The Hirschfeld Equation and the Queer Afro-Modern

This essay draws on research I did for The Pink Line: Journeys across the world’s queer frontiers (2020), and includes several adapted passages from my book.

In 1904, 7 years after he founded the world’s first homosexual rights movement in Berlin, the German sexologist Dr Magnus Hirschfeld published a slim volume called Berlin’s Third Sex. It detailed the city’s extensive queer life, from a “gathering of obviously homosexual princes, counts, and barons” discussing Wagner to a café where Jewish lesbians met to play chess. The author explored the constraints on queer life—in particular, the scourge of blackmail—but also its subversive thrill and its everyday normality. He described drag acts at the famous Eldorado club; lesbian costume parties; working-class pubs where queer laborers gathered to do needlework; the city’s burgeoning trans community; barracks filled with trick-turning horny soldiers; the sex trade in the Tiergarten (Hirschfeld, 2017).Footnote 2

Berlin was Europe’s fastest-growing city at the time. Between 1869, when Hirschfeld was born, and 1914, when the Great War broke out, the city’s population increased ninefold; in the same years, New York grew at roughly the same rate. These cities were full of single men and women who had migrated there because they discerned they would have more freedom—or who, once living there, away from the constraints of kith and kin and earning their own keep, were able to live autonomously. Wage-earners in a capitalist economy were untethered from family and fealty and had spare time; they formed subcultures around sexual identity and even began to organize politically—as Hirschfeld and his comrades did—on the basis of this identity (D’Emilio, 1993).Footnote 3

Hirschfeld’s goal in Berlin’s Third Sex was to render the queer thread visible in the city’s urban tapestry, as part of his campaign to reform the law and decriminalize homosexual sex between consenting adults. But if he was a pioneer in establishing the founding truth of what we now call the “LGBTQ Rights Movement”—that visibility brings equality—he understood something quite contradictory about the power of the city in this process: it allows you to hide in plain sight. What makes the metropolis “so attractive and distinctive”, he writes, “is that individuals are not subject to their neighbors’ surveillance as they are in smaller localities, where the circles are closed, so too minds and senses.” So big and anonymous was Berlin that neighbors often did not know each other; you could have one life in the north of the city and another in the west with little fear they would intersect.

Hirschfeld formulated an equation for queer urban life that has proven to be startlingly durable: “That which is hidden from the uninitiated in the metropolis can be all the more easily discovered by the initiate because it is far less constrained.” (Hirschfeld, 2017).

In the last few decades, African cities have boomed. The forces of globalization—the digital revolution, industrialization, and rapid urbanization—mean that queer communities have seeded in these cities in ways that are quite similar to the dynamics in Berlin or New York in the twentieth century. But the differences, over time and space, and given the politics of the twenty-first century, are very marked too. This essay thinks with Hirschfeld about the dynamics of visibility and urbanism in some African cities today, using contemporary texts and research I conducted for my 2020 book, The Pink Line: Journeys across the world’s queer frontiers. 

In the course of this research, I visited over twenty countries across the world between 2012 and 2019, as an Open Society Fellow and then under contract to write the book. I sought to understand a new global conversation about sexuality and gender that was unimaginable when I had come out of the closet, as a South African gay man, in the 1980s. Why had the world changed so rapidly when it came to understandings of gender and sexuality, and what was the impact of these changes on queer people? How had queer people themselves created these changes? As an African myself, I was driven by examing these questions from a southern perspective and providing some sort of corrective to the triumphalist narrative of gay arrival in the west.

Although I steeped myself in the literature about sexuality and gender, I am a journalist rather than a scholar, and my methodology was biographical: I spent time with people, observing their lives and listening to their stories, and my book takes the form of a series of ten deeply researched profiles interleaved with more analytical and thematic chapters. Three of my chapters tell the specific stories of Africans: from Cairo, an Egyptian lesbian couple; from Kampala and Nairobi, a gay Ugandan refugee; from Cape Town, a transgender Malawian refugee. But in the course of my research, I also visited Nigeria and Senegal, and I draw this essay out from my observations in Lagos and Dakar too.

