Nicky Falkof. Men and Masculinities. Volume 22, Issue 2. May 2018.
Apartheid, the notorious system of legislated racist injustice that was in place in South Africa from 1948 to 1994, was predicated on the enforced separation of white lives and bodies from black lives and bodies and the unequal distribution of wealth and resources between them. One of the many ways in which this system secured itself, alongside legislation, military force, racial and religious ideologies, and control of the economy, was through the willing compliance of the privileged white electorate, maintained by a set of behavioral codes that included injunctions around “appropriate” gender performance. White men, women, boys, and girls were expected to behave in ways that were coherent with the rigid traditionalizing structures of apartheid.
During its later years, as the system began to crumble under a combination of revolutionary, political, social, and economic pressures, white South African popular culture exhibited a number of strange—even pathological—symptoms. This article is concerned with two of those symptoms and with the relations between them.
The first of these was an ongoing panic in media, state, and popular discourses around the presence of gay white men in South African towns and cities. (Gay women and black men were noticeably absent from this narrative.) These men were represented as a predatory threat that placed the purity and hygiene of the national body politic at risk and as intimately related to communists who had become the catch-all fear figure of conservative whites (Nixon 1994). Apartheid depended on the dominance of a specific form of hegemonic masculinity, which Connell (1995) famously defines as “the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy” (p. 77). In the case of the apartheid state in South Africa, this manifested in the idealized figure of the white Calvinist heterosexual patriarch who was financially secure, physically able, and historically aligned with “violence, racism, domination and control” (Conway 2004, 214). According to the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1998), white masculinities were “a critical factor in the legitimation of apartheid rule and its brutal hold on power” (p. 251). Apartheid drew on “powerful cultural discourses that defined white nationalism in virile, militaristic and defiant terms” (Conway 2007, 428).
Gay white men, by their very existence, suggested a possible weakness in the ideal of the white South African patriarch. Fears about this weakness were even more potent during the late apartheid period, when both the system and the form of masculinity that supported it were seen by whites to be endangered. Gay white men posed far more of a threat to the “political mythology” of apartheid (Thompson 1985) than other forms of white male deviance that often replicated the conservative gender and racial biases that characterized apartheid. Within the apartheid system, “The use of homophobia as a stigmatizing discourse reveals the heteronormativity of the state…and the effectiveness of sexuality (and particularly homophobia) in policing gendered binaries” (Conway 2007, 424).
The ideological problem posed by gay men was not, of course, a narrative particular to South Africa. Recent scholarship has shown that an important element of the anti-communist witch hunts in 1950s America was the emphasis placed on the connection between male homosexuality and communism. “The ‘red scare’ was accompanied by far-reaching ‘lavender scare,’ in which thousands of suspected homosexuals were investigated, interrogated, and dismissed by government officials and private employers” (Friedman 2005, 1105). Witch hunter-in-chief Senator Joseph McCarthy characterized homosexuality as “the psychological maladjustment that led people toward communism” (Johnson 2004, 16). In South Africa too, male homosexuality was frequently conflated with communist sympathies. According to duPisani (2012), during apartheid, “a masculinist political discourse developed that attempted to link [male] homosexuality to communism and African nationalism” (p. 189). Within the paranoid early and late Cold War atmospheres of both 1950s American and 1980s South Africa, communists and gay white men were imagined to share the same dangerous traits and often to be the same people.
As well as being drawn into existing anxieties about communism in the late apartheid period, South Africa’s “lavender scare” had become discursively intertwined with another moral panic, a lurid set of beliefs about the frightening incursion of white Satanists into the South African social world, transmitted by a sensationalist press and backed up by the claims of state, religious, judicial, and police figures. This Satanism scare crystallized a number of contemporary fears and was described as a threat to everything that defined the white South African nation. No one was arrested for the human sacrifices, mass rapes, bestiality, and other horrible crimes that were ascribed to Satanists by the news media, but the stories surrounding them remained in circulation for over a decade.
Within this setting, both middle-class gay white men and mysterious white Satanists can be defined as what moral panic theorists, following Cohen’s pathbreaking work (1972), call folk devils. This figure is a “suitable enemy, the agent responsible for the threatening or damaging behaviour or condition…[who is] stripped of all favourable characteristics and imparted with exclusively negative ones” (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 2009, 27). The folk devil is imagined as the cause of social disintegration far beyond her or his actual sphere of influence.
