The gay experience of soldiers serving in the South African National Defence Force during and post-Apartheid. From legalised torture to prevailing ignorance

Essay from the year 2022 in the subject Gender Studies, grade: 2,3, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Cognitive Sociolinguistics, language: English, abstract: In the wake of the abolition of Apartheid, many narratives of fictional and non-fictional nature have been and continue to be published about the experiences of people serving in the military in the 1970s and 1980s. One of the most notable fictional works is André Carl Van Der Merwe's 'Moffie' (first edition published in 2006), which follows white closeted Nicholas Van Der Swart as he grows up in a conservative Christian household and is conscripted into the military at age 17. From the start, he hates the experience, describing it as being 'thrown into hell [...] forced to kill people I don't know, for a cause I don't believe in'. Nearly thirty years later, now openly gay author and spokesman Siya Khumalo, who at the time was still in the closet, was one of many men of colour who joined the SANDF in an attempt to protect the new government that was claiming equal rights for gay people (2018). Both Van Der Merwe's and Khumalo's narrative are crucial to the understanding of the development in anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments in South Africa during and post-Apartheid.