As I did my research, it came to me that “The Pink Line” was a global human rights frontier that divided and defined the world in an entirely new way in the first decades of the twenty-first century. It described a new global geopolitics (for example, between East and West Europe, or between some African nations and their previous colonizers, or between secular liberal democracy and theocracy), but it was also etched onto long-established frontiers between the countryside and the city—the “traditional” and the “modern”—that drive the discourse of urbanism. Particularly given the way political discourse has instrumentalized queer people from the global south—describing them as “enemy agents” by some and “victims” who needed to be saved by others—it seemed to me essential to respect the agency of the people I was writing about. I carry this ethos into the essay you are currently reading.

In the summer of 2013, in the wake of the Arab Spring and about a year after the Tahrir Square Revolution that brought the military regime of Hosni Mubarak down in Egypt, I spent some time in Cairo, hanging out at a downtown lesbian-owned sidewalk shisha café that had become the hub of queer life in the city. “Downtown” (wust-el-balad) had become, as in so many cities, a byword for freedom and modernity: a place where women might sit in public and smoke shisha without a veil and where queer men and women could sit together and even hold hands. Many of the people I met there while researching The Pink Line, had come out during the Tahrir Square revolution the previous year. One of them, an activist named Murad, explained that when he had moved to Cairo to study from his hometown, Port Said, his life bifurcated: he lived “the gay life” offered by the city while remaining the respectful son of a devoutly religious family back home. His coming out had initially been discreet, “online and in private space,” but “the revolution changed all this,” he told me, in words that described what happens—in theory at least—in cities. “It gave me this sense of unity, this urge to get out of my safe bubbles within the new platform of activism. We were all in the square: straight, queer, Sunni, Shi ‘a Muslim, and Copt. I was aware that the square was very diverse. Why could not society be the same?” (Gevisser, 2020).

Shortly after I left Cairo, in July 2013, Egypt’s military regained power in a brutal coup d’etat. One of the ways Mohammed Fatah al-Sisi’s regime demonstrated that society was “under control” again was by using Egypt’s “debauchery” laws to crack down on the queer people who had come out in the revolution and become visible in Cairo in particular. The café closed down, and dozens of people were arrested in raids on parties and bathhouses or through police entrapment; Mourad and the owners of the café—and almost everybody else I met on that trip—went into exile. Then, in September 2017, two young people raised a rainbow flag at the Cairo rock concert of the Lebanese band Mash’rou Leila, whose lead singer is openly queer. This prompted a media-fueled moral panic and one of the worst anti-LGBT crackdowns Africa has experienced. By January 2018, more than eighty-five people had been arrested, and at least forty had served time in jail, including the flag-wavers, charged with promoting an illegal organization. Many were tortured.

At the core of this political homophobia in the twenty-first century, today—from Eastern Europe through Asia to Africa—is the notion that some kind of essential indigenous culture, the village, has been “corrupted” by the modern world of the city. This mirrors the discourse of a century ago when queer urban subcultures were seeding in cities such as New York and Berlin. The rapid industrialization and urbanization of the late nineteenth century in Europe and North America led to an “urban vice theory” of homosexuality. “The main external check upon a man’s conduct” is “the opinion of his neighbors,” declared New York City’s anti-vice Committee of Fifteen in 1900, but while this had “such a powerful influence in the country or small town,” it “tends to disappear” in “the great city:” “No man knows the doings of even his close friends; few men care what the secret life of their friends may be…. [T]he young man is left free to follow his own inclinations.” (Chauncey, 1995).

New York’s moral guardians of a century ago do not deny that “the young man” has “inclinations”; rather, they worry that these are now unchecked in “the great city.” Similarly today. When the Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni signed that country’s draconian Anti-Homosexuality Act into law in 2014, he said: “There’s now an attempt at social imperialism, to impose social values. We are sorry to see that you live the way you live. But we keep quiet about it” (Gevisser, 2020). He was addressing the West, through the BBC, whom he accused of corrupting traditional African values. But he was also talking to those Ugandan city-dwellers whom he assumed to be the agents of this neo-colonial agenda, who had forsaken the old traditional ways for a modern, globalized urban identity. As with New York’s Committee of Fifteen, he did not deny that people had homosexual “inclinations” or behavior: what he objected to was culture—“the way you live”, unquietly and visibly.

