Many township boys appear to be internally threatened by and conflicted about the apparent ‘unmanliness’ associated with gay masculinity.

Besides talking about girls, all the boys who participated in my study spent a lot of time talking about ‘gay’ boys. It was quickly apparent through our discussions, particularly the group discussions, that boys who failed to live up to the norms of heterosexual masculinity, like other boys who did not live up to the norms of hegemonic masculinity, were ostracised, ridiculed and called derogatory names such as ‘sissies’ or isitabane (Zulu word for gay). Many of the boys felt threatened by the perceived ‘unmanliness’ associated with ‘gay’ masculinity. In order to maintain their ‘straight’ masculinity, all the boys reported that they isolated themselves from ‘gay’ boys and avoided practices or behaviours that could be associated with homosexuality. A major theme that emerged in the interviews was the characterisation of same-sex relations as un-Christian, sexually aberrant, perverse, contaminating and threatening to the institution of the heterosexual family. The boys’ responses reflected little tolerance of same-sex relations despite the existence of gay-sympathetic constitutional rights in South Africa and considerable change in social attitudes to homosexuality globally.

In the interviews they employed various discourses (for example medical, religious and psychological) to justify their discrimination against gay boys at school. All the boys (tsotsi boys, sex-jaro boys, academic boys and Christian boys) classified themselves as straight. Only two participants classified themselves as gay, although at the time of our first interviews in 2007 one of them was not yet out of the closet. He only disclosed to me two years later, in 2009, that he was gay.

In the pecking order, gay boys were ‘othered’. They were at the bottom of the masculine hierarchy. All of the boys appreciated the need to behave in a particular manner to avoid accusations of being gay, suggesting that ‘gayness’ was not defined purely on the basis of same-sex sexual desire or relationships, but also associated with other stereotypically defined practices and behaviours.