This article is interested in representations of nonhegemonic modes of manhood within a moral panic and what the ideological consequences of those representations may be. It extends the existing literature on moral panics around gay masculinities discussed by scholars like Fejes (2008), who writes about the fight for gay rights in a context in which the media had “transformed [homosexuality] into a metaphor for many of American’s larger anxieties” (p. 9); Cleminson (2000), who illustrates the pathologization of male homosexuality in early twentieth-century Spain; authors including Thomas (1993), Dennis (1997), and Watney (1988), who consider the relation between AIDS panics and homophobia aimed at men; and the body of work that discusses the apartheid state’s treatment of gay men, to which I refer throughout this article (Conway 2009; duPisani 2012; Elder 1995; Retief 1994; Zyl et al. 1999; Sinclair 2004; Schaap 2011).
Other than my own research (see, e.g., Falkof 2015), little scholarly material has been produced about white South Africa’s Satanism scare, barring a few recent journal articles and minor comments in works by the likes of Chidester (1991) and Comaroff and Comaroff (1999). Similarly, little has been written about the link between moral panic tropes around Satanism and around homosexual masculinity. Cleminson (2000) writes that the Review Sexualidad in early twentieth-century Spain “[equated] the activities of homosexuals with a kind of sodomitical and sacrificial Black Mass” (p. 124), while Dennis (1997) shows how moral entrepreneurs in the United States “[conflate] homosexuality with criminality and Satanism…This series of rhetorical manoeuvres climaxes with the figure of the ‘abnormal’ homosexual as the penultimate ‘anti-Christ’ and as a Satanic signifier” (p. 180). van Klinken (2013) discusses the Satanist-gay man connection in the case of contemporary Zambia and Mujuzi (2011) mentions it with regard to homophobic persecution in Malawi. However, the current article is, to the best of my knowledge, one of the few to centralize that link and the only one to do so in the context of apartheid.
This research is part of a larger project on the South African Satanism scare. It undertakes a discourse analysis of material published between the mid-1980s and early 1990s in English and Afrikaans newspapers. Using the SA Media newspaper database, stored and indexed by the University of the Free State in South Africa, I searched for articles using the key words “Satanism”/“satanisme,” “Satanists/Sataniste,” and “Satan.” This search yielded a total of 236 articles from newspapers around the country. For the purposes of the current article, I then undertook a selection process to isolate texts that referred, either explicitly or obliquely, to both Satanism and homosexuality, yielding a total of thirty-four texts between March 1983 and November 1994. While I do not cite all of these in the discussion that follows, all were analyzed as part of the research process.
I begin by giving a brief overview of relevant issues surrounding Satanism and white male homosexuality in late apartheid South Africa. I go on to discuss the discursive similarities between them and then turn to the media material, showing trends in press narratives that drew explicit or implicit links between Satanists and white gay men. I close by arguing for the ideological meaning of this equivalence.
Gay White Men in the Apartheid Media
In contrast to the so-called sex crime panic initiated by J. Edgar Hoover in the United States, which transformed the harmless prewar “pansy” into a homosexual “menace” (Morris 2002, 228), white homosexual men had relatively little presence in public discourse in South Africa before the 1960s. Barring a spate of reporting on a male prostitution ring in the 1930s (Sinclair 2004, 45), they were largely ignored rather than patronized or demonized. “Silence about and denial of the existence of [white male] homosexuality prevailed in Afrikaner society” (duPisani 2012, 184), which emphasized a version of masculinity that was stoic, upright, invulnerable, comfortable with firearms and “necessary” violence, and embedded in “traditional” gender roles and the racist belief systems that characterized apartheid (Morrell 1998; duPisani 2001; Swart 1998).
While there was no specific legislation against homosexuality during the first part of the twentieth century, the National Party government had inherited the Roman-Dutch common law system that outlawed acts “contrary to the order of nature,” which included male-on-male sex, sodomy (hetero- as well as homosexual), and bestiality (Brown 2014, 457). Later laws were more explicit: section 14 of the Immorality Act of 1957 forbade sex between a man and boy or girl under sixteen years old but did not further specify distinct punishments for homosexual activity (Brown 2014, 458). But even as homosexuality was criminalized, it was subject to only minimal enforcement. The ruling National Party, taken up with managing issues of race, largely ignored the discreet homosexual socializing that took place (Sinclair 2004, 60).