My research for The Pink Line demonstrates that a major factor in the Ugandan anti-gay crusade—as had happened previously in Zimbabwe and would follow later in Nigeria and Ghana—was because of the way young queer people were no longer keeping so quiet about these inclinations. Whereas a previous generation might have abided by traditional social norms—got married, kept the bloodline going, dressed according to gender conventions—the digital revolution in particular meant that younger city-dwellers were no longer willing to accept these accommodations: their sexual orientation had become a communal identity and even the basis for political mobilization. Almost without exception, homophobic backlash in Africa, as in other parts of the world, has been preceded by the unprecedented claiming, by queer people, of public urban space.

In the early twenty-first century, the global diffusion of new ideas about rights and personal freedoms, emanating from the western metropole, has clashed with a counterforce: the diffusion of a new politics of religious fundamentalism, emanating primarily from the USA (Pentecostalism) and the Arabian Peninsula (Wahhabism). It has been a perfect storm, and several African cities—from Cairo and Kampala to Lagos and Dakar—have been at its epicenter.Footnote 4

According to the “Hirschfeld equation,” the attraction of urban life for queer people is that it offers you a place to hide from those who would hurt you as much as it does a place to reveal yourself to people like yourself. The “Hirschfeld equation” also takes as given that most queer activity needs to happen behind closed doors or under cover of night. And under such cover, queer life happens; this is one of the city’s gifts to queer people living in repressive societies, from Russia and China to Nigeria and Uganda.

In twenty-first-century Egypt and Nigeria, in Kenya and Uganda, there are LGBTQ activists today with the courage and nous to match and even surpass Magnus Hirschfeld, supported by the powerful global network of a modern rights movement. But in this era, homophobia has been instrumentalized as a weapon by that other globalizing force of fundamentalist religion, and it has been harnessed by nativist politicians to describe a threat to traditional values. Even as African (and Asian) societies enter the liberal capitalist global economy, some of their political and religious leaders attempt to erect fences against the loss of control and power that comes with globalization by holding on to what they call “traditional values.” I describe this in The Pink Line as a form of “sovereignty anxiety,” in the face of the way former subjects have become global citizens in this digital age (Gevisser, 2020).

The “enemy from within” in these culture wars resides in the city, as was made manifest in a 2007 statement by the Singapore premier, Lee Kuan Yew. Changing his position from fierce criticism of the pro-gay West, Lee now argued that homosexuality needed to be decriminalized if his booming city-state was to realize its potential as “part of the inter-connected world”: “If we want creative people, we [have] got to put up with their idiosyncrasies as long as they do not infect the heartland” (Gevisser, 2020). Urban homosexuals might be necessary for economic growth, but the heartland needed nonetheless to be shielded from infection by them. The dichotomy demonstrates acutely the way that urban queer folk remain impacted by the repressive regimes of their families, churches, or governments, even if they seem freer than ever before.

In transgender history, Susan Stryker notes that the first North American laws to criminalize cross-dressing coincided with the rapid urbanization of the 1850s because of the emergence of gender-variant people in the cities (Stryker, 2017). This mirrors the way Mexican and Brazilian authorities began using public order bylaws to clamp down on the growing homosexual scenes in their cities in the mid-twentieth century, and then, in the twenty-first century, the way anti-sodomy laws were being applied for the first time and new legislation promulgated to rein in urban gay communities in Africa and the former Soviet Union.

But even in a city like Lagos, at a time when Nigeria had passed extremely homophobic legislation, there was enough bandwidth in the atmosphere and there were enough gaps in the urban fabric beneath it—a beach, a hotel bar, a theater lobby—to enable queer people to connect online and then find a way of meeting. Just how vulnerable this space was, however, was made manifest in August 2017, when a weekly party at the Vintage Hotel in Lagos was raided. Forty-seven men were arrested and charged under the Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act. In a country where no one was out of the closet despite large urban gay populations, the detainees’ photographs were published in the mainstream media. “HIV Epidemic Looms,” blared the National Sun, reporting that almost all the men had tested positive in jail “and now roam freely in the society” as a result of having been granted bail. The paper worried—literalizing the infection metaphor used by Singapore’s former premier Lee—that the accused could be “infecting new persons by the day,” given the “propensity among some of them to suddenly go on an infection spree mission.” The case would be thrown out of court in 2020 (Gevisser, 2020).

