“Girl, I have the craziest tea to spill,” Dlamini fails to whisper at me as we, along with every other student at Bishops’ Diocesan College for Boys, file into our pews in the school chapel. “Peter found another grade 12 on you-know-what.” 

From his tone, I already know he means Grindr. But the surge of the organ stops me from asking the millions of questions I have—mainly WHO?!—because now our daily chapel service has begun. We recite our motto: Pro fide et patria—for faith and fatherland. Then it is time to sing Psalm 150. I mouth to Dlamini across the aisle: WHICH GRADE 12? We sing, “Praise God in his sanctuary!” Dlamini misunderstands me, mouthing back: PETER TOPPED HIM! “Praise him for his surpassing greatness!” PETER TOPPED WHO? “Praise him with the strings and pipe!” Dlamini points with his eyes while belting out every note with rehearsed ease. I follow his line of sight. “Let everything that has breath…” There he is: The star of the first team for rugby, almost screeching out the last words of the psalm with macho gusto, the words reverberating between his steroid-fueled chest and the blazer of our school uniform. What else can be said? “Praaaaaiiiiiissssseeeeee the Lord!” 

The private schools of Cape Town share much in common: almost all are single-sex, almost all are predominantly white, almost all cost more a year than what the majority of South Africans ever have in their bank accounts, and, so, they are all conservative enough to make Elon Musk regret fleeing to the whiter West. Even still, Bishops stood out among the rest as the absolute pinnacle of gluttonous caucasian depravity, the school that the others loved only in its capacity to make them look maybe a bit more humane. The Versailles of Cape Town, and there I was with my buttoned-up shirt, tie, and pageboy haircut thinking they had space for a Marie Antoinette. 

For faith, they prayed every day that they would not have any more students whowalked and talked like Dlamini and I did. There was a meager handful of us noted homosexuals too flamboyant to maintain a semblance of closet. We were known and flogged and actively avoided. We might’ve had pink triangles on our uniforms if the Allied Forces hadn’t gone and ruined everything. For fatherland, we all were made to worship our very own holy land: the rugby field. Our most prestigious field, upon which only the members of the first team could walk lest you get beaten, was called the Piley Rees. Funnily enough, it was one of those piles that was giving our star player problems when Peter tried to enter him underneath the field’s stands. He was the team’s hooker for a reason. 

The idea that there might be a number of closet cases at an all-boys school is probably not radical. Our school was certainly no stranger to scandal. Cape Town isn’t a place that experiences much by way of seasons, so we liked to mark the passage of our years by that month’s Page Six worthy event. Autumn was the season of the boarding house drug trade, uncovered by an on-campus Xanax overdose—hopefully that mom has started locking her medicine cabinet; winter was the season of the water polo coach sex scandal; spring was the season of racial epithets; summer, the season of deepfake porn edits of our female staff. But where these events came and went with the efficient ease of a man’s sexual stamina, if it were to come out (yes) that our star rugby player was getting his backdoor knocked on…well, then there really might’ve been pink triangles. It would be, at least, as career-ruining as preying on the boys you’re coaching in water polo. 

Knowing the consequences of queerness first-hand, we good samaritans would keep it all hush-hush. Thus, the homo underground was born: the gay black market! Trading in secrets, screenshots, and nudes, a network developed in the shadows of WhatsApp groupchats and disabled toilets. I wouldn’t really say we were friends. We were hardly allies. But we all knew our duty to the sisterhood. And the sisterhood knew all. 

I entered Bishops with the plucky courage of a cartoon mouse, ready to learn and grow in this big new world of adolescence. I remember my first day so clearly. I walked up to a group of fellow new Grade 8s gathering in shared anxiety and, with the most saccharine smile I could muster, introduced myself with what was honestly an impressive amount of confidence! They turned to me. One boy said, “Uh…hey.” Then, after a pause, another said, “Are you gay or something?” Oops! I hadn’t realized my fly was down with my faggotry hanging out for all to see. “Um…no…?” I was not so naive that I would be honest in response to such a question, especially on day one. “Okay, good, I guess. But you talk like a girl.” I didn’t know what the appropriate response might be, but I decided it likely didn’t include talking any more. 