Then in 1966, zealous police raided an all-male party at a private home in the wealthy, whites-only Johannesburg suburb of Forest Town, described by the press in horrified terms as something “which had never been seen in the Republic [of South Africa]” (Retief 1994, 101). The spectacularity of the raid suggested that white homosexual men could no longer expect to be quietly ignored by a state obsessed with racial and national purity: “Led by Prime Minister Verwoerd’s clampdown on the liberation movements and his formalisation of apartheid, the South African authorities were…expelling from the laager anything that was deemed threatening to white civilization” (Gevisser 1994, 30). The privileges of race and class did not protect these men from the threat they were seen to pose to the health of the national body.
This sudden discovery of a thriving homosexual subculture led to extensive press coverage and the appointment of a Select Committee to decide what to do about the increasing “problem” of homosexuality (duPisani 2012; Schaap 2011, 26). Its central point of debate was “whether or not homosexuality was infectious and could endanger the country’s youth” (Schaap 2011, 27). Policemen and representatives of the Department of Justice insisted that it was necessary to legislate to prevent the spread of these “unnatural practices” (Jones 2012, 116-34). The tone taken by the Select Committee set the agenda for much of the state’s response to homosexuality over the following decades. The 1968 amendment to the Immorality Act included laws like the so-called men at a party clause, by which a “male person who commits with another male person at a party an act which is calculated to stimulate sexual passion or to give sexual gratification, shall be guilty of an offence” (cited in Brown 2014, 456). As well as sexual acts themselves being prohibited, white male homosexual sociality was penalized, stigmatized, and forced further underground (Gevisser 1994).
Issues around male homosexuality came to the fore again in 1985, when a President’s Council report discussed the potential threat that gay white men posed to the moral order. The Council, which also discussed the influence of popular culture on the apparent spread of Satanism, wanted more research on “how society should express its abhorrence to homosexuality” and “what programs of rehabilitation or forms of punishment would be desirable,” and “identified homosexuality as a cause of social breakdown and an impediment to good citizenship” (Schaap 2011, 31). The fines related to homosexual behavior were increased but in practice little was done to punish gay men, as the government had its hands full attempting to contain political unrest (Sinclair 2004, 209).
At the same time, state and other actors used aggressively homophobic rhetoric to discredit the End Conscription Campaign (ECC), the only white-run organization to be banned during apartheid. Conway (2007, 2012) has shown how the homophobic language used by the ECC’s opponents painted its activists as weak, feminized gender failures, suggesting that homosexuality was treated as an aberration within white popular culture, used as a way to discipline or single out unruly white people whose political or social behavior was considered inappropriate within the aggressively homogenizing norms of apartheid society.
Satanic Panic
Ideas about Satanism persist in various forms in contemporary South Africa and existed before the period in question. However, when I speak of the Satanism scare, I am referring to a particular cultural phenomenon in which, to quote two contemporary anti-Satanist publications, many white people believed that other white people belonged to an “organised, anti-bible, anti-Christian cult” (Jonker 1992, 4), which had global reach and international leadership and whose members included “directors of companies and big bosses” (Gardiner and Gardiner 1990, 17). These ideas were most prevalent in press and political discourse between the mid-1980s and early 1990s.
Unlike concurrent scares in the United States and United Kingdom, South Africa’s satanic panic rarely involved claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse, a psychiatric acronym developed to explain apparent cases of mass institutionalized child abuse. Fear of Satanism in late apartheid white culture generally manifested as a religiously motivated battle between good and evil, coherent with the state’s self-mythology of white South Africa as a Christian nation under threat by the demonic forces of communism and African nationalism. Where fears of satanic cult groups in the Anglophone west led to interventions by psychiatrists and social workers, in South Africa, reactions to episodes of alleged Satanists were usually driven by religious figures and included calls for the affected people and places to be literally exorcized. As I have discussed elsewhere (Falkof 2012), Satanism in late apartheid South Africa also took on racialized characteristics that did not appear in scares in other countries. Satanists were explicitly figured as white, another instance of the recentering of whiteness and erasure of blackness that were so common during apartheid.
Like discussions about the infectious potential of homosexuality, the panic played into a familiar discourse of hygiene, sanitation, purity, and disease, a continuation of what Swanson (1977) calls the “sanitation syndrome,” in which the claimed risk of plague-ridden black bodies infecting healthy white bodies was used as justification for the segregation of colonial cities. Racial purity was one of the most persistent concerns of the apartheid state, which used legislation like the Immorality Act to forestall the bloedvermenging, blood mixing, that was a primary fear of Afrikaner ideologues (Moodie 1975, 246; Sparks 1990, 179).