When I visited Nigeria the previous year, I attended Sunday services at an LGBT church called House of Rainbow, which met in a nondescript apartment in a gated compound in Ibadan, the university city two hours’ drive from Lagos. I watched the way the twenty-odd congregants arrived: dressed in ordinary male streetwear and carrying sizable bags, they knocked on the locked gate of the unmarked apartment; having been appraised through the keyhole, they were granted access. The bathroom was a busy place before prayers, as parishioners did themselves up—sometimes with no more than a frilly vest, a little mascara, or a pair of sling-back heels—to meet their Lord “as I really feel myself to be,” one of them told me. At the end of the service, the pastor reminded his flock to remove their makeup and change back to their street clothes and to “comport yourselves decently” upon leaving the premises, “as you arrived.” Such code-switching is an essential application of the Hirschfeld equation.

Of course, in—or “above”—the twenty-first-century metropole, connecting it even to the smallest towns in the countryside, is an online space that would have been unavailable to Berliners or New Yorkers a century ago but to which the Hirschfeld equation also applies. When I was in Lagos, I connected with the participants of a closed gay Facebook group—a “hidden” space for “initiates,” most of whom had found it because of the relatively “unconstrained” way it had made itself known, through the use of rainbow flags and the like. Its administrator offered to convene an “in-real-life” gathering of the group, and one evening I met about fifteen of them, sitting around the boardroom table of a trendy advertising agency, over pizza and red wine. Many of them had the resources to shuttle between double lives; some were married with kids in Nigeria but had long-term same-sex lovers abroad.

Several members of the group worked for multinational corporations that trumpeted their LGBT diversity policies, and yet not one was out of the closet, at work or at home. Lagos is the wealthiest place on the African continent, with a huge middle-class population that is literate, worldly, and wired. Why, I asked, did they think that their city was not following the globalizing trend—from Mexico City to Moscow to Mumbai—when it came to sexual mores? One of the women present worked for a multinational corporation with a strong diversity profile. When I asked whether she was considering coming out, she snorted: “Are you crazy? My boss is in my church!” Without exception, every person present went to church, mainly to one or another of the Pentecostal congregations mushrooming across Africa. “It’s not just about religion,” she said. “It’s about society, and culture, and about networking. You have to go to church to belong—and to move up in the world. I just shut my ears when I need to—and work hard to save for my next trip abroad.” (Gevisser, 2020).

In his 2017 memoir, Lives of Great Men, Chike Frankie Edozien cites his Lagos friend, a lesbian named Kainene, about life in the city today: while outsiders might think, “ ‘Oh my god, gays are in danger here,’…. in Lagos we will carry on as we always have… Nobody cares, but that would be so long as I don’t go on TV and say, ‘I’m gay.’ But that applies to everything here. You just don’t wear your heart on your sleeve here, and you don’t fly your rainbow colors out in public. I don’t feel the need to hide, but I don’t feel the need to make a big statement either.” (Edozien, 2018).

But across the world, there is an evident flow from meeting in communal clandestine spaces to some kind of political, and more visible, identity. This is all the more so in the digital age when there is online access to the way people live with full personal autonomy in other parts of the world. This was put to me, powerfully, by a Ukrainian LGBT activist describing an argument she had with fellow revolutionaries during the 2014 Orange Revolution, when she was asked not to bring the rainbow flag onto the Kyiv Maidan:

Yes they are right. Ukrainian society is not ready for LGBT rights. I agree. But Ukrainian LGBTs, themselves, they cannot be restrained anymore. They go online. They watch TV. They travel. They see how things can be. Why should they not have similar freedoms? Why should they be forced to live in hiding? The world is moving so fast, and events are overtaking us in Ukraine. We have no choice but to try and catch up (Gevisser, 2020)

There is also, now, a global human rights movement—and support from Western donors for freedom struggles that promise to confirm your right to live without fear, or compromise. Or even, perhaps, just to have space.

