Gay life in Harare in the 1980s - A prelude to the formation of GALZ

GALZ was formed in 1990, but there are a lot of questions about any formal organisation of the gay and lesbian community prior to that. The answer basically was that there was none, which is not to say that there was nothing going on. There were also a few loose groupings of individuals who worked on an informal basis, and who would be instrumental in the formation of an organised gay movement in Zimbabwe in the Nineties.

There has always been a gay "scene" in Zimbabwe. In the early Eighties, there were exclusively gay clubs, (some so exclusive that nobody could find them), and mixed clubs whose clientele was mainly gay and gay-friendly. But sometimes finding "the Scene" could be difficult. As an illustration, I will be drawing on my own personal experiences.

Being a gay teenager is difficult in the best of times, but in Rhodesia in the Seventies it was a nightmare. I was aware of my sexual feelings from the age of eleven, but growing up in a macho society with a huge emphasis on conformity, I was unable or afraid to act on my impulses. In those days we had never even heard of the expression "role model", let alone have any gay ones. My gaydar, still not well tuned, was still able to recognise that some men were gay, such as certain television personalities, for example. I was terrified that if I were gay, I would end up being like them. i.e.: camp, effeminate, and all the other stereotypes I had been taught. My conditioning at school, my internalised homophobia meant that I did not want to be gay if gay meant being girly. Nevertheless, I still knew I was sexually attracted to men. I had heard that there was a gay club in Monavale, thanks to a sensational story in Illustrated Life Rhodesia, a news magazine of the time. Although I was lucky that my father bought me a car, and I had a lot of freedom as a sixteen year old, my fear would not free me to explore. I had to leave the country in 1978 to find some kind of sexual and political awakening.

When I first returned to Zimbabwe in July 1980 for a varsity vac, most of my friends were gone, and those who were still around didn't want to know me as they considered me a traitor for running away from Smith's army. (Wait till they found out I was queer too) My Dad had this secretary, Marj, who was about my age. She had heard of the Talking Heads and to my complete surprise, Joy Division, who were a cult British band which my friends at varsity and I were into. She was also a complete David Bowie nut. Our common interest in music meant we became friends. On my one vac from university she took me to this club in Strathaven called Inner Circle. Basically this was a mind fuck for me. My conservative upbringing did not prepare me for what we used to call the Freaks: Drag Queens, Druggies, boys wearing make-up and lots of jewellery, the air heavy with incense and dope. Basically, this was the first alternative scene in Zimbabwe. It was a reaction to Rhodesia; it was a celebration of a Zimbabwe where young people believed that they were now free to express themselves in any way they wanted. It wasn't a gay club as such. Such distinctions didn't seem to matter as much as they do now. We were alternative. The people who were not, we called straight, regardless of their sexual orientation.

I only spent two weeks in Harare in July 1980. I went to Inner Circle twice and discovered the cottages at the Monomotapa Hotel. There I met a British soldier who was part of the peacekeeping forces. I only learnt later that there were lots of gay guys among the Commonwealth peacekeepers. But when I came back for my next vac, Inner Circle was gone, and so were the soldiers.

When I came home for two months at the end of 1980, I had more time to discover Gay Harare. Actually, the capital city was still called Salisbury then. It was a relief when the name changed to Harare. I still had hardly any friends apart from Marj. One of the Urban Legends of Harare when I was a teenager was that gay guys would pick up each other at night in Cecil Square (now Africa Unity Square). This is where the Pioneer Column raised the Union Jack in Fort Salisbury in 1890. The joke was that Frank Johnson had to ask the permission of the queen who was cruising there if they could make camp in her spot. So after a week or so back home, I decided to see if the rumour was true. To my delight it was. Cars were driving around constantly, from about 9 in the evening, till the early hours. I was excited and nervous, but at last I was making face-to-face contact with other gay men. Then I met Daryl one Thursday night. He took me to a place called Scamps in Park St near the Jameson Hotel, run by a notorious queen called Frank Sutton, who was a bugler in the Army. The place was mainly a Goffel hang out, but on Thursdays it was a gay club. I was a bit freaked out there. This was my first gay club. I liked it that it was all men there, but I didn't like the vibe. I was never into bars at that stage, mainly because I didn't like being drunk. But I became a regular at The Square, as we used to all it. I had a lot of fun there and I met some of my best friends cruising around there. It was sometimes dangerous. Once in a while gay-bashers would try and muscle in. Most of the activity stopped around 1986 when the Spanish Ambassador was murdered. There was a lot of speculation amongst gay men at the time that the ambassador was murdered by a trick picked up at The Square. But that is one of Zimbabwe's untold stories.

