Dancing on the Dark Continent

Joey and I always try to check out what gay scene exists in any country we are visiting. But except for North America and Western Europe, we generally come away saying, "That was pretty good, under the circumstances."

Both in Cape Town and Johannesburg, it was pretty good, period.

CAPE TOWN

Gay life in Cape Town centers on a small neighborhood called De Waterkant, at the foot of a hill separating the central city from the waterfront shopping mall. Since we were staying at the waterfront and dining in the central city, we decided to walk there and back and stop off in De Waterkant for drinks and dancing in both directions.

(Despite South Africa's hideous reputation for crime, we didn't feel unsafe walking around Cape Town at night. Yes, the streets were relatively deserted except for beggars, but the beggars are well dressed and polite and on the whole, the streets feel sketchier in Philadelphia.)

Our first stop, before dinner, was at a bar/restaurant called Manhattan. That early in the evening there were maybe 15 people in the bar, most of them clearly gay to my eye. Yet when we asked the bartender where to go later to dance, he bent down and, in kind of a hushed way, asked if we were gay. And then he mentioned The Bronx, which several people had told me before we left was the only gay club in Cape Town.

It is actually one of at least two, now, we discovered on our way back after dinner. Next door to The Bronx is a new place called The Crew. Both places are dance bars more than clubs, but both were a lot of fun. The Crew is definitely more of a bar; its dance floor is relatively small and the music was generic handbag with no real thought or effort put into it. The Bronx has two dance floors, a small one at street level and a larger one upstairs; it charges a cover while The Crew does not; and the music was excellent handbag tinged with harder trance (including a twisted trance mix of "Gypsy Woman" that I've never heard before). There's a fair amount of traffic back and forth between the two.

South Africans are among the friendliest people I've ever met anywhere, and a number of them are strikingly good-looking, particularly (to my eye) when they are of mixed race. Yet gay life in both cities was a predominantly white affair: except for having a few more South Asians and fewer East Asians, the crowd looked pretty much like you'd expect in the United States. Whether the blacks have their own parallel scene, or don't participate in gay life for cultural or economic reasons, I couldn't tell you. (We also noted that everyone in the bars was speaking English, not Afrikaans, which we were told is somewhat unpopular now because of its associations with apartheid.)

We had a great time shuttling back and forth between the two bars -- especially when the go-go boys at Crew grabbed bottles from behind the bar and started pouring free shots in the mouths of all and sundry (we tried to get pictures of this, but they didn't come out) -- but had to leave a bit sooner than we wanted because we had an early tour the next day. We will definitely carve out more time for this scene next time we are there.

JOHANNESBURG

We hadn't planned to carve out any time for gay life in South Africa's biggest city, because we were only there on a Sunday night and because Jo'burg is a much harder place to get a grip on than Cape Town. Had we not had a friend living there, we wouldn't have found anything, and even our friend was initially stumped about what to do on a Sunday evening. Several phone calls to his circle produced no definitive results, but suddenly as we drove through the far northern suburbs, he noticed that a bar called Risque was open with its parking lot full (this was at around 7 p.m.). So we went in for a peek.


You could find places like Bronx and Crew in most American cities, but not Risque. Outdoors, with palapa-shaded bars in huts surrounding a large kidney-shaped swimming pool, it resembled nothing so much as the game lodge we had just spent three days in, way out in the bush. The crowd was of a similar ethnic mix to those in Cape Town but much younger, on average -- as in really young, with many 18-25-year-olds. Comparatively few were dancing to what I thought was excellent funky house, reminiscent of Lydia Prim in her prime. They seemed more interested in flirting and gossiping. But the friend we were with knew people who knew people; shots were proposed, the barman produced a tequila bottle (of all things to find in that part of the world), and we had a fine old time, all the better for being unexpected.