“Gays, it is said, are moving from the swish era into the macho era”: mapping the Butch Shift in the early South African gay press

Abstract

Drawing from a content analysis of early issues of the gay newspapers, Link/Skakel and Exit, I map the force with which the masculinization of gay culture, the Butch Shift, entered the white gay imaginary in South Africa in the 1980s via transnational exchanges with comparable print and visual cultures from the Global North (especially the United States) and related processes of indigenization. Along with other relevant editorial and commercial content, selected advertising images for South African gay leisure spaces invested in macho iconographies are discussed as prominent sites for shifting white gay male identity away from effeminacy and toward hypermasculinity in this period. The sissyphobia (or anti-effeminacy attitudes), misogyny, and race politics that informed such discourses are also addressed, along with some polemics against the Butch Shift that appeared in Link/Skakel and Exit at the same historical juncture.