In January 2021, an LGBT organization in Ghana opened a community center in the capital, Accra. “We wanted a safe space, a place where we could provide support for each other”, its founder Alex Donkor later said (Attiah, 2022). But the opening was attended by supportive foreign diplomats, and when word of it got out, there was a furor: the center was shut down after a police raid, inaugurating a season of vitriol that has culminated in what—if passed—will be Africa’s harshest anti-LGBT legislation: mere suspicion of homosexuality will be grounds for arrest, and any form of organizing will be impossible. Even though the center was to be an internal safe space, when word got out about it, it exploded the Hirschfeld equation. Some African cities have thus become a site of conflict, as queer people try to shift the equation towards visibility and their opponents use their power to push it the other way.

And in this global culture wars battle, African cities actually lose some of their diversity. Chike Edozien describes a Nigerian childhood in the 1970s and’80 s, populated with people he recognized immediately as his kin: the swishy Ghanaian hairdressers on his street; a popular music star called Area Scatter; an older lover who was part of a broad and discreet network of “TBs” (“tops and bottoms,” as they called themselves), most of whom would go on to marry women. He also describes a pulsing gay scene in Accra, Ghana’s capital, where he lived at the turn of the twenty-first century. But this world evaporated, he writes, in both these countries as a result of the anti-LGBT backlash driven by political and religious ideology in recent years.

In Dakar, one of Africa’s most cosmopolitan cities, I met a pioneering activist, Djadji Diouf, who had been sentenced to five years in jail in 2009 when a safer-sex workshop being run by his AIDES-Senegal organization was raided. The organization had been the first in the Muslim country to associate itself with LGBT rights. If we had met in 2009, he told me, it would have probably been at a gay-friendly bar or café; now, six years later, the only public space he felt comfortable enough meeting was in the lobby of an international hotel. There was a budding gay scene in the early 2000s, but the raid provoked a moral panic, and this scene evaporated. So, too, did a community of people called goor-jigeen (“men-women” in Wolof), who had long been part of Dakar’s urban tapestry: often attached to wealthy houses, they were responsible for organizing ceremonies, providing entertainment, and dressing and grooming the women.

A younger activist, Abubakar Ndoye, gave me his explanation for the disappearance of goor-jigeen: “In the past, they were accepted as entertainers who danced in ceremonies to make the crowds laugh. But with the arrests of 2008 [of Djiadji Diouf and others], Senegalese came to see goor-jigeen differently, thanks to the media. They came to think that these people were no longer just clowns but rather organized groups financed by Western funders to pervert the young and to destroy Senegalese culture, religion, and values” (Gevisser, 2020). There were still two occasions in the year when you could see a flicker of Dakar’s goor-jigeen spirit: during Mardi Gras and, more so, at Tajabone, a Muslim Halloween, where the tradition of trick-or-treating in disguise had traditionally given queer folk sanction to cross-dress publicly. For the rest of the year, the goor-jigeen put away their feminine apparel. Many had wives and children and did not even have sex with men, but they had become the most visible face of this new threat, debauchery now named and identified coming from the West. An accepted gender identity had become an unacceptable sexual behavior in the wake of a global LGBT rights movement and the backlash against it.

The city had contracted.

“After eight on a fine winter’s evening, coach after coach pulls up in front of one of Berlin’s finest hotels, from which emerge women and men in costumes of every land and epoch.”

Thus begins the account of one Miss R., cited by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin’s Third Sex. Miss R. is describing the highlight of the city’s annual calendar of lesbian events, a costume ball to which you are only invited if you are “acquainted with one of the ladies of the committee”:

A dark-eyed Carmen sets a jockey aflame, a fiery Italian strikes up an intimate friendship with a snowman. The cheerful gaggle of those in the most colourful, dazzling costumes presents an unusually becoming tableau. The partygoers first fortify themselves at the flower-laden tables. The host, in a smart velvet jacket, welcomes the gathering in a brief, pithy address. Then the tables are cleared away. The “Waves of the Danube” waltz starts up, and the couples swing through the night accompanied by cheerful dance tunes. From the adjoining halls comes the sound of bright laughter, the clinking of glasses and blithe song, but nowhere—no matter where you look—are the bounds of an elegant costume party transgressed (Hirschfeld, 2017).