It turned out that, socially, I was what medical professionals might describe as D.O.A.—dead on arrival. Yet, I persisted. After all, I had at least decided to feign straightness, and promptly started editing my vocal intonations and mannerisms. I was really putting in my best effort! After a month, I had fallen in with one group of the more let’s-play-Fortnite-together-Saturday-night-instead-of-going-to-that-party-we-weren’t-invited-to type of boys, and I was almost happy. 

“Paulie, we want to talk to you. As a group.” 

How intriguing! My birthday was coming up, so I tried to rehearse a performance of surprise when they revealed some gift they had all pitched in to get me or something. 

“We’ve…we’ve decided it is too uncomfortable—for us—how, um, girly you act. And, like, sound. Like, gay.”

Oopsssss. Of course, I immediately apologized profusely. I genuinely had not realized how gay I was being. I mean, still?! After I lowered my voice an octave and started saying words like “bru” and “fire?!!” I even had to pretend I didn’t know any songs in Beyonce’s discography—I basically betrayed my faith! 

“I…I can try harder to…” 

“No, Paulie, um, I think…I just think we might want to, uh, hang out with just the original group. No offense.” 

It was a year of bathroom lunches and avoiding eye contact with the bigger, older boys at the school before Dlamini arrived. He had gone to Bishops’ junior school, and so he was already somewhat of a known quantity. “Oh my god, guys, apparently Dlamini is coming to the college for high school.” “Bru, he’s so fucking annoying.” “He’s the most stuck-up little sissy…” At this, my ears perked up. Another D.O.A. patient? He found me at tryouts for the junior debating team, which I was the co-captain of. He got my number from the group chat we made and private-messaged me that night: Hi, this is Dlamini. I wanted to message because you seem sweet. Are you a sister? And, thus, a lifelong friendship was formed. It’s funny—that was actually my first interaction with a queer person (at least, that I was aware of) wherein I got to be myself, too. Dlamini was so boldly feminine that he hadn’t even attempted being anything other than himself. That alone might’ve been enough, but this, on top of being one of the scarily few black students at the school, was an unforgivable crime, warranting his position as the automatic public enemy number one. It was social suicide to even be seen within a meter of him doing anything other than calling him a slur. All that attention wasn’t just hostile, though; he attracted every quieter queer to him like moths to a flame, assembling in his shadow to use him as both a confidant (a true hustler, Dlamini knew everyone and everything) and a meat shield. He quickly introduced me to all the other hidden fairies and put me on the underground map. I had barely watched an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, lest my parents (who definitely had noooo idea) see it on our Netflix account, so my mind was blown. A gay baby finally started to crawl.

Unfortunately, not everyone was as subversively confident as Dlamini. There was only a spot for one queen, it seemed, and everyone else was evaluated based on their ability to pass amongst the other boys at school and not give the gays a bad name. I was sort of the embodiment of everything they didn’t want to be associated with. They’d actually hate that I’m calling them a sisterhood, which is, of course, why I’m doing it. So, even amongst the few out students, I was yet again on the outs. When the others were getting sniffed out by the straights, it was me they would start talking shit about to distract the bloodhounds. They’d dissociate from me in order to stay on party lists and bond with the boys at their lunch tables about how, thank god, they might be a bit you-know-what, but they weren’t, you know, like Paulie. This ended up being a blessing in disguise, I think. I might’ve been blaring the music of Bikini Kill through my earphones while stomping across campus, just a haircut rule away from getting black emo bangs, but my position as a lone wolf spared me from what was truly the lifeblood, the pure crack of the gay underground. That was a kind of innocence I don’t think any involved have been able to retrieve. 