But threats of infection and impurity do not only originate from outside. According to Pettman (1996), nationalizing discourses often represent the nation “as a body, the body politic. The body can be threatened from without but also by pollution, contamination, by the enemy within” (p. 50). Satanism practiced by whites was imagined to be an internal contagion in contrast to the external contagion that black people represented to the segregated white national body.
Discursive Repetitions
A number of scholars who have written on apartheid responses to male homosexuality refer to them as moral panics, particularly around the prostitution ring uncovered in 1939 (duPisani 2012; Sinclair 2004) and the Forest Town party in 1967 (Conway 2009, 851; Retief 1994, 105). Reactions to both Satanism and homosexuality were deeply embedded within the discourse of sanitation and hygiene. Both were described as dangerous, as spreading and as having the potential to infect the youth and weaken South Africa.
Phelan (2001) writes that “stigmatised groups may become threats to the ‘public health’ and the ‘moral fibre of the nation’, imagined agents of disintegration” (p. 60), a narrative trait that was repeated in newspaper reporting on both Satanism and white male homosexuality. Like Satanists, gay white men were sometimes credited with intentional efforts to “overthrow the moral order” (Elder 1995, 63). Testimony to the 1967 Select Committee even referred to homosexuality as a “cult” (Sinclair 2004, 77). Both Satanism and homosexuality were described as organized and conspiratorial.
Satanists made themselves known to each other by a series of arcane signs and symbols, which parents were warned about by newspapers and popular magazines. However, they could also pass among the unaware without comment; one pamphlet proclaimed that while many wore black clothing and sported occult symbols, you could not always tell a Satanist “just by looking” (Jonker 1997b, 9). Gay men, too, could not necessarily be identified by outsiders (Elder 1995, 64) but had their own codes with which they could recognize each other. In the United States, “Communists and homosexuals were linked through the trope of enslavement: homosexuals were slaves to their passions for other men, communists to their Soviet masters” (Friedman 2005, 1106). Satanists, similarly, were enslaved not only to the cult of which they were part but to the devil himself.
Both posed a risk to the family and concurrently to the stability of gender roles, which were a vital pole of white South African social mythology (duPisani 2001; McClintock 1995). Both threatened to destabilize the traditional Afrikaner Dutch Reformed Church (Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk or NGK), also central to national identity and an important historical provider of the theological justification for apartheid (Chidester 1991, xv). Both preyed on the unwary, in particular children and teenagers, and transmitted their ideologies using popular films and music. In some instances, these attempts overlapped: the British band Queen was often included in lists of dangerous occult musicians (e.g., Seale 1988, 83) on the basis both of a reference to Beelzebub and because it took its name “from the drag overtones of the homosexual world” (Aida Parker Newsletter, May 15, 1983).
Adding to these conceptual similarities, the relation between Satanism and homosexuality was at times made more explicit. The following sections discuss common instances of media representation that linked homosexuality to Satanism.
The Problem of Sodomy
According to Edelman (1993), male sodomy carries an “extraordinarily potent, though phobically charged, relation to the signifying conventions of the West” (p. 174). This tendency can be seen in the way in which the term itself can act as a signifier not only for male homosexuality but also for disgust, perversion, defilement, and violation: connotative classifications of sexual practices that imply impurity, the threat to hygiene and wholeness that characterized the two moral panics under consideration here.
While few press reports actively stated that all gay white men were Satanists, many equated “deviant” masculinity with pedophilia and defined it as satanic. According to Die Kerkbode, the official mouthpiece of the NGK churches, “Verval onder ons jongmense, selfs in ons eie kerk, is besig om toe te neem. Al meer gevalle van dwelm—en drankmisbruik, prostitusie, homoseksuele aktiwiteite en duiwelsaanbidding word aangemeld” (July 2, 1987). Newspapers repeated the idea that Satanism was not illegal because of South Africa’s support for religious freedom, an ironic claim given the apartheid state’s many repressions, but that “satanic acts” could be punished. These included murder, rape, and, very often, sodomy.
Barnard (2016) writes that “conflictedly hyperbolic responses to sodomy architecturalize the structure” of child molester panics (p. 13). Similarly, within South Africa’s satanic panic Satanism, pedophilia and the sexual practices of men who have sex with men were often dramatically equated. In an article titled “Donker beeld van ‘n siek saamelewing,” the mainstream Afrikaans newspaper Rapport discussed a religious symposium in Cape Town, which claimed that sodomy had increased by 15 percent the previous year and that “okkultiese molestiering” was also on the rise (May 20, 1990). The Reverend Leo Jamieson, a “student of the occult” and Presbyterian preacher, attempted to allay readers’ fears about Satanism spreading throughout the Transvaal province but added that Satanism “could provide an outlet…to people inclined toward perverted behaviour like rape and sodomy of young children—which is sanctioned by the belief” (The Star, May 28, 1990).
