Love for Sale: Marketing Gay Male P/Leisure Space in Contemporary Cape Town, South Africa

Quartering the City in Discourse and Bricks: Articulating Urban Change in a South African Enclave

“…Firstly, the results of this study apply the concept of quartering as presented in European and North America contexts within a South African setting. Although De Waterkant has been the focus of inquiry through the lens of sexuality and leisure/tourism (Elder 2004;Sonnekus 2007;Rink 2008aRink , 2008bVisser 2002Visser , 2003aVisser , 2003bVisser , 2013Visser , 2014, this study situates previous investigations of De Waterkant in the conceptual framework of quartering while highlighting four distinct quartered identities, adding depth to the neighbourhood's social and spatial contexts.…”

“…The area is often referred to as 'De Waterkant Village', or simply 'the Village'. The area's identity has thus shifted with the coming and going of the apartheid city, but in the past two decades has witnessed a surge of economic and infrastructural development that in the late 1990s gave birth to the area's reputation as Cape Town's gay village (Elder 2004;Rink 2008a), which gave way to the dawn of a new era of consumer-driven development (Rink 2008b) drawing local and international visitors to this urban enclave. Contemporary depictions of De Waterkant as a gay utopia (Rink 2008a) are both instructive and limiting.…”

“…While the embodiment of the enclave as a site of gay male leisure pursuits is substantiated by Visser's (2003a) description of the area as "consolidated gay territory" (Visser 2003a: 128) and is clearly evident through touristic publications like the Pink Map (Rink 2008a(Rink , 2013, such reading of De Waterkant proves problematic since such places are understood to have North American roots as the identity-marked enclave known as the "gay ghetto" (Levine 1979). Gay villages nonetheless serve as a locus of gay identity performance (Désert 1997;Binnie 2004) and leisure/consumptive pursuits (Elder 2004;Visser 2002;2003a;2003b) that are rich with symbols and meanings of otherness in contrast to the 'ambient heterosexual' (Murray 1995). The notion of a gay village emerges from debates concerning gentrification, citizenship and sexuality, and provides the basis for only one type of urban quartering.…”

Community as Utopia: Reflections on De Waterkant

“…Gentrified gay enclaves as experienced in other parts of the world have not been an element on the South African landscape (Elder 2004) but have relevance to the modern city in that they are marketed and represented "...as idyllic landscapes to ensure a variety of lifestyle fantasies" (MacLeod and Ward 2002, p.154), while "... providing city stakeholders with much of the pleasurable freedom one might ordinarily associate with urban civic life" (p. 154). Whether or not De Waterkant constitutes a 'gay enclave' in the true sense, the extent to which the area is marketed and situated as a site of freedom-seeking performance of transgressive identities and sexualities not freely practised in hetero-sexualised spaces beyond the gay enclave cannot be denied.…”

“…Such sites, however, can also prove exclusionary as they buttress themselves from "...the real and perceived threats of another fiercely hostile, dystopian environment 'out there'" (p.154). In the South African context, however, equality of access to and agency in such 'utopian' gay space cannot be assumed (see Elder 1995Elder , 2004Gevisser and Cameron 1993;Visser 2002Visser , 2003a where a history of spatial control and a policy of racial separateness shaped the city. The case of a gay enclave on the South African landscape is more complex and is infused with other tensions that may not be present in other such urban settings.…”