Adolescence is defined by pimples, periods, hormones, and constant humiliation. The only fun part is that, now, you finally get to have sex. It’s all anyone at Bishops would talk about. Mondays were for the tall tales of sexual conquests if you were hot, and for sharing porn links if you were not. Sometimes, guys would even take a girl out on a nice date and have a conversation or two! Things for the underground sisterhood were a little different. There simply wasn’t anyone else to naturally engage with romantically at parties or after-school activities or whatever else, and it was only a fraction of us who had sold our souls down the river so successfully as to even be invited to any of these events. And, don’t even try to suggest intermingling, nay, INCEST! No sister could ever want another sister. No, we all longed for the guys so straight-ish they hadn’t even appeared on our map yet, so well-hidden they had girlfriends and played on sports teams and, to everyone above ground, were just one of the boys. I’m sure you can imagine how well that tended to turn out. There were really two options for us. The first was waiting it out in holy celibacy, which is what I did, and I might even convince you it was sort of voluntary. I spent my weekends alone in my room, dreaming of the romantic utopia that was surely waiting for me once I reached college. Right. The second option was what everyone else chose, to embrace the one place a gay boy might find some action, and probably a lot of it: the shadows. 

My young sisters told their own Monday tales, though the climaxes of these stories happened while they were on their knees in a toilet stall or while aching, unprepared, in a man’s bed at three a.m. after his girlfriend had gone to sleep. It’s certainly not unique for adolescent sexual experiences to be uncomfortable or, even, straight-up unpleasant. From how the boys around me talked, it certainly wasn’t for their poor girlfriends, let alone the girls they used for a night and discarded like plastic wrappers the next day. However, the issue with a black market is not that it is a market, but that, in its secrecy, there are no regulations. There are no protections. These golden opportunities were not as easily sourced as the lyrics of a George Michael song might lead you to believe. My sisters had to collect within our modern-day equivalent of a men’s bathhouse, the Grand You-know-what, the seventh circle. Grindr. The app is supposedly restricted to the use of adults. Of course, when you have an app designed to protect the anonymity of DL cowards with wives more than the vulnerable minors they constantly prey on, all it takes is a fake birthday to become the latest headless torso at the butchery. I remember looking over my sisters’ shoulders as they created their accounts and watching as a patchwork quilt of hundreds of horny, noncommittal men unfolded before our eyes. They always left their profiles devoid of identifying photos or information—you can’t accuse a witch of being at the devil’s sacrament if you were caught there too—but this was no issue. After all, all it took to get a wild influx of propositioning taps and messages was to make sure your fake age was no older than the base 18 and that your profile was named something along the lines of “high school boy.” Conversations here begin with the notification “user413 sent you a photo,” and I think you can imagine what that photo would be of. While our peers were learning how to ask out their crush or what pants would make them look good that Saturday, my sisters were learning which angle made their nude, teenage genitals look the biggest for the camera.

The location settings revealed who on the app was nearby, which became very exciting when a new 18-year-old profile popped up mere meters from where we stood on campus. Of course, we all knew which accounts belonged to the sisterhood, so this could only mean one thing: new blood. Private conversations wherein identifying clue was exchanged for identifying clue (grade for grade, boarder or dayboy, etc.) became popcorn for a whole chorus of desperate queens to share and chew on, comparing notes like it was a game of Clue. Nudes spread across phones, with various disembodied dicks being tagged to countless boys who wouldn’t even talk to us in the light of day. Prudishly innocent as I was, I took particular umbrage with that part. I had argued furiously with countless straight classmates about how they spoke about the girls they slept with, how they objectified and spread their most vulnerable moments for sport, and now I couldn’t help but feel these gay boys were doing the exact same thing. I’m not one to defend closet-cases—I had no choice, so why should you!—and I’m definitely not opposed to being a hypocrite (my dad’s favorite nickname for me is ‘the champagne socialist’), but with no skin in the game myself, I couldn’t help but recognize the loneliness that leads a teenager to lay their body out for complete strangers, and the genuine tragedy of exploiting that for gossip and ridicule, no matter how lonely we might’ve been, too. It was cannibalism. Had Dlamini not scooped me up, who knows that I wouldn’t have been on the other side of that black screen? 