In June 1990, newspapers reported that the Minister for Law and Order, Adriaan Vlok, had ordered police to launch a countrywide investigation into Satanism (Pretoria News, June 13, 1990; Transvaler, June 13, 1990). Since the “religion” was not illegal, crimes that occurred in conjunction with Satanism would be investigated, such as drug abuse, child abuse, animal abuse, murder, and sexual offenses including sodomy and bestiality (Die Burger, June 13, 1990). According to a Daily Dispatch editorial in 1991, “While Satanism is not an offence in South Africa, crimes associated with it are—and these include bestiality, incest, sodomy and abduction” (April 15). A 1992 Weekend Post article wrote, “Satanism itself is not a crime, but the crimes associated with it include bestiality, incest, sodomy, kidnapping and abduction, housebreaking, theft, dealing in drugs, cruelty to animals, and—if reports are correct—even murder” (April 13). An editorial in the Beeld bemoaned the fact that liberalizers who supported godsdiensvryheid, freedom of religion, did not realize that they were also opening the door to Satanism and sodomy, among other evils (October 1, 1992). Later that month an article in the same paper titled “Sataniste—wat hulle doen en hoe hulle ons kinders vang” claimed that sodomy was one of the crimes most closely associated with Satanism (October 26, 1992).
Cohen (1972) writes that moral panics are frequently fueled by moral entrepreneurs, self-appointed experts, and interest groups who “[seek] to eradicate the evil that disturbs [them]” (p. 127). According to Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994), “the moral entrepreneur creates the crusade” (p. 154). When it comes to Satanism scares, these often take the form of “cult cops” (Crouch and Damphousse 1991), born-again Christian policemen (and they are generally men) whose response to the Satanist menace is influenced by their own religious beliefs. South Africa’s satanic panic threw up a number of such policemen whose claims of uncovering appalling satanic crimes were eagerly repeated by the press. The scare also gave rise to numerous evangelical preachers who toured white schools, giving lectures and publishing pamphlets on the dangers of popular films and music and the ways that families could keep their teenagers safe from Satanism. These white heterosexual Christian men presented a stark contrast to the male deviance they were trying to weed out. Many of them repeated claims about the link between Satanism and homosexuality/sodomy.
Rodney Seale, a reborn Christian evangelist, took a particular interest in popular music. An article in the South African Observer in May 1985 reported that he had given a talk to university theology students, warning about “pop groups with an obvious satanic influence” and “homosexuality in music.” Seale also self-published pamphlets called Rock Musiek: Die reg om te weet (1988) and Satanisme: Die reg om te weg (1991), both of which warned of the risk posed to the unwary by gay and/or satanic bands like Queen and the Village People. Other evangelical pastors publishing pamphlets that cited sodomy as one of the ills of Satanism included Dr. James van Zyl (1988) and Frank Bruning (1991).
The most significant cult cop was Kobus Jonker, also known as “Donker [Dark] Jonker.” Jonker was the first head of the South African Police Service’s controversial Occult-Related Crime Unit, who is still active in the hunt for Satan today. Jonker was so closely associated with the scare that by the early 1990s, he was mentioned or quoted in the majority of feature articles on Satanism that appeared in the press.
In 1990, the Eastern Province Herald reported that Jonker was rescuing children who had been lured into Satanism and quoted him saying, “To give up is not easy. The children are forced to commit horrifying acts, including sodomy and the sacrifice of animals. Many were too ashamed to make a clean breast of it” (April 20). In 1992, he wrote of the “attack on teenagers” by Satanists, which involved pornography, homosexuality, incest, sodomy, and “alternative” music with repetitive beats (1992, 16). Jonker was still mentioning homosexuality, sodomy, and the perils of gender confusion in self-published pamphlets long after the main energy of the late apartheid Satanism scare had dissipated (1997a, 20, 1997b, 10).