Down the road from Scamps was Sarah's, a legend in its heyday. This club opened just before Independence and was gay owned (Mark Baird & Gordon Campbell who were later to open various gay clubs in Jo'burg) and gay run. Desmond Sly and Trevor Daks were the DJs and provided entertainment. The mother of one of Trevor's boyfriends put up the money for the club. On Saturday nights it was strictly gay, and there was no admittance unless you were known to the management or if you were accompanied by another gay person. I had heard about Sarah's but didn't know anyone who could get me in. The first time I tried to get in, I loitered around the door until I recognised someone who was willing to vouch for me. Sarah's was quite a wild place, and definitely the hang out of choice amongst the fashionable set. Personally, I really didn't like it much because I thought it was rather prissy. Sarah's remained a hang out for gays for many years, but it lost its exclusively gay character around 1984 when Trevor Dalton took over management. Here was a prime example of internalised homophobia. Dalton banned the drag queens and any overt expressions of affection between members of the same sex. In the end, it became a badge of honour to have been "banned from my fucking club" by Dalton. This anti-gay behaviour from a member of our own community resulted in a spontaneous boycott (contrary to Dalton's allegations, I did not organise the boycott, though I did encourage it) and was eventually one of the forces that inspired some of the gay men to form GALZ, but we are jumping the gun here, somewhat. By the 90s, Sarah's was defiantly a no go area for gays. Various attempts to resurrect the venue in the last ten years have failed miserably.

If Sarah's was the glamorous place to be seen on the scene in the early 80's, there were a couple of other ventures that were less than glam. There was The Zoo, which was an all-male and almost all-white gay club operation from a farm in Tynwald, a few kilometres out of Harare. It was run by Ralph Kok, aka Farmer Giles, who leased the farm from a man called Bill de Bois. It's exclusive racial and gender character rendered it almost obsolete. I hated it because I thought it was too narrow.

In October 1983, The Zoo was transformed into Hardcore, which many people will argue was the best alternative nightclub ever in Zimbabwe. Hardcore was opened by Bill de Bois with Davis Reeler, who was to play a huge part in gay life in the Eighties, and Trevor Daks, one of the people involved with Sarah's. Trevor was too drugged out most of the time, so he was dropped. Hardcore was undoubtedly a gay space, but it was open to anyone with an open mind. The Door Policy was displayed on a sign at the door: No Racism, No Rhodies, No Drugs. The last of the three exclusion clauses was completely ignored. There was a lot of heavy drug taking and a lot of sex going on in the back rooms. But what made the club was the music. There was a lot of Talking Heads, New Order, Depeche Mode, and a lot of reggae. After all this was post-Independence Zimbabwe, and we were all into reggae in a big way. But there was something else really new and exciting and advanced for its time. James Morgan, one of the DJs at Hardcore had been living in Jo'burg, and he came back with a new style of music called Hi-NRG, a speeded-up disco music that was making it big in the gay clubs in Europe and Jo'burg. We first heard it at Hardcore a good two years before mainstream clubs such as Sarah's got into it. This Hi-NRG was GAY. It was a revelation and a release. Hardcore was a completely fabulous club pumping out proto-techno in the middle of the bush for one wild summer. It lasted six months and burned out. There was no ways it could have lasted any longer.

While Hardcore was rocking, Farmer G moved his operations to the farm next door. This gay club was called The Chicken Run, and it was as pre-Stonewallian as its predecessor. Farmer G had it in for David Reeler because he felt he was splitting the community. In fact, all David was doing was going with the flow of what was happening in Zimbabwe. Yes, being gay was an important part of our identity, but Zimbabwe had just been liberated, or so we thought, and we a lot of us did not want to be confined into one small gay space, out of sight out of mind. We wanted to be a visible part of Zimbabwe, and not hidden away on some farm out of town.

Prior to Hardcore, there was a club in Chinhoyi St called Himalaya It was a real sleaze pit, and the gay guys would often get harassed by the ladies of the night. Klunk used to play there, and that is where I met Nick Winkie, who has now reinvented himself as Beatnik. I suppose Nick is a male fag-hag. Seems as if he's always DJing in our spaces. A lot of drugs went down there.

At that time I also used to hang around the Wine Barrel, which was a pub at the Monomotapa Hotel. The cottages there were notorious, so it was a popular pub for the gay guys, especially when Chris Parkin was the resident singer there. He was really cute. I once or twice also went to a gay club in someone's house in Northwood. Now that I think of it, it was probably a brothel. It didn't last very long.

