Growing Up White, Gay, and Jewish in South Africa

Out today from FSG is Lost and Found in Johannesburg [Kindle] (published internationally as Dispatcher) by Mark Gevisser, the award-winning biographer and Teddy-winning filmmaker who is an Open Society Fellow working on The Global Sexuality Frontier. Growing up gay, white, and Jewish during apartheid, Mark kept to himself and was keen on maps, fixated by the mysterious blank areas that separated his family's neighborhood from where their black servants lived. As a double outsider he developed an eye for boundaries, and transgression. His father married the daughter of an anti-Semite, Mark eventually marries his partner, a man of color, and they move to Paris. On a visit back to work on this memoir, he is the victim of a violent home invasion, bound, gagged, and held hostage at gunpoint. Throughout the book, he poignantly confronts the gap between assumptions and reality. Teju Cole: "Outstanding. A genuinely strange, marvelous, and complex account of a self and a city. Does for Johannesburg what Pamuk did for Istanbul." Claire Messud: "Mark Gevisser’s extraordinary memoir asks profound questions – about race, sexuality, faith and politics -- while examining both his own history and that of his beloved Johannesburg. The result is unlike any other book I know. It is illuminating, unsettling, engrossing, often funny, and, in a word, brilliant." Dinaw Mengestu: "A story as complex and beautiful as any memoir I've ever read."

Mark Gevisser will speak in New York on May 1 at Columbia and May 6 at CLAGS.

 

For gay novels from South Africa try:

Michael Power, Shadow Game (banned for its interracial gay love in 1972, reissued)

Damon Galgut, A Sinless Season (1982)

Stephen Gray’s Time of Our Darkness (1988)

Mark Behr’s Embrace (2000)

K Sello Duiker, The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001)

Michiel Heyns, The Children's Day (2002)

Guy Willoughby, Archangels (2002)

Michiel Heyns, The Reluctant Passenger (2003)

Barry Levy, Burning Bright (2004)

Craig Higginson, The Hill (2005)

Fred Khumalo, Seven Steps to Heaven (2007)

Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room (2010)

Comments

[Ripley Hotch]

Also Andre Carl van der Merwe, Moffie--fictionalized account of growing up gay in an extreme fundamentalist family in South Africa.