The most vehement of those who linked Satanism and homosexuality in the public imaginary was the police captain Leonard Solms, head of the Cape Town police’s Child Protection Unit, who had investigated gay “gangs” before moving on to Satanism. At a widely reported press conference in 1990 in which he alleged that “eleven babies had been ‘specially bred for sacrifice to the devil’ and were ritually murdered…by having their throats slit and their hearts cut out and eaten,” he also claimed that “devil-worshipping parents initiated their children by allowing other adults to sodomise and rape them” and that a sixteen-year-old boy was paid money every week to perform sexual acts with a satanic cell (May 19, 1990). An article on a speech he gave to an NGK conference reported,
The sexual abuse of boys by men is a much bigger problem in Cape Town than in other South African cities…[Solms] also said child abuse at Satanic ceremonies in the [Cape] Peninsula was increasing…[He added], “If we don’t do anything we will have many homosexuals in the next generations.” He said that in certain gay nightclubs in the city young boys were “specifically concentrated on” and that child unit detectives had seen boys as young as 12 dancing with adult males. (Cape Times, June 18, 1990)
As well as claiming that gay male sexual practices were linked to Satanism and that homosexuality was contagious, Solms here implicated gay male social practices, suggesting that gay sociality automatically led to child molestation and therefore to the destruction of South Africa’s youth. The link between gay white men, child abusers, and imaginary white Satanists was made powerfully by moral entrepreneurs from journalistic, police, religious, and political backgrounds, serving to further demonize a mode of white masculinity that failed to perform hegemonic functions.
Homosexual Narratives
In some cases, newspaper reporting on Satanism went further than associating Satanism with sodomy, drawing on common stories about gay men to describe episodes of alleged Satanism.
According to a Star article in 1985, “A prominent Bloemfontein attorney, for years suspected of being in charge of a Satanist cult movement in the city, was observed at the scene of a bizarre shooting incident apparently connected with the cult.” It went on to detail how a standard 9 pupil (sixteen/seventeen years old) at an exclusive English-speaking boarding school was shot twice in the leg after breaking into another school’s grounds. Bystanders claimed that the boy “growled like an animal” and “was on something,” that was not drugs or alcohol. “Reliable investigators” told the paper that the boy had been at a party at the lawyer’s house that night. The article continued, “According to six eye-witnesses from the affluent suburb of Universitas, where the incident happened, they heard the boy scream, ‘Help me, help me,’ in the street near the lawyer’s home. They said the lawyer later arrived on the scene, rushed to the boy’s side and touched his head” (September 5, 1985). A few days later its sister paper, The Sunday Star, carried an even more lurid version of the story, quoting locals who “watched horrified as a figure staggered from the home of a well-known lawyer who is rumoured to be Bloemfontein’s ‘warlock.’ The figure with outstretched arms lurched toward the Eunice Girls’ High hostel ‘howling like a banshee.’ ‘It was terrible,’ said Mrs Borman. ‘He sounded like a werewolf. It was certainly not a human sound’” (September 8, 1985).
The presence of Satanism is, however, only one way of interpreting these events. The “prominent attorney” was never mentioned in connection with a wife or family. He was known to hold parties at his home, which male high school pupils attended and at which inappropriate behavior took place. He lived in a wealthy upper middle-class area, connoting the possibility of decadence and corruption. His intimate, perhaps possessive touching of the wounded boy’s head was remarked on. While there was no explicit accusation of homosexuality made, it was implied in the way in which the figure of the lawyer was constructed: the single older man with a career that suggested financial success and sophistication, hosting parties for younger boys at which intoxicants could be consumed, is a model of the predatory, pedophiliac white homosexuality that the National Party and the church were concerned about. The journalists, editors, and interviewees who co-constructed these stories conflated the Satanist menace with existing myths about and fears of white gay men as enticing, dangerous predators who could infect young people with homosexual urges, making them uncontrolled and animalistic, a particular threat given the apartheid system’s “need to keep the white nation sexually and morally pure so that it had the strength to resist the black communist onslaught” (Retief 1994, 100).
A later article purporting to be an investigation into the rise of Satanism in Durban recounted the story of another youth:
A young man who was recently drawn into Satanism told the Sunday Tribune how he was befriended in a Durban beachfront disco by a devil worshipper. “I was just sitting there when a man came over to me and offered me a drink. We got chatting and he offered me a lift home. We made arrangements to meet again…” He said that after spending the evening at the disco, his friend invited him to a party where they drank a large amount of alcohol and smoked dagga [marijuana]. (Sunday Tribune, October 9, 1988)
The article went on to explain the young man’s shock on finding that he had accidentally entered a satanic circle, but “I took the bait and now I am hooked.” As in the episode above, this is a story that appears repeatedly in demonizations of male homosexuality: a young man is approached, or rather cruised, by an older man who takes him to parties, gives him alcohol and drugs, and gets him “hooked” on an alternative lifestyle. Again, homosexuality is not mentioned, but the story uses recognizable stereotypes associated with gay men.