The Chicken Run lasted for a few years. In the end many of us did frequent at times when there was nowhere else. The Chicken Run does have a special place in the gay history of Zimbabwe. It was the home of the Gay Miss Zimbabwe Contests. It was also the venue of Zimbabwe's first gay wedding in 1995. Somehow The Sunday Mail got hold of the story and there was a furore. We were delighted to have the publicity. The Chicken Run was also the venue of the first ever Gay Pride celebration in Zimbabwe in 1995. It's a wonder this party, the first politically motivated gay event in the country happened at all. Firstly there was a major fight in the organising stages between one of the more radical lesbians and the current editor of a large independent newspaper which resulted in a walkout by the women. Then there was an up-hill battle trying to get Farmer G to agree to let us have the party there. He did not understand the concept of Gay Pride. He felt we were rocking the boat and drawing too much attention to ourselves. This is a very common reasoning and objection that many of us who became activists have faced from within the community many times. We were always told the time was not right. But when is it ever the right time?

When David Reeler returned from exile in 1980, I'm sure he had no idea how important he would become to the gay community. He opened up Zeon in 1981, and it became the focus of trendy and gay Harare. This was the only boutique in town which was truly alternative. In fact it was wild. Apart from the clothes, there was always a buzz. Loud music, punky shop girls, lots of pretty boys languishing around. If you wanted to find out where the party was, the information could be had at Zeon. The location was great, as the cottages in the Parkade were also very active in those days, and later the Brazita Coffee Shop became a major hangout for the gay guys until the owners twigged on and became hostile. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

After Hardcore came Beat Box, in Park St, in the same building as Scamps. This was really David's baby all the way. Beat Box opened in June 1984. On opening night there were queues down three flights of stairs. There was a hype never before or since seen in Harare. The dÈcor was minimalist basic black/bondage/cages. It was a totally exciting space for gay people, by gay people. Again, this was not an exclusively gay club. We didn't believe in exclusivity. If a drunk Rhodie would come up, he'd be let in, because there was no way on earth he'd want to come back again. The place was far too spaced out. Beat Box was the scene of many great parties, including Zimbabwe's first Alternative Clothes Show. It is also where I met my first lesbians in the days when dykes were not afraid to be out, and certainly long before they would dream of having babies. It's where I met the women who would become Chief Dykes and who would be very instrumental in the formation of GALZ later. Unknown to me at the time, the women already had a group called the Monday Club, which was very strictly separatist. It was rumoured that you had to have a certificate declaring you were a full time practising radical feminist lesbian.

Beat Box had its own fanzine called Fallout, which I was heavily involved in. In fact, my brother and I wrote some of the issues in their entirety. It was a handwritten and typed (on a typewriter-no PCs then), cut and pasted photocopied, punk ethic, in your face sort of thing, which rubbed up a lot of people the wrong way. We probably wouldn't get away with it today, now that we know about Political Correctness. It was basically a bitchy gossip rag, but it contained the germs of writing on gay issues in Zimbabwe. I think the first was a review of Bronski Beat's "Age of Consent" album, which was an excuse to make a comment on the legal status of gays in Zimbabwe. I would also venture to say that we were the first publication in Zimbabwe to talk about Safer Sex for gay men. At that time, as far as we knew, AIDS was still a disease confined to gay men. Fallout grew from a small poorly produced rag to a more professional tabloid publication. I think the reason it went big was to give David Reeler the excuse to photograph scantily dressed boys for the centrespread fashion shoots. Many a pretty young chicken was ruined for life after being a Fallout Cover Boy. But a bigger publication required more work, more people, more money. It survived for just over two years, but with out the stimulus of Beat Box, which had close down after 9 crazy months, it lost it's sparkle and cutting edge. Ultimately, it was the lack of money that shut it down.

After the closure of Beat Box, Reeler continued to organise parties under the name of Black Ice. Most of the parties were held at the Park Lane Hotel. These included various fashion and cabaret shows, most including drag artistes, notably the famous stripper Kevin Coutinho who performed under the name Evinka. Most importantly, Black Ice hosted the Ms Outrageous Contest in 1986. This was the first public drag pageant to be held in Zimbabwe. A second pageant was held the following year.

Around about the same time, 1986 or so, Arnold Katzenburg of Homegrown Restaurant fame opened up the Private Eye CafÈ in Union Avenue. This became an instant hit in the gay community. By this time, a lot of Sarah's gay clientele had already been alienated, and Private Eye provided a welcome alternative. It was a bar, not a nightclub, with good music and a nice buzz. I seem to recall a number of cases of outrageous exhibitionism there. This venue also had a limited life span, and lost popularity after about a year or so.

