.



Terra and Simcelile, in a computer lab somewhere deep in the bowels of UCT and a little silly after our marathon editing session.