These queer gardens: a South African story

Two white male Afrikaans gay academics decide to respond to a call for papers to be presented at a conference with the theme “Gardens of justice ” in Stockholm, Sweden in 2012. In the course of their attempt to co-author an academic paper on the history of the struggle for sexual minority freedom in South Africa, they are confronted by their own histories, contradictions, literary influences and context- confrontations that ultimately mirror the instability of subjectivity and the valences of a critically queer positionality in post-apartheid South Africa. Jaco Barnard-Naudé & Pierre de Vos / These queer gardens: a South African story 135 To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied (Deleuze & Guattari 2007: 3-4). This story is fiction. Those who recognise themselves in it are probably right. 1. Of a veld and a garden of delight It was on his return from a year of study in the United States – after the man ha