There was another venue that allowed gay people to express their creativity, and that was The Inn Place at the Holiday Inn. From about 1984 to 1988 there were a number of outstanding cabaret shows (along with some pretty awful ones). Funki's "Neo-Kwazi" and "Glass Houses" come to mind as examples of the brilliant ones. There was the 60s Show, where all the go-go girls were drag queens. And then there was the infamous Neo-Factors Fashion Show from Bulawayo which was unashamedly homoerotic. The management were often quite worried about the Censor Board, but they got away with some pretty risquÈ stuff for the time.

There were also a number of short-lived or one off ventures. Fresh Cream was one that Des & Trevor could only sustain for about four Saturdays. Then there was Pinx at the Round Table in Belgravia for a few months. Quite a few parties happened at the Avondale Scout Hall, where people like Barbara "Fudge Fairy" Hind would spin a very eclectic selection of discs. Of course, one would always find a whole lot of interesting fags & dykes at various TWG (Third World Groupie) parties.

So in about 1987, the clubbing scene generally fizzled out. That's about when David Reeler, Ross Parsons, the late Chris Hunt and I formed The Pink Berets. Basically it started out as a joke after we consumed too much marijuana at a dinner party. We were bored stiff, with nowhere to go, especially as we were feeling most unwelcome at Sarah's. David had just built a fabulous house, ideal for parties. So we decided to throw one. But there was a major change in tactics and policy. In the past, parties such as those thrown by Black Ice were very much public affairs, and although organised by gay people, were gay friendly rather than gay. Now we decided it was time to have gay people organise parties for gay people. There was definitely a change in mood in the country and in the gay community. What we did is to try and make a list of every gay and lesbian we knew, as well as a few fag-hags who would be totally miffed if they were excluded, and invite them to a private party. We would hype it by making it exclusive. No invite, no entry. So there was always a scramble for invitations. In fact, we hardly ever excluded anyone, and in the end cool straight people found their way in. But it was made clear that these parties were a gay space. David's house was the venue of various fantastic events, including Gay Pride parties. The latter attracted much participation from the lesbians, who in those days organised great shows. The Pink Berets were solely an outfit for throwing parties. We had no political aspirations whatsoever. We liked the name because it was sort of radical chic and camp at the same time.

These Pink Berets parties worked very well, and we found that we worked well with the lesbians from WCC (Women's Cultural Centre- a mainly lesbian women's group). We met a lot of different and interesting gay and lesbian people. Although we enjoyed throwing the parties, and people enjoyed coming to them, there was a general dissatisfaction with the quality of gay life in Zimbabwe. Was this as good as it gets? Personally, I can't say that life was particularly bad. There was no overt discrimination against gays, and gay bashing was rare. But the homophobia and prejudice was there. And most of all, there were legal sanctions against the way men chose to love other men making us all "unconvicted felons". So by mid 1990, there were enough gays and lesbians in Harare, at least, who felt it was time to form some kind of organisation that would take care of the interests of gay people.

We formed GALZ (Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe) in mid 1990 after a series of meetings of interested parties. I remember David, Chris, Nigel Crawhill, Sonia Pereira, Sheila Stewart, Amanda Hammar, and Bev Scofield as part of the original participants. David Reeler came up with the name, which he thought was suitably camp. Some people in the community were vehemently opposed to the name, and to the idea of the organisation. They are the same people who were opposed to GALZ participating in the 1995 Book Fair, and they are the same people who complain that GALZ does not do enough for them. These are the people who said that the time was not right, that we should not rock the boat, that we didn't know what we were doing. But we ploughed ahead regardless. It was a new decade, and people are generally more hopeful that a new decade brings in new eras, new ideas. Our idea was GALZ. The truth is that at the time we had absolutely no idea where it would take us. But for us the time was right. The first thing we did was throw a party, and the next thing was to produce a newsletter. During the course of 1991 we wrote the Constitution of the organisation, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I have to make it absolutely clear that from the onset, the aims and objectives of GALZ were political, i.e. that we would fight for equality for gays and lesbians under the law. The strategies of course, have changed throughout the years. In the beginning, most of our activities were indeed social rather than political because it was felt that we could not begin to organise effectively without a strong community base. This could only be constructed socially. In the beginning we had a hard time trying to convince many people within our own community of the need to organise. There was a lot of suspicion and scepticism. But in time the barriers were broken down. When people realised that GALZ was providing some services they could use, they gradually became more supportive. With the Book Fair in 1995, GALZ had no choice but to become more politicised and visible. Certainly, eleven years ago we could not have foreseen that the interest of gay and lesbian Zimbabweans would be represented at the National Constitutional Assembly by the organisation we formed almost by accident. The gay equality issue is on the national agenda, where it should be, and the national gay organisation is firmly part of civil society, whether some people like it or not, striving for change in this country.