Even amongst the sisterhood, promises were violated and private photos and screenshots were smuggled between factions, mere fodder in the petty arguments constantly plaguing our group. Nothing was ever seriously exposed or leaked, but what could it mean for our psychology that we approached disagreements by weaponizing each other’s bodies and sexualities, playing both slut and slut-shamer and acting like we were all mature enough to be so casual, so callous about it. We were hardly seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen. This was child pornography. Legally, many of the sisters could’ve been taken to court for creation, ownership, and distribution. And there were only so many boys our age. Naive and arrogant, the sisterhood freely chatted with men double their age, giving up so much more than they could ever realize just so one man who could be their father might call them pretty. As the black market grew more and more out of control, implicating friends, brothers, uncles, fathers, teachers, I grew more desperate for any kind of love. It was not long before I pretended I was three years older than I was and created my own blank profile. It only took minutes for results. Photo received. Hey slut. Gonna be good for Daddy? And then another “18-year-old” started with a simple Bishops? My heart skipped a beat. We exchanged clues. I’m a grade 10, you’re a grade 10. I’m a day boy, you’re a boarder. I’m in Kidd house, you’re in Founders house. Is this Paulie? My heart stopped. Yes. I paused. And you—but I was blocked before I could finish typing the follow-up question, watching as my privacy vanished before me. I cried hysterically into my pillow, too mortified and guilty to tell anyone why, convinced my whole life was about to be upended the next day at school by whoever could’ve gotten that screenshot. I walked on eggshells all week, overanalyzing every glare and whisper that followed me around the college, but nothing came of it. A year later, Dlamini revealed to me that it had been the one other sister I might’ve considered to be a friend (although, by that point, it was clearly at least frenemy territory)—Judas, let’s call him—on the other side of that conversation. I don’t know if he blocked me out of embarrassment, or to entertain his faction, or simply to fuck with me, personally. I thought back to when we were nine in my parents’ garden, and he had goaded me into telling him what my biggest secret was in exchange for him to reveal his. At that moment, shaking like a wet dog, I was honest, and he became the first person I came out to. “Oh. Hm.” An awkward silence. “So, what’s your biggest secret?” “Not telling!” He laughed as he ran back inside, where his mother was waiting to take him home. 

When I finally came out, a Grade 11 now, it was merely because I had reached my limit with the sisterhood as much as I had with the brotherhood of real Bishops boys that had caused our formation. I had had enough with asphyxiation. I was asked to speak in the school chapel the next morning for Human Rights Day, a momentous day in South African history that Bishops acknowledged with a reverent two-minute half-speech prepared the night before by one of the more liberal students they could think of. I don’t know what exactly clicked within me, but I just knew it was time. I got up at the pulpit and, once again shaking like a wet dog, declared my outrage at our supposed celebration of Human Rights Day when I had not been treated like a human from the first day I entered that school. I had had some vague speech in mind that I had rehearsed with my parents (miracles that they are) the night before, but, after my first red-faced sentence, I no longer had control of what was coming out of my mouth. I honestly sort of blacked out. Somehow, when I finished, it was only a few seconds of shocked silence before the school staff, followed by the senior class, followed by everyone else, rose to their feet to applaud. It honestly kinda ruined my vibe. I was just screaming at them all and calling them evil homophobes, and now they were giving me a Cannes-level standing ovation. The rest of that day was very awkward. I remember, though, at the back of the chapel, the sisterhood stayed in their seats, applause scattered. 

Jumping on this sudden momentum toward the fresh air above ground, I went on a bit of a crusade to start the school’s first-ever Queer Students Society, a mix between the more traditional Queer/Straight Alliance and the more situationally-necessitated support group for queer students. I subsequently found out that people can be a lot more open to challenging words than the actions they threaten, and I faced significant difficulty trying to make this happen. It was almost a year of bureaucracy, board meetings, and student body campaigns formed specifically to stop me until I saw my vision realized, and I had quickly taken on the public enemy number one status from my good Judy, Dlamini. It was hard to understand how the same students who had applauded me in that chapel just one year earlier were now rallying around the most notorious bigot in our grade to protect him from any disciplinary action in response to a very public tirade during which he threatened to “burn all faggots and piss on the pride flag.” My bad for provoking him—I had twisted the arm of our principal to put up the pride flag for the first few days of Pride Month, going against the Student Representative Forum’s majority vote against condoning any such thing. Of course, he was not punished. 