The equation between Satanism and homosexuality became overt at times. One article, quoting Jonker, claimed,
Jong homoseksuele wat hulself “die seuns van Satan” noem, is the jongste gier tussen Suid-Afrika se satanbidders wat al meer lede werf, het die polisie in Johannesburg bekend gemaak. Die beweging geniet ook steun tussen Afrikaanssprekende tieners…Teen omtrent R200 kry die jeugdiges toegang tot ‘a geslote groep wat gekenmerk word dear seks—en dwelmrituele en diere wat geslag word. (Transvaler, September 22, 1992).
Whereas the two articles mentioned above operated on a latent level, drawing on common narrative trajectories around homosexuality to describe the way in which Satanists were imagined to work, this one dispensed with the implicit and made the manifest claim that white male homosexuals were Satanists and that one of the folk devils threatening the stability of the apartheid state was in fact the same as the other. Various modes and repertoires of oppositional white behavior coalesced in the narratives of cult cops and media outlets to create a single frightening possibility that had greater potential for social upheaval than either Satanists or gay men alone. The figure of the gay white man, which already suggested a possible instability in apartheid’s violent, racist, and patriarchal masculinities, was aligned with an even more dramatic evil, one in league with the devil himself, to create a nexus of threat and anxiety.
White Failures
Many scholars who have written on apartheid treatment of male homosexuality have pointed out its social and political effects of policing whiteness, evident in the state’s single-minded concentration on white gay men. Both the 1967 Select Committee and the 1985 President’s Council focused almost entirely on white men, to the exclusion of gay women and gay men of color. According to Elder (1995), the common practice of migrant black mineworkers taking or becoming “wives” was excluded from state legislation in part because “homosexuality helped to contain the threat of unbridled black male sexuality” within the hostel space (p. 60). Significantly for my argument here, Sinclair (2004) writes that “white homosexuality directly challenged…hegemonic Afrikaner masculinity” in a way that black homosexuality did not (p. 4). The emphasis on white male homosexual activity rather than on homosexual activity as a whole suggests that white homosexuality was a disciplinary as well as a moral issue: “The government had no essential concern over bodily acts, but was concerned about the potential threats a homosexual identity could pose to the fabric of Afrikaner society” (du Pisani 2012, 203). White male homosexuals were associated with a lifestyle that was not in keeping with the “conformist group discipline” that apartheid demanded from white people (Westhuizen 2007, 293).
As is common in homophobic discourse, homosexuality was often spoken of as being actively dangerous. In 1967, the Minister of Justice P. C. Pelser advised the committee and House of Assembly that, if unchecked, homosexuality would “bring about the utter ruin of civilization in South Africa” (Schaap 2011, 26). Phillips (2005) writes,
Apartheid was bent on establishing identities as immutable. It depended on and developed through the intractability of categories that were embedded socially, and embodied physically as the designated stigmata of its various subjects. Such zealous righteousness was born from a certainty that had to be categorical, so that everything was fixed and lines were not blurred. (p. 5)
In failing to enact the hegemonic heterosexual imperative and the patriarchal sexual and family dynamics that the system depended on (McClintock 1993), gay white men evoked an oppositional identity that was equated to a refusal to conform to the injunctions of the state and was consequently seen as a threat to white society. Their very existence suggested that apartheid’s version of white South African masculinity was in fact not at all immutable. Gay white men who were conscripted into the military were defined as a security risk and classified as having a gedryfsafwyking, a personality disorder. In many cases, these conscripts were subjected to violently medicalizing “cures” in notorious military hospitals with long-term consequences on physical and mental health (van Zyl et al. 1999, 40-46). The policing of white male homosexuality was concerned with more than who had sex with whom; it was an attempt at control, at discipline, of a sector of the white population that threatened the distinctions and divisions on which apartheid was based.
This sometimes violent disciplining of unacceptable forms of masculinity may have done more than sanction white gay men. Committees, arrests, raids, press condemnation, and ongoing concern around the spread of homosexuality also contained a message for other white South Africans that this was a state and a society that would not tolerate deviance from norms of gender or behavior. These discourses and activities were part of the state’s denial of difference and manufacture of orthodoxy and consent. I am not suggesting that the aggressively homophobic rhetoric surrounding gay white men in itself discomforted or unsettled the majority of the population who may have held similar views. Rather, late apartheid treatment of white male homosexuality was a public and overt repudiation of difference that made a point to all white South Africans, regardless of their personal, sexual, or political positions, that whites who failed to conform were a threat to society at large and thus to the continued existence of the white state. Difference was equated to treachery, even to “race suicide” (Bederman 1995).