Over a century later—in 2016—the Nigerian writer Pwaangulongi Dauod published an essay in Granta in which he describes a scene that developed at a regular underground party called PartyBomBoy (PBB), hosted by a young man named C Boy in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna:

If you stepped in here, you would see all of us—gays, lesbians, bisexuals: oppressed people—refusing to mourn the anti-gay laws. We are making a mockery of it; mourning, for us, is not a virtue. We are reinforcing our passion and existence in this hall, right now, in our own way. Unknown to the world, we are buzzing in here with energy and stamina and dreams. We are laughs. We are smart laughing fires. Our feet are fires; so are our waists, our tongues, our eyes and our passions. You would see us blazing, emitting prophecies. We are fires: smoky hot fires, ready to choke to death the places and imaginations that threaten our survival (Dauod, 2016).

In a very Nigerian way, C Boy’s parties included “brainstorming” sessions. That night’s topic: “Afro-Modernism”. In urgent polemical style, Dauod lists what came out of the brainstorm, climaxing in a swaggering assertion of urban confidence: “We are not only the turning-point generation; we are also Africa’s hugest turning, biggest point, and boldest generation.” He frames it all with a spatial metaphor: “We are neither a theory nor a movement. We are open space: Africa’s newest genre.” (Dauod, 2016).

This definition is all the more compelling for having been hatched in a dark, underground nightclub. It is in the relationship between these two—the safe but confined space that can be carved out of (or beneath) a city, but the possibility of “open space” offered by the city—that best describes the dialectic of queer urban life, from Berlin in 1904 to Lagos or Cairo or Kaduna today.

At that Berlin ball, reports Miss R.,

not a single false note brings disharmony to the general merriment until the last of the guests steps out into the wan dawn light of a cold February morning from a venue where, for just a few hours, they were able to find sympathetic company with which to live the dream of their innermost feelings (Hirschfeld, 2017).

These last words—“the dream” of one’s “innermost feelings”—suggest an even more private sphere than the underground club or behind-closed-doors venue. Peter Ackroyd describes it as follows in Queer City, his book about London: “The city was a phantasmagoria or a dreamscape upon which the queer man or woman could project the most illicit longings. It was the most open and public space but also the most private and furtive space” (Ackroyd, 2017).

An acknowledgment of this third, innermost sphere complicates the Hirschfeld equation by adding another variable. And while the shuttle between these three spaces—the private and furtive place of longing or fear, the underground meeting place, and the open space of the street—is the source of much of the creativity of queer urban culture, from camp to voguing, it is sometimes too much to bear. In Berlin’s Third Sex, Hirschfeld dedicates many pages to the phenomenon of suicide within the city’s queer community; in Kaduna, C Boy kills himself two weeks after the “Afro-Modern” party, which was raided by the police at 4.15 am.

At the end of her description of the Berlin costume ball, Miss R. notes:

Anyone who had the opportunity of attending such a party would spend the rest of his life in honest conviction defending uranianFootnote 5 women so wrongly condemned, because it would be apparent that good and bad people are to be found everywhere, that the natural homosexual inclination is no less apt to mark a person out as either good or evil than the heterosexual (Hirschfeld, 2017).

Here is Pwaangulongi Dauod, on the same theme, over a century later:

If you were in this hall, you would feel how we assert ourselves through music, words, dance, hair, fashion, technology, ideas and spirits… If you were here, you would notice that we are not the demons roaming your cities and villages with evil and sin in our bosoms. We are not wayward, perverse, queer or funny lovers. We are children of our parents, children of this continent, children of nature, of imagination and of hunger. If you were in this club seeing the tears roll down our eyes, feeling the sweat on our bodies, pouring down our torsos to our pants, as we move to Afrobeat, Afropop, highlife and juju, you would realize that WE ARE CHILDREN OF OUR GODS. We exist (Dauod, 2017).