I think what troubled me most, though, was how not a single one of my sisters, besides Dlamini, supported me. In fact, some actively opposed it (you can’t give something as obnoxious a name as the Student Representative Forum without having it full of the sourest of homosexuals). I couldn’t understand it. I had done everything to dig a tunnel up to the surface for all of us, and it was like I might as well have leaked their Grindr nudes. 

A lot of people ask me why I would ever go to a school like that. Honestly, for as liberal and famously gay a city as Cape Town is, there really weren’t any options that were much better that would’ve offered me such an education. I don’t doubt it’s a big part of why I ended up at an Ivy League. As a humble fourteen-year-old, that seemed like it was more important than anything else. A lot of people also ask me why, through everything I experienced, I stayed. My own parents, once I finally revealed what was happening to me, asked me several times, too. Opportunity was still a factor, sure, but now it was personal. My blood had been spilt across that campus, and leaving felt like I had fought all of those battles only to raise the white flag and let them win the war. It would be evidence that a person like me can’t be at that school, can’t thrive there, can’t change it to be better. It would prove all those cowardly sisters right. Out of pure spite, I refused to let that happen. I think it was probably worth it. I got to Brown, I grew tremendously as a person, and I have already gone far further than any of those boys at that school ever will. It’s funny, though, that I got to Brown and encountered new American sisters who were just the same as the ones I had practically revolted against as a high schooler. Judgmental, scared, callous, cannibalistic. Dealing with each other like sexual meat. Relying on that sordid app for blind hookups with men twice their age, devoid of any intimacy. Spreading each other’s nudes and sexual escapades to anyone with eyes and ears. 

Dlamini, being the year below me, stayed in that white private school circle back home for a little longer before he, too, surpassed them all to study in the States. He would give me updates on how all our once-sisters were doing. They, too, had not changed at all. Free to be whatever they wanted at the varyingly liberal universities of Cape Town, they chose to stay in their burrows. This one has joined a homophobic church and is still in the closet; this one is still sleeping with his straight ex-bunkmate who has a girlfriend; this one is with one of the most notorious sex pests under the age of thirty on South African Grindr just to get some validation. I thought their terrible news might be satisfying—and it was a little, if I’m completely honest. The overwhelming feeling, though, was the exact same one that I felt for those closeted boys they had smuggled pics of across our gay black market. It’s a tragedy. Where straight boys are taught to repress their empathy in order to be real men, I think these gay boys have it violently stolen from them just so that one of those real men might look their way for a night. It is beyond the loss of innocence; it is submitting yourself to be both product and starved consumer in a sexual marketplace for which there may definitely be an old that is too old, but never a youth that is too premature to claim. It’s learning that, not only does the mainstream world not have a place for you, but the community you’re supposed to fall in with is a gladiator arena. The status quo of this stadium is dog-eat-dog, so you better sharpen your teeth. 

Dlamini and I, androgynous fish sticks that we are, have since graduated far beyond this world. These days, our issue with straight men is not that they might be homophobic, but that they, thinking we are cis women, want to sleep with us until they angrily realize the situation, and their shame becomes violence. Conversely, our issue with gay men is not that they think we’re in the arena with them, but that they don’t at all and, thus, don’t want to sleep with us. We like to think our skins really aren’t in the game anymore. Yet, there seems to always be another game, another arena. I look around me, and it almost seems like, somehow, we’re all still stuck down there, all still buried alive beneath that white chapel. Daylight reveals the exit is open; this need not be our world. But we don’t move. The thick, fuzzy bass of the organ playing Psalm 150 shakes the earth around us, and at any moment, it seems like it might all crash down upon us. But we don’t move.

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