This collective anxiety around the destabilizing potential of homosexuality is a form of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls homosexual panic, a structuring principle of many western societies in which men who do not identify as homosexual are forced into a complex and often distressing double bind. The homosocial performances that are required in order to enact hegemonic masculinity (e.g., sport and the military) are ambiguous, “arbitrarily mapped, self-contradictory, and anathema-riddled quicksands,” always potentially available to an undermining categorization of homosexuality, producing a “permanent threat” of unsettled or uncentered masculinity (Sedgwick 1990, 186). Homosexual panics “structure male gender generally, and male homosocial bonds specifically, through the threat of guilt by homosexual identification” (Morris 2002, 232). They can also point to the weakness of the very “idealised version of nationalist masculinity” they are constructed to support (Payne 2008, 37).
Male homosexuality in late apartheid South Africa suggested a condition of permanent anxiety lurking underneath mainstream heterosexual white culture, whispering that masculinity, and by extension the civilization it stood in for, were fallible and could fall apart if they were not continually shored up by the performance of appropriate and acceptable versions of gender, citizenship, and whiteness. As well as a disciplinary measure imposed by a domineering and authoritarian state, white male homosexuality also suggested a more spectral threat to the moral health of the polis.
Searching for Satan
The discursive relation between Satanism and white male homosexuality suggests that Satanists performed similar sociopolitical functions to those discussed above, policing the types of masculinity that were considered to be appropriate to the apartheid state, demonizing a potentially disruptive and disobedient sector of white society while at the same time using it as a cautionary example to discipline other white people into conformity.
Despite the degree of anxiety that they attracted, “authentic” Satanists were impossible to find. Described as members of a high-level cult who performed murders, sold drugs and pornography, and belonged to an organized conspiracy that aimed to overthrow society, they have never been proven to exist, either in South Africa or elsewhere. But this absence at the heart of the scare was filled up by other actors: antisocial loners who self-identified as Satanists or people whose apparent deviance saw them defined as Satanists, like the Bloemfontein lawyer mentioned above.
Rebellious adolescents could easily be classified as potential Satanists and treated with suspicion and approbation, as could youth practices that were seen as problematic or oppositional: drugs, sex, nightclubs, even clothes and music that were categorized as inappropriate. Thus, young people who failed to conform to apartheid’s strict social demands were pathologized and categorized as threats to civilization. And, in a way, they were; like the gay white men whose very existence suggested that white South African masculinity was not a fixed and dependable object, teenagers who refused to enact the healthy, sporty, Christian mode of youth that was expected of them suggested the potential weakness of a system that depended strongly on white compliance and revealed the flaws in apartheid’s determination to set categories as immutable.
Like the treatment of white male homosexuality, the satanic panic served as a disciplinary tool for the white population at large, illustrating the response that whites could expect if they too obviously failed to conform. Both Satanists and white gay men, discursively equated by the press and in the public imaginary and depicted as dangerous threats to society as a whole, were warnings to all white people of the consequences of refusal, however minor, of apartheid’s injunctions. They showed what the response could be to those who failed to perform the right sort of whiteness.
Conclusion
As my discussion of the media texts cited above has shown, homophobia, fear of Satanism and the equation between them served as methods of social control, expressed through the press and designed to maintain the docility of the white population and its continued commitment to conservative norms of gender and sexuality that were seen to support the state. Gay white men’s enactment of deviant masculinity saw them quite literally demonized.
My analysis has also shown that the Satanism scare gained affective force by drawing on preexisting cultural notions about the potential danger that gay white men posed to the state. This has suggested the way in which moral panics intersect with and feed upon each other to create ever more potent folk devils.
Whether or not these acts of approbation affected most people’s daily lived experiences, they had a profound influence on the imaginary landscape of white South Africans in the late apartheid period. Gay white men and people described as Satanists took on added meanings, acting as metonyms for an imagined attack on the stability of family, church, and state and illustrating the discursive and dialectical consequences of white refusal, however small, to adhere to all apartheid’s fierce injunctions. In this way, both white homosexual men and imaginary Satanists revealed the weaknesses of apartheid’s gendered and raced identities, the cracks in a social and political edifice whose claim to impermeable boundaries could never be realized.